The beautiful Reese Witherspoon shares will Elle Magazine that she has been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, which attempts to explain why some people gain unusual success. (Love Gladwell, btw) Witherspoon was, she says, “struck by the idea that to be a master at anything, you have to have 10,000 hours of practice at it. And that is what you accumulate over a lifetime. And I started when I was 14, working and working and working.”
On her divorce: “Very humiliating and very isolating…But, by the way, if it’s not painful, maybe it wasn’t the right decision to marry to begin with. Those are the appropriate emotions. When people get in your face and say, ‘This will pass,’ you think, Are they crazy? I’m never gonna feel any better than I feel right this minute and nothing’s ever gonna make sense again. And I still have moments where I’m like, Nothings ever gonna make sense again.”
On dealing with the pain that stems from divorce: “You see a lot of people play this blame game. Blame, blame, blame. You know? And it’s a really easy thing to do, and I’m certainly guilty of it. [You have to] look at yourself and go, ‘What part of this do I need to own? Which part of this is my responsibility? And that’s the painful work that you have to go through to hopefully get some real life knowledge out of it.”
On boyfriend, Jake Gyllenhaal: “He’s fabulous. He really is a fantastic guy. Unfortunately, he’s not in the movie, so we can’t really talk about him.”
On being a young mother: “When I first had Ava, I couldn’t afford [help]. And it was so hard. I was out in Los Angeles, living [away from my family]. I really didn’t have any friends. And I had a baby,” she says, laughing. “No one else who was 22 had a baby. I couldn’t go out.”
A tight circle of girlfriends became her “salvation,” she says. “That’s always been the center of my life, female friendships. I’ll drop anything for a friend.” “It’s hard having kids. It’s hard having a job. It’s hard having a relationship–for anybody.”
On her reported Type A personality: “I don’t think I’m a control freak. I think I’m just fearful. I operate from a lot of fear, like, of things being lost or forgotten or neglected. Losing the spiritual rather than the physical. It’s so funny to me that somehow I’ve been portrayed as a very, like, closed-off or uptight person. I’m very open.”
On the paparazzi: “Fascination is gonna die off. I honestly know it. But it’s just like I keep waiting and waiting, and then it’s just more tabloid magazines, and it keeps going. I don’t take a shower everyday. I don’t put on makeup everyday. I wear a lot of sunglasses, in case you noticed.”
On not being diet obsessed: “I’m made of cookies after the holidays. Everything inside me is made of sugar and flour and a little red wine–a lot of red wine.”
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