{"id":174011,"date":"2025-06-10T22:02:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-10T22:02:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/174011\/"},"modified":"2025-06-10T22:02:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-10T22:02:10","slug":"how-meghan-markles-favorite-bookseller-took-a-sacred-pause-went-feral-and-emerged-with-a-new-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/174011\/","title":{"rendered":"How Meghan Markle’s Favorite Bookseller Took a “Sacred Pause,” Went “Feral,” and Emerged With a New Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

It takes about fourteen seconds of speaking with Jennifer Rudolph Walsh<\/strong> to understand why Prince Harry<\/strong> describes her as his fairy godmother<\/a>. The co-owner of Godmothers<\/a>, the Southern California bookstore-to-the-stars, starts our conversation with an expression of relief. \u201cI\u2019m so oddly refreshed by the fact that you wanted to do a phone call,\u201d she says. Zooms are not for her. Even so, she\u2019s breaking one of her policies, which is no scheduled calls unless you\u2019re her doctor. \u201cPeople are like, but how will I reach you? It’s like, okay, here’s the system. You try me. If it’s not a good time, I’ll try you back. Okay? Let’s go with that. It worked for 50 years perfectly.\u201d She\u2019s warm, open, calls me \u201csweetheart\u201d with an easy familiarity, and wants to spend as much time juicing up her friends and acquaintances as she does talking about herself. Whitney Wolf Herd<\/strong><\/a> is \u201cbrave\u201d and \u201cloving\u201d; Amanda Knox<\/strong><\/a> is \u201ca modern day Victor Frankl\u201d; her store\u2019s head of community engagement<\/a>, Riley Reed<\/strong>, is \u201cbeautiful, incredible, smart, brave, funny, kind.\u201d<\/p>\n

She has the magnetic selling power one might expect from a woman who, in her past life, spent three decades ascending to the highest rungs of the publishing world as a literary agent to the stars, working with the likes of Oprah Winfrey<\/strong>, Sheryl Sandberg<\/strong>, Dani Shapiro<\/strong>, Ariana Huffington<\/strong>, and Rob Lowe<\/strong>. She was the head of WME’s Worldwide Literary, Lectures, and Conference Divisions, founded the New York Public Library\u2019s Young Lions Fiction Award, launched Winfrey\u2019s \u201cThe Life You Want\u201d tour, and served on the board of the National Book Foundation.<\/p>\n

Five years ago Rudolph Walsh began what she calls her \u201csacred pause,\u201d when she left WME and New York. The pause lasted until nine months ago, when she opened Godmothers in Summerland, California with Victoria Jackson<\/strong>, cosmetics entrepreneur and author of the book We All Worry, Now What?<\/a>, in September 2024. \u201cI realized, I don’t miss the book business, I don’t miss managing people, but I do miss book people. I miss the tribe of book lovers,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd I miss gathering together to talk about what we’re reading and what it reminds us of.\u201d<\/p>\n

Godmothers, writ large.<\/p>\n

Riley Reed.<\/p>\n

The pair took the name from Prince Harry\u2019s assertion at the Beverly Hills launch party for his memoir, Spare<\/a>, that Jackson, Walsh, and Oprah Winfrey were his \u201cfairy godmothers.\u201d The celebrations for their own store opening<\/a> spanned a weekend, with Winfrey, Meghan Markle<\/strong>, and Harry in attendance, along with other starry locals including Jane Lynch<\/strong> and Portia de Rossi<\/strong>. They debuted a Founders Circle program, which offers such benefits as members-only game nights and a monthly Sunday tea, early tickets and VIP seating at in-store events, plus four members-only events each month (last week\u2019s was a cocktail meet-and-greet with Kevin Kwan<\/strong>), custom book recommendations, and 15% off of everything. She and Reed also run a book club, open to all\u2014though with a waitlist. Next up: Barbara Kingsolver<\/strong>\u2019s The Poisonwood Bible<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Here, from her house in the hills, where she lives with her husband, two mini donkeys, two micro cows, a pair of goats\u2014all six of which she bottle fed\u2014and four dogs (she also has three children and two grandchildren, one of whom was born just last week), she talks about her life transition, her beloved and glittering social circle, and the books she can\u2019t stop thinking about.<\/p>\n

Vanity Fair: What has surprised you about being a bookstore owner?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jennifer Rudolph Walsh: The hunger is really the thing that has surprised and delighted me the most. Victoria and I really built this\u2014we say it’s not a store, it’s a storefront for magic\u2014we built this storefront because we needed it, because we wanted a place to dive into the deep end about things that matter, about stories about ideas, and to be open-hearted and open-minded around these discussions.<\/p>\n

Besides, obviously, your love of books, how has your former life as an agent translated to running the store?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My evolution is that I was exclusively a literary agent for many, many years. And then in 2014, I co-produced Oprah Winfrey’s \u201cThe Life You Want Tour.\u201d We went on the road, and it was during those three months that I fell in love with the idea of hearing stories together, sharing stories together. I really was bitten by a love bug on this where I was like, oh my gosh, it’s not enough to actually read books\u2014which is amazing\u2014but writers write them in solitude, and readers often read them in solitude. There’s something alchemical that happens when we’re in a shared space, sharing stories. So for the last six years, my work in New York, I was really braiding my love of culture with my love of reading and then my love of live events and storytelling. In a way, Godmothers has taken all my favorite pieces of my previous chapter, which I was living at scale, and recreated it at intimacy\u2014almost like a perfect dollhouse version of all of the things that I’ve loved and been putting into the world my whole career.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It takes about fourteen seconds of speaking with Jennifer Rudolph Walsh to understand why Prince Harry describes her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7708],"tags":[7709,7721,7719,7718,7720,1281,447,7710,519,12121,7711],"class_list":{"0":"post-174011","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-royals","8":"tag-british-royal-family","9":"tag-duchess-of-sussex","10":"tag-duke-of-sussex","11":"tag-harry","12":"tag-meghan","13":"tag-meghan-markle","14":"tag-prince-harry","15":"tag-royal-families","16":"tag-royal-family","17":"tag-summer-reading-list","18":"tag-uk-royal-family"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114661329944894150","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}