\u201cThere\u2019s something about the sense of humor in it that I find to be so modern, and just the idea that Cervantes could write something in 1605 and 1615 that skewers human nature in such a way\u2014I find it to be still so relevant today. I find that life is made of tragedy and comedy, and if you have something that\u2019s only tragic or only comic, it\u2019s not telling the whole story.\u201d<\/p>\n
Middlemarch by George Eliot \u201cI think the women in it are just so dimensional. My takeaway from it was how important it is to choose your life partner in terms of marriage. As a child of the 1950s and \u201960s, having grown up indoctrinated in the romance of falling in love, in the American dream that Hollywood manufactured\u2014[I saw] a maturity to the story of these women and men, in the subtle ramifications of these marriages playing out and going wrong. I remember reading it in the early 1990s, when I had made this extreme choice to move away from the US and start my life in England. It was really in order to get married and have a family, and I remember feeling that [moving away] was a catastrophic and self-destructive thing to do. I was told constantly, Why are you destroying your career?, and when I read Middlemarch, I thought it was so wise about how important that choice is in the long term. In my life it\u2019s been an incredibly positive choice, even though at the time it seemed like the biggest mistake one could potentially imagine.\u201d<\/p>\n The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck A native of small-town North Carolina during the Great Depression, Gardner objected to Hollywood\u2019s rags-to-riches characterization of her childhood, claiming that her family was better off than others in their Southern community. In her conversations with Evans, she recalls that Ernest Hemingway thought her father\u2019s name, Jonas Bailey Gardner, was \u201clike something out of a Steinbeck novel,\u201d a comment that inspired McGovern to reread Steinbeck\u2019s 1939 magnum opus, The Grapes of Wrath. \u201cIt is poetry, and also just incredible storytelling,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee Who\u2019s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?<\/p>\n McGovern, who starred as Martha in a 2023 production of Edward Albee\u2019s 1962 classic, recalls: \u201cIt really did get into my bones and I loved it. There\u2019s a logic to it, but it isn\u2019t a linear logic; there\u2019s the sound of the words, and the [role of alcohol] in the play releases the freedom of it, and [the language] starts to have its own kind of sense.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"Image](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/71WnmtnCSdL._SL1500_.jpg\")
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