I Love Natalie Portman’s Book Club—Here’s Why It’s *So* Different from Reese’s

Listen, I love Reese’s Book Club. Aside from the very occasional misstep, Witherspoon’s selections are on point. But I recently came across another celebrity book club that might be even better: Natalie Portman’s Natalie’s Book Club.

The book club lives exclusively on Instagram, where each month, Portman posts a selfie with the title of her choosing, along with a brief note about the plot or why it was picked. (For fans of Reese’s Book Club’s more robust web and social presence, you might find yourself wishing there was more content.)

Now let’s talk book specifics: Where Witherspoon often chooses thrillers and rom-coms meant to appeal to a wide audience, Portman’s selects often skew a bit more niche and high-brow (think: less beach read, more assigned reading for a college contemporary lit class—in a good way). She also doesn’t stick exclusively to current books; recent selects include Nora Ephron’s Heartburn and George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

Here, three of my favorites the Black Swan star has selected so far.

In a similar vein as Elena Ferrante's The Lost Daughter and Sheila Heti's Motherhood, this gut-punch of a novel (which I really liked) considers what is gained and lost when one becomes a mother. The complexities of mother-daughter relationships are far from unmined in fiction, but How to Love Your Daughter is a fresh, deeply intimate and thought-provoking read for anyone who’s been a daughter, a mother or both. Of her September 2023 pick, Portman wrote, “Hila Blum's How to Love Your Daughter begins with a woman spying on her daughter and the grandchildren she's never met. I love the way Blum weaves in and out of timelines as the narrator examines memories and seeks to understand her daughter's estrangement.”

You might know Michelle Zauner as the indie rock sensation Japanese Breakfast, but she’s also a lauded writer whose debut memoir, Crying in H Mart, shot to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Here, she opens up about growing up one of the few Asian-American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon, struggling with her mother's high expectations and treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over food. Following her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, Zauner began to reckon with her identity and eventually reclaim the gifts of taste, language and history her mother had given her.