One Nightstand With Jennifer Garner

In One Nightstand, celebrity readers and writers join us at The Blond in 11 Howard to discuss some of their favorite books, allowing us to learn about their tastes and lives in the process.

Jennifer Garner’s love of reading started with the help of a school librarian.

“I grew up in this little town and my big sister is this really brilliant woman, and as a kid she kind of shone over the whole town,” Garner says. “She was the sun, and I was Melissa’s little sister. What I did have was this incredible relationship with our school librarian who saw me for me, and her name is Annyce McCann. I still visit her when I’m home in West Virginia.” The friendship not only resulted in Garner helping out by stacking books, but also fostered her ambition to be a children’s book author. “She made a little area for me inside an old refrigerator box and let me sit and write,” she recalls.

The actor has worked hard to pass on the hobby to her own children. “I do think reading to your kids is the greatest gift you can give them,” she says. It’s a habit she developed with her own mother, who she read stories with, page by page, through middle school. “I have one of my kids who let me read to them that late in their life,” she says, “but with the other two, one kind of stopped in seventh grade and one was just like, ‘I cannot, you read so slowly.’”

Her own reading habit led her to her latest project, the Apple TV+ adaptation of Laura Dave’s book The Last Thing He Told Me, which returned last week for its second season. “I find Laura's writing to be incredibly profound and what I love is that it kind of tricks you,” she says. “Because if you really love wise, profound writing, that's all about these deep relationships with people that you fall for, OK, great. But really, you can't stop turning the pages because there is underlying it this thriller and this engine of, ‘What is going to happen?’ She manages to give you a twist at the end of every chapter.”

In the show, Garner plays Hannah, a woman whose new husband disappears under strange circumstances, leaving her to discover the truth of his absence and navigate life as a stepmom. “I was really drawn to Hannah because she is imperfect and because she's figuring it out,” she says. “She's the grown-up in the room and she's a benevolent caregiver… but she’s a reluctant mother.” Garner drew on her own experience as a parent when she wrote a letter advocating for herself to be cast after the show’s previous actress dropped out. “I was kind of just talking about motherhood,” she says of the note’s contents. “I was talking about the ways that somebody can disappear on you and it can bring out the best in you because you have to rise.”

While Dave’s books might be regulars on Garner’s nightstand, plenty of others have been there for decades. “There's so many that I love, but this is what I went back to,” she says of the books she has selected for One Nightstand. “What my mom and I read to each other every night, one page at a time.”

Keep reading to discover five of Garner’s favorite books.

Garner’s first choice, Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, is a consistent tear-jerker in her household. “I read it aloud to each of my kids, and all three times they talk about it, they tease me about it because I cry at the end,” she says. “I have to put the book down and have a real cry about it. The thought of saying goodbye to Charlotte is like — and that is a beautiful introduction, if you’re lucky enough, to the end of life.”

She continues: “I love how transcendent friendship is and how kids are brilliant enough and open enough to hear everyone speaking around them. And it’s only as we get older that we lose that skill. And I love how naughty Templeton the rat is and I love that in the end, he gets to be part of the hero’s journey.”

Her second choice is Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. “I’ve probably read the whole series 15 times, 20 times, easily,” she says. “My daughter actually wrote a paper about Little House On The Prairie for college. And she really looks at it through a different lens, which she has worked really hard to see the world in — she’s much more educated than I certainly have ever been. But oh my gosh, as a kid I didn’t see that at all. I just saw the romanticism of what this family went through and how they only had each other and their dog Jack, the good dog Jack, and just everything that it took to grow up on the prairie and to colonize, yes, but also to be pioneers in this beautiful, incredible country of ours.”

The story’s themes of isolation and surviving amongst scarcity is, in fact, similar to parts of Garner’s own family history. “My mom grew up on this tiny farm in nowhere Oklahoma,” she says. “And they had a little house that was two rooms — a front room and a back room. There were all these kids and they would sleep one facing this way, one facing this way, one facing this way. And I think I romanticize it because they had a cellar. My grandmother, Violet, was really good at canning food, so they weren’t hungry. And she always kept them looking really neat and smart. But it was back when the feed sacks for animals were made out of calico and that calico she would use to make their clothes.”

Garner’s love of farms led her to join Once Upon A Farm in 2017 as a co-founder; the company, which supplies farm-fresh organic food for children and babies, went public in early February at a valuation of nearly $845 million. Garner’s mother’s farm, which the actress now owns, is part of the company’s supply chain. “My grandmother was born in a covered wagon, and the house didn't have running water or electricity until my mom was much, much older — it was just this little farm,” she recalls. “And my uncle was living there and my mom said, ‘Oh, I think she would be so nice for Uncle Robert if you bought the farm.’ And I said, ‘Of course.’ But, it had been bought on a handshake a hundred years earlier and my business manager had to go back and find a record and there were no records. He was just like, ‘Really? What are we doing?’ But he figured it out!”

Her third selection is Ramona the Pest by Beverly Cleary. “I was obsessed with Beverly Cleary, obsessed,” she says. “I actually started writing a book when I was little called Ramona the Meek, because there's a book, Ramona the Brave, and I was writing the opposite.” She continues: “I think that the thing about Ramona that I loved is that she gave me permission to draw outside the lines, to be a little bit messy, to be unhappy, to dreamily wear my pajamas under my clothes to school and think that that was going to work out okay.”

Her fourth pick, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, is a favorite of her mother’s. “My mom keeps it by her bed. She reads a little bit of it at night like the Bible, and she quotes it like the Bible,” she says. “I can't even think of how many sayings from my childhood come from Anne.” Part of the attraction for Garner, the middle of three girls, is Anne’s big feelings. “She’s quite a mess,” she says, laughing. “She just does everything wrong, but she does it with her whole heart.”

In the book, Anne is an orphan who is parented by a brother-sister duo, Marilla and Matthew. The former does the formal bringing up, while Matthew offers encouragement, and Montgomery remarks on the benefits of both approaches. “I think that I do a bit of both,” she says of her own parenting methods. “And I think my kids’ dad does too, especially when your kids grow up in two separate households. I become mom and dad; he becomes dad and mom. You kind of can’t help it, right? Because you don't have the benefit of both sides of the yin and yang being in the same house. And so you have to have a bit of both in the way that you parent. There's a little bit of loss in that, but there's also something gained in that. Yeah. You also just learn. It’s made me let go and not focus so much on the bringing up.”

Her fifth and final pick is perhaps the biggest classic of them all: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. “This was toward the end of my reading journey with my mom, and it is a perfect book,” says Garner. “It has love, it has intrigue. It has the country kids doing OK. It has the missing father and the promise of him possibly appearing. It has the perfect blessed mother. It has the scare of the illness, and then it has tragedy. It has real tragedy. Is there anything more sad?”

Watch the full episode below: