Mallory Edens On Writing Her Own Narrative

Lately, Mallory Edens has found herself revisiting Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That.” The producer has read the essay countless times — but now, as Edens prepares to move from New York to Los Angeles at 29 years old, mirroring Didion’s own arc — it hits different.

“It’s providing a really cozy framework for this moment of my life,” Edens tells me from her Tribeca apartment, where she’s perched in front of her floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. “I love it because I’m always looking for [stories] that don’t always have to be so serious but still offer young women different ways of seeing themselves and experiencing their lives.”

Another writer Edens often returns to is famed French author Annie Ernaux, whose novel Simple Passion is the inaugural pick for Little Library, the book club she launched this week under her Little Ray production banner. “She’s totally and completely down bad for this man who’s married and has ghosted her. So she’s describing a relationship that’s transgressive in more ways than one,” Edens says of the selection. “But I actually think the most transgressive thing about it is that Annie Ernaux is a Nobel Prize-winning author, she’s intellectually lauded, and yet she also has these feelings.”

These are exactly the kinds of stories Edens not only wants to champion, but is actively bringing to life on screen. Her latest film, Charlie Harper, traces a couple across a scrambled timeline — reminiscent of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, one of Edens’s all-time favorites — as they grow, change, and fall in and out of love along the way. (The movie, which stars Nick Robinson and Emilia Jones, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last year and will hit theaters this fall.)

“I really love producing, and I’ve found it so gratifying to have autonomy and independence over the kinds of stories we tell,” says Edens, who begins to tear up before quickly laughing it off. “I do think part of the reason that I love it so much is because I’ve been on the other side of stories about young women that really flatten them.”

Edens first started making headlines back in 2014 when she represented the Milwaukee Bucks — the NBA team co-owned by her father, Wes Edens — at the draft lottery on stage in New York. Though she was just 18, she quickly went viral for just how good she looked on camera. (“The Cavs won the lottery and Mallory Edens won the Internet,” Bill Simmons tweeted at the time.)

Some of the commentary quickly turned misogynistic. “A sports journalist who I respected wrote an article in which he called me a trophy daughter, a future trophy girlfriend, and a future trophy wife,” says Edens, who went on to have other brushes with fame following a 2019 “beef” with Drake and a rumored relationship with Aaron Rodgers. “I can remember reading that online and trying to understand why the older people in my life were more upset for me than I was for myself. I was like, ‘Wow, that’s misogynistic. Wow, I’ve never heard somebody describe anybody as a “trophy daughter.” What does that mean?’ But it wasn’t really much deeper than that for me at that age. ”

That changed with time. After graduating from Princeton in 2018, Edens entered into a period of self-discovery. Her days were spent pursuing a modeling career in Los Angeles, while her evenings became a testing ground for other artistic ambitions. “I took a sketch writing class at UCB and an improv class. I took a couple screenwriting classes at UCLA,” she says. “One class I took was called ‘Writing a Pilot,’ and I sat next to this guy who was a development exec at a production company. He was explaining his job to me, and it was one of those light bulb moments in my life where I was like, ‘Oh, how do I get that job?’”

Within a matter of months Edens had launched Little Ray — and quickly discovered that producing wasn’t quite as glamorous as her classmate had made it sound. “I wish I could tell you why I thought in my early 20s that I was capable of starting my own production company, because it seems a little bit insane to me in retrospect,” Edens jokes. Though now with two films under her belt, Charlie Harper as well as 2024’s Bad Genius, Edens has learned to equally appreciate the left-brain aspects of the job. “I take a lot of joy in the business-minded side: getting into movie magic, working through a budget, and understanding how those pieces of a movie come together.”

For Edens, having a “really robust understanding of the industry and the business that underpins it” isn’t just helpful, it’s essential to shaping and sustaining the kinds of films she wants to bring to life. “I have a Letterboxd burner account, and it’s my favorite thing in the world. Right now my top four are Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, A Man and a Woman, Hamnet, which was my favorite film of the past year, and Eternal Sunshine,” she says of her inspirations.

This work has also allowed Edens to reclaim her own narrative. “‘Trophy daughter’ is a very concise story, and as I’ve moved through my 20s, I’ve experienced how those kinds of stories continue to breathe into your life,” she says. “That is true of stories that aren’t helpful — that one wasn’t particularly helpful for me — but it’s also true of stories that are helpful.”

The “helpful” ones are now her focus, through Little Ray and its sister Little Library — the latter of which she’s built around the philosophy “It’s about the girl, not the book.”

“I love the idea of offering people stories and ways of talking about them that help them experience their own lives in ways that make them feel more alive and help them through different moments of their life,” Edens says. “It’s about the girl — not the book — for us, in particular, because we’re creating a community where women can come together around these books and laugh, cry, and think through them.”

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