One Nightstand With Sophia Bush

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.

For activist and actor Sophia Bush, writing her memoir, And I Will Tell You Mine: Notes from a Life in Progress, proved a surprisingly challenging experience. “When you are a thinker, a writer, when you’re privileged enough to have regular therapy, you really think you know your sh*t and then your book drags you,” she says. “It’s horrible. I called a few friends who are writers and I was like, ‘Why do we do this? Who let us do this?’”

Bush has been in the public eye since being cast as Brooke Davis in One Tree Hill in 2003, bringing the added complication of fame. “If you are a gorgeous writer, like a personal hero of mine, Cheryl Strayed, and you write the bone marrow of your life and that book becomes famous, you’re allowed to do that,” she says. “If you are someone the world perceives as famous in whatever way they do, you don’t get the same carte blanche to talk about your life.”

For that reason, Bush returned to the fundamentals she learned while studying journalism at the University of Southern California. “I wrote the New York Times piece, the investigative reporting of some of my life experiences to get them out, and then I had to decide what to reduce,” she says, nodding to intimate chapters that cover her divorces and what she describes as workplace sexual harassment. “Over a hundred pages of my book I pulled out and literally burned. I had a little ritual all to myself and I burned them. It didn’t feel like something I owed to everyone else. I don’t think you have to give someone your whole heart.”

For the chapters about her experience shooting One Tree Hill, she also sought consent from those involved before moving forward. “We’ve got an incredible group chat, but I chose to have individual conversations with every single person and individual dissemination of pages and things because I didn’t want anybody to feel swayed by the group,” she recalls, adding that she even anonymized two people who she “smushed into one.”

The goal was to protect the relationships they’d built with each other, despite the odds. “When I started working on TV in the early aughts, the machinery loved to input women and chew them up and spit them out,” she says. “The benefit to the machine itself is to cast you, the woman, in a role that they can then clickbait to death, but that’s not who you are. The hours are crazy. If you have a not particularly great boss, like we all didn’t, you’ll be taught to compete instead of collaborate. You’ll be pitted against each other and then won’t understand why suddenly everything feels weird. And you can’t talk about it because you can’t have a fight with your friends at work. So then it buries and it festers and it just cements.”

Bush, stepmother to the two children of her wife, former US soccer goalkeeper Ashlyn Harris, compares the craft of writing to raising a child. “Everyone I know who’s a parent has thoughts about what parenting will be, and then they meet the person their child is in every stage and they are that person,” she says. “Nothing you do is going to change who they intrinsically are. You hope to raise them well, you hope to make them feel confident, you hope to love them enough that the world doesn’t break them, but they are who they are.” Her book proved to be similar.

“The book is going to be what it wants to be,” she says. “You think you know the book you’re going to write, and then it pulls you on a journey.”

Keep reading to discover four of Bush’s favorite reads.

Bush’s first selection is Gloria Steinem’s 2015 memoir My Life on the Road, tracing the activist’s life from childhood through the 2010s. The morning Bush joins One Nightstand, she’d learned of Steinem’s passing at 92. “It was just such a surreal thing to sit and read over these gorgeous articles. I knew she hadn’t been feeling well,” she says. “Strangely, some friends of ours were talking about the next talking circle we wanted to host with her. And I said, ‘I know she’s not well, but she’s Gloria.’ I think we really thought she would just be with us forever.”

Steinem’s memoir made an impression on Bush when it came out, but it became a true North Star while writing her own. “It’s very surreal and it’s an interesting thing having just finished my first memoir to think about the memoirs and the life stories like hers, like this book that truly shaped me,” she says. “I think about the fact that I grew up a fan of hers and she became a friend. She became a person I could text. I will never not be so grateful that I got to be in her orbit.”

Steinem’s work also informed Bush’s own activism. “One of the things I learned from her was that I’ll show up for the small organization that’s working in one town on a border in Texas to protect migrant children in the same way that I’ll show up for a federal election,” she says. “It’s so clear for me how the political is, in fact, personal. And that’s her whole thesis. I think when you know it, it doesn’t have to feel overwhelming. It actually is so empowering. You realize that each of us has a hand on a lever of change, and that makes me feel optimistic rather than pessimistic.”

One of the last conversations she had with Steinem was on FaceTime. “She held a talking circle on women’s health, and I was working in Los Angeles and I couldn’t be there, but my partner was there and a group of our best friends were there,” she says. “It was so lovely just to see her, and she grabbed my partner and was like, ‘I love her.’ I said, ‘I know, right?’ She was like, ‘I’m just so happy for you two.’”

Her second choice is Tiny Beautiful Things, a collection of responses from Cheryl Strayed’s advice column “Dear Sugar.”

Bush has purchased and gifted the book more than 30 times. “There are things from running the gamut of Eastern and Western tradition that I understand to be universally true about humanity,” she says. “I believe Cheryl’s book to be one of the most spiritually sacred texts that any of our peers has ever written, because what she’s doing is modeling love out loud and in the hardest moments and in some of the most beautiful, and it is so exacting and yet so gentle.”

Some of Strayed’s advice has had an enduring effect on her. “We are all so much more than the worst mistake we’ve ever made or the greatest success we’ve ever had. We’re human beings in the center of all of that,” she says. “I think especially for women, the world encourages us to just self-obsess about our failures, or to wonder what everyone thinks of us, or to be so ashamed for existing or speaking, God forbid. We have to figure out how to divest from that, and I think we do that in community.”

That said, she’s judicious about giving advice. “I'm a little on the spectrum,” she says. “I've had to learn that my neuro-spiciness that goes like, ‘You're not alone. I have a thing.’ Calm down. Slow down. Like a Cheryl, I want to make people feel seen and know they're not alone. I also know that the immediate, ‘You're not alone. I can also offer you a terrible thing or a hard thing or a bad boss or whatever.’ It’s not always helpful.”

She continues: “As a person who has crazy pattern recognition because of the way my brain is wired, I can go big 30,000 feet: ‘Well, this is the system and this is what's going on with you and this is what women are dealing with in the workplace,’” she explains. “Also not always helpful. I love the data. Not everybody needs it.”

Her third pick is The Bitter Southerner, a triannual magazine coming out of the American South. Although Bush is California born and raised, she feels a strong connection to the region. “I spent 10 years in North Carolina. I’ve lived in Texas, and I’m madly in love with a woman from Florida,” she says.

It’s also been at the center of much of her activism. “The South is so culturally rich and has also been so historically under-resourced and taken from,” she says. “In all of my travels everywhere, some of my favorite fellow organizers, some of the most hilarious radical minds I know, come from my Southern friends that are like, ‘It’s f*ck this sh*t o’clock, and we're going to fix America.’ And, I’m like, ‘OK!’”

Bush says living in North Carolina while filming One Tree Hill was an enlightening experience. “It was very strange to move somewhere and be walking down a sidewalk downtown next to my neighbors of color and have to pass Confederate statues,” she says. “Interestingly enough, moving there enabled me to begin on the journey of having conversations about disparity in real time, not talking about what happened historically, but about: What were the patterns of our history that still exist today?”

Her final pick is Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Written in 1993 and set in 2024, the novel follows a California on the brink of collapse due to climate change and social decay. “In the year 2026, it’s weird to revisit it because you realize she’s a gorgeous writer and perhaps a psychic,” she says. “One of the things that inspires me most about her is she wrote her lead female to be someone who is willing to ask the questions that most people are too scared to answer, that most people want to ignore because they are on the precipice of something scary and they're trying to cling to what was, but what was will never exist.”

Strangely, Bush says Butler’s dystopian world has a hint of optimism. “What I think it encourages is readers to be bold enough to envision something we can build together,” she says. “We only survive in community. The only way through is to build together and everyone’s experience — the diversity of race, generation, economic status, all of it — is actually what gives a community the amount of thought and the different experience levels to be able to build something together.”