Required Reading: 7 Books and Authors That Changed Elizabeth McGovern’s Life—and Informed Her New Play, ‘Ava: The Secret Conversations’

“It just blew my mind, because it takes a person all the way from high school age to maturity. That really fascinates me as an actor, the idea that every person has an internal monologue. It’s what got me into writing songs—you just put an internal monologue into musical form, and that becomes a song. When I was writing the play, I was thinking of it in a really musical way.”

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

“There’s 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—I find it to be still so relevant today. I find that life is made of tragedy and comedy, and if you have something that’s only tragic or only comic, it’s not telling the whole story.”

Middlemarch by George Eliot

“I 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 ’60s, having grown up indoctrinated in the romance of falling in love, in the American dream that Hollywood manufactured—[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’s been an incredibly positive choice, even though at the time it seemed like the biggest mistake one could potentially imagine.”

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

A native of small-town North Carolina during the Great Depression, Gardner objected to Hollywood’s 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’s name, Jonas Bailey Gardner, was “like something out of a Steinbeck novel,” a comment that inspired McGovern to reread Steinbeck’s 1939 magnum opus, The Grapes of Wrath. “It is poetry, and also just incredible storytelling,” she says.

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

McGovern, who starred as Martha in a 2023 production of Edward Albee’s 1962 classic, recalls: “It really did get into my bones and I loved it. There’s a logic to it, but it isn’t a linear logic; there’s 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.”

The Belle of Amherst by William Luce

The Belle of Amherst: A Play Based on the Life of Emily Dickinson

“It was a one-woman play about the life of Emily Dickinson, with Julie Harris at the Longacre Theatre in Los Angeles, and I remember thinking, I want to do that. I was so entranced by [Harris] living on stage as this character; that really influenced me in terms of being an actor.”

The poetry of Anne Sexton

“There’s just something about her writing that is, at times, genius for me. I’m sure that a lot of it has to do, unfortunately, with her madness. But there is a brilliance in her use of imagery, and her absolutely honest and searing identity as a woman, putting herself in such a brave and uncompromising way into the poetry.”