It takes about fourteen seconds of speaking with Jennifer Rudolph Walsh to understand why Prince Harry describes her as his fairy godmother. The co-owner of Godmothers, the Southern California bookstore-to-the-stars, starts our conversation with an expression of relief. “I’m so oddly refreshed by the fact that you wanted to do a phone call,” she says. Zooms are not for her. Even so, she’s breaking one of her policies, which is no scheduled calls unless you’re her doctor. “People are like, but how will I reach you? It’s like, okay, here’s the system. You try me. If it’s not a good time, I’ll try you back. Okay? Let’s go with that. It worked for 50 years perfectly.” She’s warm, open, calls me “sweetheart” with an easy familiarity, and wants to spend as much time juicing up her friends and acquaintances as she does talking about herself. Whitney Wolf Herd is “brave” and “loving”; Amanda Knox is “a modern day Victor Frankl”; her store’s head of community engagement, Riley Reed, is “beautiful, incredible, smart, brave, funny, kind.”
She has the magnetic selling power one might expect from a woman who, in her past life, spent three decades ascending to the highest rungs of the publishing world as a literary agent to the stars, working with the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Sheryl Sandberg, Dani Shapiro, Ariana Huffington, and Rob Lowe. She was the head of WME’s Worldwide Literary, Lectures, and Conference Divisions, founded the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, launched Winfrey’s “The Life You Want” tour, and served on the board of the National Book Foundation.
Five years ago Rudolph Walsh began what she calls her “sacred pause,” when she left WME and New York. The pause lasted until nine months ago, when she opened Godmothers in Summerland, California with Victoria Jackson, cosmetics entrepreneur and author of the book We All Worry, Now What?, in September 2024. “I realized, I don’t miss the book business, I don’t miss managing people, but I do miss book people. I miss the tribe of book lovers,” she says. “And I miss gathering together to talk about what we’re reading and what it reminds us of.”
The pair took the name from Prince Harry’s assertion at the Beverly Hills launch party for his memoir, Spare, that Jackson, Walsh, and Oprah Winfrey were his “fairy godmothers.” The celebrations for their own store opening spanned a weekend, with Winfrey, Meghan Markle, and Harry in attendance, along with other starry locals including Jane Lynch and Portia de Rossi. They debuted a Founders Circle program, which offers such benefits as members-only game nights and a monthly Sunday tea, early tickets and VIP seating at in-store events, plus four members-only events each month (last week’s was a cocktail meet-and-greet with Kevin Kwan), custom book recommendations, and 15% off of everything. She and Reed also run a book club, open to all—though with a waitlist. Next up: Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible.
Here, from her house in the hills, where she lives with her husband, two mini donkeys, two micro cows, a pair of goats—all six of which she bottle fed—and four dogs (she also has three children and two grandchildren, one of whom was born just last week), she talks about her life transition, her beloved and glittering social circle, and the books she can’t stop thinking about.
Vanity Fair: What has surprised you about being a bookstore owner?
Jennifer Rudolph Walsh: The hunger is really the thing that has surprised and delighted me the most. Victoria and I really built this—we say it’s not a store, it’s a storefront for magic—we built this storefront because we needed it, because we wanted a place to dive into the deep end about things that matter, about stories about ideas, and to be open-hearted and open-minded around these discussions.
Besides, obviously, your love of books, how has your former life as an agent translated to running the store?
My evolution is that I was exclusively a literary agent for many, many years. And then in 2014, I co-produced Oprah Winfrey’s “The Life You Want Tour.” We went on the road, and it was during those three months that I fell in love with the idea of hearing stories together, sharing stories together. I really was bitten by a love bug on this where I was like, oh my gosh, it’s not enough to actually read books—which is amazing—but writers write them in solitude, and readers often read them in solitude. There’s something alchemical that happens when we’re in a shared space, sharing stories. So for the last six years, my work in New York, I was really braiding my love of culture with my love of reading and then my love of live events and storytelling. In a way, Godmothers has taken all my favorite pieces of my previous chapter, which I was living at scale, and recreated it at intimacy—almost like a perfect dollhouse version of all of the things that I’ve loved and been putting into the world my whole career.
