Reese...Her Most Funny and Real Q&A Yet

That flash of blonde locks - that's Reese Witherspoon, the Southern belle turned impresario, movie star, mother of three, and budding lifestyle guru. Catch her if you can.

- Fannie Flagg

It’s a hot day in Hollywood, two o’clock in the afternoon, and the sun is scorching a back lot of Universal Studios. It’s the New York set, blocks of gleaming glass buildings and elegant brownstones in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. It’s discombobulating. But from behind a rack of clothes pops Reese Witherspoon, totally at ease. Her big blue eyes are clear, and she still has the peaches-and-cream complexion of a 16-year-old. She flashes the wide grin that has endeared her to audiences since she was a child. When she shakes my hand, her grip is firm but genteel. I grew up with girls like Witherspoon back in Alabama, where I’m from. Some of the characters from my novels, like Evelyn, the protagonist in Fried Green Tomatoes At The Whistle Stop Cafe, speak with the same sweet, gentle Southern accent. And like Evelyn, beneath Witherspoon’s sunny charm, there’s a clever mind. She’s as smart as a whip. I think of her roles in Election and Legally Blonde, in which her characters’ bubbliness disguises razor-sharp ambition. ‘I’ve always been a little spitfire,’ Witherspoon tells me when we finally sit down over some cheese straws, a Southern treat I brought from home. ‘Sometimes it’s got me into trouble,’ she adds. But that need to speak her mind has also given vibrancy to complicated roles in such films as last year’s hit Wild, or in her famously nuanced portrait of June Carter Cash in 2005’s Walk The  Line. Today, the 39-year-old Witherspoon is balancing motherhood, helming her own production company, Pacific Standard – she produced the noir thriller Gone Girl - and, of course, starring in her own films. Her newest is