A character wouldn’t leave Reese Witherspoon alone. It led to her first novel

Reese Witherspoon’s first novel for adults began with the kind of inspiration veteran fiction writers know well – a character who wouldn’t leave her alone.

A military doctor who ends up performing plastic surgery for mysterious clients.

“I had never had an idea for a character in my whole life. She was sort of living in my head, and once that happens, I knew I was going to have to do something about it,” Witherspoon said this week as she and co-author Harlan Coben spoke in a conference room at the Apple SoHo store in downtown Manhattan, shortly before they were interviewed for an upcoming podcast, Bookmark.

“And so I called Harlan.”

The novel, which has just been published, is called “Gone Before Goodbye.” The woman in Witherspoon’s mind became Maggie McCabe, an Army combat surgeon whose professional setbacks lead her to accept a lucrative, but suspicious plastic surgery job