Witherspoon Cast in 'Girls' Guide'

Jan. 24, 2001 -- Plucky actress Reese Witherspoon will embody Jane, the young heroine in Melissa Bank's popular book of short stories, The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing, for a feature adaptation.

The young star, who earned kudos as a ruthless high-school activist in Election, will also produce the feature, Variety reports.

Girls' Guide is a best seller, with its vibrant, self-doubting main character, Jane, striking a chord with readers not fully satisfied by Helen Fielding's Bridget Jones' Diary (which is also headed into theaters, with Renée Zellweger in the lead).

Witherspoon's Dream Job

The film version will condense two of Bank's stories, "The Worst Thing a Suburban Girl Can Imagine" and "My Old Man," as its star is forced to accept the hierarchy of New York literati while simultaneously dealing with her father's terminal illness.

"When I read the book, I knew immediately that this was a character I had to play," Witherspoon told Variety. Girls' Guide is also Witherspoon's second production stint; her other is the upcoming drama Slow Motion.

No word yet on who the director will be.

Witherspoon should do Jane's spunky character justice. "I'd been a rising star," Jane laments in an excerpt from "The Worst Thing," "until Mimi Howlett, the new executive editor, decided I was just the lights of an airplane. … She might have been a romantic heroine from a novel, The Age of Innocence, maybe, except she was with me, in my sacky wool dress, a worker in a documentary about the lumpen proletariat."

Witherspoon last appeared in Adam Sandler's Little Nicky.