Reese Witherspoon has debuted her first novel. The book, co-written with best-selling author Harlan Coben, is set in the medical world. "My biggest goal for this book is to make as many little girls as possible want to be surgeons, as Elle Woods did for lawyers," Witherspoon said of Gone Before Goodbye. The thriller - which follows Maggie McCabe, an army surgeon who finds herself thrown into the world of Russian billionaires and private medicine - was introduced at Shine Away, a two-day summit put on by Witherspoon's Hello Sunshine media company. The star told the crowd that she had been cooking up the story idea for two and a half years but didn't know how to go about writing a book, and reached out to Coben to help her bring it to life. The actor revealed that the Maggie character was inspired by her own family. Her father was a doctor, and her mother was a nurse, and they were both in the military when Witherspoon was growing up. "The first five years of my life, I lived on a military base in Germany, and everybody who filtered in and out of our house was another doctor, and all they would talk about was medical jargon. "So I was really, really little, sitting at the dinner table listening to my dad and his friends and my mom and her friends talk about really gnarly surgeries," Witherspoon recalled. "For years and years, I wanted to be a surgeon."