Blair Waldorf is officially making her return to the Upper East Side.
According to Deadline, the fan favorite character, portrayed by Leighton Meester, will be at the center of a new novel from original series author Cecily von Ziegesar.
The book will mark the first major literary continuation of the franchise in more than two decades.
The book, titled Blair, is set approximately 20 years after the original Gossip Girl and will follow the former Manhattan socialite in her 40s as she returns to New York City and attempts to reclaim her place atop the Upper East Side social hierarchy.
At this time, plot details remain under wraps.
The book will be written by von Ziegesar and is tentatively scheduled for publication in Summer 2027.
While no screen project is currently in development, the move is expected to generate interest across the television industry.
The original Gossip Girl novels, first published in 2002, sold more than six million copies worldwide, were translated into 25 languages, and spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, before spawning the hit CW series and a later HBO Max reboot.
The Gossip Girl reboot premiered in 2021.
The identity of Gossip Girl was revealed to be a group of the high school’s teachers, led by Kate Keller (Tavi Gevinson), in the first episode.
The creator of the original series, Joshua Safran, who is serving as the showrunner for the reboot, discussed the decision-making behind the surprising twist during an interview with Variety.
He explained, ‘I have friends who work in the private schools of the Upper East Side and Upper West Side. And I went to one, obviously. I often thought since the first Gossip Girl ended that there was maybe a show in teachers at these rarefied schools, but I never landed on anything.
‘And then I was talking to my friends a couple of years ago, just about the small changes that they had noticed in the students’ parents in the years they were teaching there.
Safran went on to say, ‘I can’t remember whether I first knew that there would be teachers and a teacher would be Gossip Girl, or whether I knew first that I would know who Gossip Girl was and it would be a teacher.
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‘The two were so neck-and-neck for me. I was also very interested in looking at roads we hadn’t explored the first time around, and teachers — that was a whole area. Especially private school teachers who are younger than public school teachers, who make less money than public school teachers, who come out of college and are not so removed from the age of the students that they’re teaching. All of that combined just felt like really fertile territory.’
He also addressed the potential ramifications that becoming Gossip Girl might have on the teachers. ‘It’s a be-careful-what-you-wish-for story,’ Safran said. ‘It’s a cautionary tale. We will be tracking not just what Gossip Girl does to the kids, but what being Gossip Girl does to them.
‘And it is incredibly messy and morally compromised, obviously.’
The original Gossip Girl television series aired on The CW from 2007 to 2012, running for six seasons and becoming a defining pop-culture hit of the late 2000s.
The show starred Blake Lively as Serena van der Woodsen and Meester as Waldorf, alongside Penn Badgley, Chace Crawford, Ed Westwick and Taylor Momsen.
Kristen Bell narrated the series, which followed Manhattan’s elite teens as their scandals were anonymously exposed online.
In September, Lively marked the 18th anniversary of Gossip Girl by sharing a treasure trove of never-before-seen photos from the set of the hit teen drama that defined a generation.
‘The summer Gossip Girl turned 18…’ Lively, 38, captioned the nostalgic Instagram carousel, with an accompanying song aptly set to the 2006 Peter Bjorn And John track Young Folks.
Lively, who starred as Serena van der Woodsen on the series, likened being on the show to a ‘college’ experience, and said it provided her with an ‘education’ and peers who became like ‘family.’
The slideshow is filled with candid moments of the cast during filming and downtime in New York City.
Among the throwbacks, Lively can be seen hugging her onscreen BFF Leighton Meester, 39, who played Blair Waldorf, in multiple sweet shots that perfectly capture their Serena-and-Blair bond.
Another snap featured Lively with the late Michelle Trachtenberg, who tragically died earlier this year at the age of 39. Trachtenberg played the scheming Georgina Sparks on 28 episodes of the series.
