Reviewed by Casey Lawrence
When someone in my mixed-bag book club (instead of everyone reading the same book, we each choose one on a theme and then present it to the group) brought Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo to our Pride-themed June meeting, I was baffled. I had heard of it; it’s extremely popular on BookTok. But all the marketing for this book—a historical novel about an aging Golden Age actress coming out of seclusion to drop a memoir about her seven salacious marriages and various affairs—painted it as tremendously heterosexual.
“This book is extremely bisexual,” I was told at that meeting. “Explicitly, loudly, proudly bisexual.” I think many BWQ readers would be surprised to hear that. I certainly was!
Evelyn Hugo, 79, is no longer the blonde bombshell splashed all over the tabloids, but now she is a woman looking to make amends—and control the narrative of her legacy. Taylor Jenkins Reid renders aging not as a soft fade-out, but as a clarifying lens that brings the history of Hollywood (and all its dirt) into sharp focus. As Evelyn looks back on her life and critically analyzes her own decisions, we see how the industry’s obsession with youth and beauty shaped her trajectory by pitting women against each other and discarding them the moment they “lost” their sexual currency.
“People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’—that’s intimacy.”
While the industry eventually grew tired of Evelyn when she was no longer a 1950s sex symbol or 1960s femme fatale, maturity also gives Evelyn power: the power to shed the burden of performance and the confidence to confront truths she once had to bury. In this way, the book treats aging as a form of liberation. Evelyn hires upstart journalist Monique Grant to write her biography, but the central conceit of the novel (the “why did she choose me to tell her story?”) is the least interesting aspect of the book.
Frankly, by the end, I was not invested in Monique’s life; I could have read Evelyn’s story without the framing interview. But Evelyn. Oh, I was invested in Evelyn: her drama, her perseverance, and especially her tumultuous relationship with girl-next-door actress Celia St. James.
“Doesn’t it bother you? That your husbands have become such a headline story, so often mentioned, that they have nearly eclipsed your work and yourself? That all anyone talks about […] are the seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo?” […]
“No,” she told me. “Because they are just husbands. I am Evelyn Hugo.”
A combination of Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor, Evelyn Hugo is the kind of starlet that captivates, even on the page rather than the stage. From her humble beginning as Evelyn Herrera, desperate to use her adolescent sexuality to get out of Hell’s Kitchen, to the recently post-partum actress willing to depict a female orgasm on film for the first time to prove that motherhood (and turning 40) don’t neuter sexuality, Evelyn is a force to be reckoned with from age 14 to 79.
She isn’t likeable. Not all of her decisions are commendable or righteous. She is a manipulative, egotistic, cold-hearted bitch. But she’s also a lover. A mother. A deeply devoted wife to at least some of her husbands. Better than likeable, she’s interesting. She’s complicated. She feels real in a way that, speaking as a writer myself, is damned hard to do. We can excuse Reid for not developing Monique when she’s up against such a powerhouse. Anyone would be eclipsed when standing beside Evelyn Hugo.
The book is fiercely and unapologetically political. It is a riveting story that features a biracial narrator; a bisexual, Cuban protagonist; a lesbian main character; multiple gay men as main characters; and a diverse cast in general. The word “bisexual” is used deliberately, firmly. Assumptions are challenged. Biphobia called out. I wasn’t expecting that, even once I knew that Evelyn Hugo loved a woman, too.
Taylor Jenkins Reid did a great job painting a complex portrait of an actress who saw it all and lived to tell the tale. Evelyn uses her final years not to rewrite history, but to bring the truth out of the shadows once it can no longer hurt the people she loved. The husbands she bamboozled; the one that beat her; the lavender marriage; the ones who cheated; the ones she loved; the ones she didn’t. Each husband gets his own section of her story, but through it all, there is Celia, the woman Evelyn Hugo kept running back to. It’s a love story for the ages, and one I’m glad I picked up!
Casey Lawrence (she/they) has a PhD from Trinity College Dublin. After taking a five-year hiatus from creative writing to pursue her doctorate, Casey published her third Young Adult novel with JMS Books in 2023. She is from Ontario, Canada, and currently lives in Sweden with her husband, Rhys. Her fiction has recently appeared inSKIN: Anthology of Dark Fiction, Polar Borealis: Magazine of Canadian Speculative Fiction, Broken Antler Magazine, andStone Quarterly Literary Arts Journal. Find her on Bluesky @myexplodingpen.bsky.social.
