“An aging Hollywood icon agrees to tell the true story of her career and her seven marriages, but only to an unknown journalist.”
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The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is Taylor Jenkins Reid's 2017 novel, the Hollywood-memoir-fiction breakthrough that became one of the canonical late-2010s and 2020s book-club novels and that drove Reid's broader interconnected-California fiction project (Daisy Jones & The Six, Malibu Rising, Carrie Soto Is Back, Atmosphere). Evelyn Hugo, a seventy-nine-year-old retired Hollywood icon, agrees to give an exclusive career-spanning interview to an unknown Vivant magazine journalist, Monique Grant. Evelyn's stated reason for choosing Monique is unclear at the start of the interview and is the structural mystery the novel resolves across its 388 pages. The interview itself is structured as a long oral-history of Evelyn's life from her 1958 arrival in Hollywood through the dissolution of her seventh marriage, organized by husband.
Reid's structural method is the patient excavation of one fictional life across forty years of Hollywood history, with each marriage chapter doubling as a character study of a different era of American studio-system and post-studio Hollywood. The Don Adler chapter (Evelyn's first husband, a Studio-Era leading man whose physical violence Evelyn escapes only by leveraging her own publicity machinery) is one of the most carefully written prose about coercive control in commercial literary fiction. The Celia St. James material (Evelyn's lifelong love and the secret the seven marriages are hiding) is rendered with patient queer-relationship specificity the marketing of the novel sometimes underplays. The third-act reveal about Monique earns its surprise.
Recommended as required contemporary American commercial literary fiction reading, as the right Reid entry point, and for fans of Reid's Daisy Jones & The Six and Malibu Rising, plus Stacey D'Erasmo's Wonderland and Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown. The Alma Cuervo / Julia Whelan / Robin Miles audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation. A Netflix adaptation is in development.
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