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Review

Taylor Jenkins Reid's The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a novel that accomplishes something deceptively difficult: it takes what could be a sensational premise — a legendary Hollywood actress confessing the secrets behind her seven marriages — and transforms it into a deeply felt meditation on identity, desire, the cost of ambition, and the impossible choices queer people have been forced to make in order to survive. The novel is structured as an oral biography, told by the fictional seventy-nine-year-old film icon Evelyn Hugo to a young journalist named Monique Grant, and this dual-narrative architecture is one of the book's greatest achievements. Evelyn's story spans from 1950s Hollywood to the late 1980s, while Monique's unfolds in the contemporary present, and the two stories converge with devastating force.

The novel opens with Evelyn summoning Monique — a relatively unknown writer at Vivant magazine — under the pretense of discussing a gown auction. The real reason, Evelyn reveals, is that she wants Monique to write her authorized biography, a tell-all to be published posthumously. Why Monique specifically? This question hangs over the entire novel like a Chekhov's gun, and Reid handles the eventual revelation with impressive narrative precision. The frame story gives Monique her own arc — a crumbling marriage to David, career stagnation, and the slow-building confidence that comes from being around someone as formidable as Evelyn Hugo — and this parallel narrative is never merely decorative. It earns its place.

Evelyn's story begins in Hell's Kitchen, where she grows up as Evelyn Herrera, the daughter of Cuban immigrants. Her mother dies young; her father is abusive. At fourteen, she manipulates her way into a marriage with Ernie Diaz, a young electrician heading to Hollywood, trading her virginity for a ride out of town. This origin story establishes the novel's central tension: Evelyn's ruthless pragmatism is born not of cruelty but of survival. She is a woman who learned early that her body was currency and that the world would take from her whether she consented or not — so she might as well set the terms. Reid never flinches from the moral complexity here, and Evelyn herself refuses to apologize for what she did. "How can I condemn the fourteen-year-old girl who did whatever she could to get herself out of town?" she asks. The reader is challenged to answer.

Husband two is Don Adler, Hollywood royalty, and the marriage that Reid uses to most directly address domestic violence. The Don section is perhaps the novel's most conventional, but it works because Reid understands that the power of an abusive relationship lies not in the violence itself but in its architecture — the apologies, the cycles, the way the victim's own desires (Evelyn genuinely loved Don, genuinely desired him) become weapons against her. Don is the only husband who truly awoke Evelyn's heterosexual desire, and Reid is careful to establish this before the abuse begins, so that the reader understands why leaving was so complicated. The Don section also introduces the novel's two most important relationships: Evelyn's friendship with producer Harry Cameron, who is gay, and her growing intimacy with actress Celia St. James.

The Celia revelation is the emotional center of the novel, and Reid handles it beautifully. Evelyn does not realize she is in love with Celia in a sudden flash; the understanding creeps up on her, arriving through a series of small recognitions — the line of freckles on Celia's hip, the desire to give Celia everything she owns, the ache of jealousy when Ruby Reilly reveals that Celia is a lesbian. Their first kiss happens in a laundry room at a party, and Evelyn's description of it is one of the novel's finest passages: the softness of Celia's lips, the way "she swelled in all the places Don went flat." When Monique later assumes Evelyn is gay, Evelyn's correction is fierce: "I'm bisexual. Don't ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box." This moment is one of the novel's most important thematic statements — the insistence on being seen fully, not reduced to a convenient label.

The remaining husbands serve as chapters in Evelyn's ongoing negotiation between love and survival. Mick Riva is husband three — a Vegas elopement engineered entirely to divert tabloid attention from her relationship with Celia. The Mick section is narrated in second person, a bold stylistic choice that works because it conveys the dissociative distance Evelyn maintained during the manipulation. "You cross your fingers behind your back. You close your eyes." The marriage lasts a night, produces a pregnancy that Evelyn terminates in Tijuana, and ultimately fails to save her relationship with Celia, who leaves when she discovers Evelyn slept with Mick. The five-year separation that follows is one of the novel's most painful silences.

Rex North, husband four, is perhaps the most likable of the husbands — a pragmatic, witty Icelander (born Karl Olvirsson) who enters a transactional marriage with Evelyn to promote their film Anna Karenina. The Rex sections are lighter in tone and showcase Evelyn's business acumen. Rex and Evelyn never sleep together, and their arrangement is the one marriage in the book that functions exactly as designed. Rex eventually falls genuinely in love with Joy Nathan, and the dissolution of the marriage is handled with the same straightforward deal-making that inaugurated it. The Rex period also marks Evelyn's ascent to extraordinary wealth — she becomes the highest-paid actress in Hollywood through a blind deal at Paramount.

Harry Cameron, husband five, is the marriage that most closely resembles genuine partnership. Harry is gay; Evelyn is in love with Celia. They marry to provide cover for both, and the arrangement works because they genuinely love each other — not romantically, but with the depth of true kinship. Their decision to have a child together (Connor, conceived the old-fashioned way) is one of the novel's most tender plotlines. Reid is particularly strong in depicting the four-person family unit of Evelyn, Harry, Celia, and John Braverman (Celia's own beard husband), and the Stonewall section captures beautifully the tension between their political convictions and their personal survival strategies.

The Three A.M. controversy — in which Evelyn films an explicitly sexual scene with Don Adler without telling Celia — introduces a fracture that Reid uses to explore questions of consent, autonomy, and obligation within a relationship. Evelyn's decision is framed not as simple betrayal but as a failure of communication born from her lifelong inability to cede control. The scene itself is a landmark moment in Evelyn's filmography (it wins her an Oscar), but it costs her dearly with Celia. This is the novel's subtlest argument: that Evelyn's greatest strength — her refusal to let anyone else determine her path — is also her most destructive quality in intimate relationships.

Harry's death in a drunk-driving accident is the novel's most devastating sequence. Reid constructs it as a trauma narrative, with Evelyn's memory fragmenting at the moment of crisis and reassembling only in flashes — the blood, the two teeth in his lap, the smell of bourbon. What follows is Evelyn's most morally compromised act: she moves Harry's dead lover into the driver's seat to protect Harry's reputation and Connor's future. The identity of that lover — James Grant, Monique's father — is the revelation that the entire novel has been building toward. It recontextualizes everything: Evelyn's choice of Monique, the letter she has been holding for nearly three decades, and the fundamental question of whether telling the truth can ever make up for what the truth costs.

The final husbands — Max Girard (six, the director who tries to blackmail Evelyn when she leaves him) and Robert Jamison (seven, Celia's brother, married to protect Celia's estate) — are sketched more quickly but serve essential structural functions. Max represents the last gasp of Hollywood's power over Evelyn; Robert represents the system of mutual care that Evelyn, Celia, and their chosen family build in Spain. The Spain sections are the novel's emotional oasis — Evelyn rediscovering her Spanish, Connor healing from Harry's death, Celia and Evelyn finally living together openly. Their private wedding ceremony, performed in bed with hair ties for rings, is one of the most moving scenes in contemporary fiction about queer love.

Celia's death from emphysema and Connor's death from breast cancer are handled with restraint. Reid understands that by the time these losses arrive, the reader is so invested in Evelyn's emotional world that the simple fact of absence is enough. The novel's ending — in which Monique suspects Evelyn is planning to take her own life and chooses not to intervene — echoes her right-to-die piece and brings the novel full circle. Reid refuses to sentimentalize either the decision or Monique's response to it.

The novel's weaknesses are minor but worth noting. The tabloid and gossip column interludes, while cleverly used to mark time and provide ironic counterpoint, occasionally feel formulaic. Some of the later husbands (Max, Robert) receive less development than the earlier ones, making the novel's second half feel slightly compressed. And there are moments where Evelyn's narration reads more like contemporary sensibility than mid-century consciousness — her vocabulary of identity politics feels at times more 2017 than 1960. But these are quibbles in a novel that overwhelmingly delivers on its ambitions.

What Reid achieves here is a popular novel that manages to be genuinely subversive. Beneath the glamorous surface — the gowns, the Oscars, the palatial homes — lies a sustained argument about who gets to control their own narrative, who gets to love openly, and what it costs to live as your full self in a world that demands you be only one thing. Evelyn Hugo is a character who will stay with readers long after the final page, not because she is likable (she is often not) but because she is unapologetically, complicatedly, magnificently herself. "I think that loving you has been the truest thing about me," she tells Celia. In a novel about masks and performances, that line of unadorned honesty hits like a revelation.

Reviewed 2026-05-09