The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid Review: A Dazzling Old Hollywood Historical Drama

Published by Atria Books in 2017 and later issued in a paperback reprint edition, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a historical drama novel structured as a biography-within-a-novel. The premise is precise: at age 79, the reclusive former Old Hollywood star Evelyn Hugo reaches out to an unknown magazine reporter named Monique Grant — not to give the interview her publicist announced, about an auction of her iconic gown collection benefiting a breast cancer charity, but to dictate her full life story. Evelyn insists only Monique will do, citing a piece the journalist wrote about assisted suicide. The explanation for that choice is itself the novel's central mystery. The narrative then splits: the present-day interview sessions with Monique frame a decades-long recollection in which Evelyn charts her rise from an abusive household in Hell's Kitchen, Manhattan — escaping at age fourteen by marrying her first husband, Ernie Diaz, as a calculated passage to Hollywood — through each of her seven marriages. Reid structures the novel into seven named parts, one per husband, each title carrying a charged adjective that broadcasts Evelyn's private verdict on the man: "Brilliant, kindhearted, tortured Harry Cameron" or "gullible Mick Riva," as Wikipedia's synopsis records.

The novel's emotional spine, disclosed late, is that none of Evelyn's seven husbands was the love of her life. That role belongs to Celia St. James, her co-star and fellow actress — a relationship Evelyn kept hidden across decades of carefully stage-managed public marriages. The novel is therefore simultaneously a portrait of bisexuality navigated inside the rigid moral codes of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood and an inquiry into the cost of a life performed for public consumption. Reid drew on real figures when constructing Evelyn: according to the author herself, Evelyn is loosely based in part on Elizabeth Taylor, who was married eight times to seven different men, and on Ava Gardner, whose secrets were eventually revealed to a journalist in Ava Gardner: The Secret Conversations. That dual inspiration grounds the novel's fictional excess in a recognizable historical texture without reducing it to roman à clef guesswork.

One of the novel's most discussed formal choices is its layered documentary texture. Alongside the interview-and-recollection structure, the book incorporates fabricated newspaper clippings and gossip columns about Evelyn — a device that, as a reviewer for the University of Arizona Wildcat noted, made the novel feel as though it had been written about an actual person. This pseudo-archival scaffolding does real narrative work: it places Evelyn's self-told story against a public record she spent decades constructing and controlling, and it allows Reid to dramatize the gap between a celebrity's curated image and private truth. The dual-timeline design — Evelyn's Golden Age life and Monique's present-day interview sessions running in parallel — creates an architecture where every new marriage-chapter casts retroactive light on the framing story. Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, the New York Times bestselling author of Bittersweet, called it "a glamorous romp through Hollywood in its heyday" featuring "several unexpected twists and a dazzling, ambitious movie star."

The novel was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction in 2017. Its reach has extended far beyond the English-language market: the book has been translated into more than two dozen languages, including Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Japanese-adjacent Asian markets, and others. Television rights were acquired in 2019 by Freeform and Fox 21 Television Studios, with Jennifer Beals and Ilene Chaiken — the team behind The L Word — attached to produce, and Reid herself set to contribute as a screenwriter. The breadth of translation and the speed of the adaptation interest reflect the novel's crossover appeal across literary and popular fiction audiences.

Readers drawn to compulsive narrative momentum, morally complex protagonists, and LGBTQ+ historical storylines will find the novel squarely in their territory. The seven-part episodic structure, with each husband serving as a distinct chapter in Evelyn's evolution, means the novel functions almost as a linked collection of dramatic acts — a design that rewards binge reading but can feel uneven across sections of unequal dramatic weight. The framing device with Monique, while ingeniously resolved, demands patience: the mystery of why Evelyn chose this particular journalist is deliberately withheld across most of the novel, and readers who prefer answers to accumulate rather than detonate at the end may find the long deferral occasionally frustrating. Those who prefer tightly bounded literary fiction over the more expansive, plot-driven architecture of popular historical fiction should calibrate expectations accordingly.