At first glance, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo appears to be just another Hollywood melodrama, glamorous gowns, scandalous marriages, and the rise and fall of a silver-screen goddess. But peel away the chiffon and diamonds, and you’ll find something far more interesting. A meditation on power, identity, and the impossible bargains women make in a world that insists on writing their stories for them.
Evelyn Hugo, the Cuban-American girl who reinvents herself into Hollywood royalty, is not interested in your sympathy. She is, instead, interested in control. She knows her beauty is a commodity, her sexuality a weapon, and her ambition a liability. If she must marry seven times to stay afloat in an industry that fetishises women and discards them with equal speed, then so be it. Evelyn’s ruthlessness is not cruelty. It is survival, sharpened into an art form.
Each of her husbands represents more than a relationship, they are narrative devices, markers in her personal and professional metamorphosis.
Some are transactional, some are protective, some are catastrophic. But the husbands are never the point.
What Reid achieves is no small feat — to write about women’s ambition without apology. Evelyn is allowed to be calculating, ambitious, and selfish, all words that men in her industry wore like medals but women were crucified for. Reid doesn’t soften her, doesn’t make her more “likeable” for the reader’s comfort. Instead, she forces us to reckon with the uncomfortable truth, that glamour is labour, that visibility comes with violence, and that survival often demands a price no man is ever asked to pay.
The novel also raises questions about narrative control. Evelyn’s decision to tell her story to Monique, a relatively unknown journalist, is deliberate. She is, until her last breath, curating her legacy. In doing so, Reid points to the larger truth of women’s histories, that they have almost always been told by others, and almost always distorted. Evelyn’s confessional, then, is both a performance and a reclamation.
Of course, the book leans into melodrama — lovers torn apart, explosive scandals, a secret that detonates in the final act. But that is also its point. Hollywood itself is melodrama, a carefully constructed myth machine. Reid writes Evelyn as both victim and architect of this machinery — complicit in its deceptions, yet also defiant enough to use them for her own ends.
In the end, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is not a story about husbands at all. It is a story about women, about survival, about the messy and unglamorous work of carving out power in systems that would rather see them as ornaments. Evelyn is not moral. She is not consistent. She is not kind. And that is precisely why she feels so real.
Taylor Jenkins Reid gives us a heroine who is dazzling and difficult, glamorous and grotesque, but above all… unforgettable.
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