The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid

Evelyn Hugo is a legendary Hollywood actress, famous for her beauty, her films and her seven marriages. Now in her late seventies and long retired, she has finally decided to tell the true story of her glamorous and scandalous life. To everyone’s surprise, she chooses Monique Grant, a little-known magazine reporter whose career and marriage are both struggling, to write it.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, by Taylor Jenkins Reid, alternates between Monique’s present-day conversations with Evelyn in her Manhattan apartment and Evelyn’s recollections of her life. Born to Cuban immigrants in Hell’s Kitchen, Evelyn escapes poverty by heading to Los Angeles in the 1950s, where she reinvents herself and rises to stardom through determination, ambition and calculated choices.

Each section of her story is named after one of her husbands, from her first marriage, which helped her get to Hollywood, to unions with a studio heir, a famous singer, a director and others. But Evelyn reveals that the great love of her life was not any of her husbands, and that many of her decisions were shaped by the need to protect a secret that the Hollywood of her era would never have accepted. As her story unfolds, Monique begins to suspect that Evelyn chose her for a reason that connects their lives in unexpected ways.

Reid explores fame, ambition, love, sexuality, identity and the price of secrecy, creating a vivid portrait of old Hollywood.

Absorbing and emotional, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo became a word-of-mouth phenomenon and a bestseller. It contains sexual content, domestic violence and mature themes.