“You do not know how fast you have been running, how hard you have been working, how truly exhausted you are, until somewhat stands behind you and says, “It’s OK, you can fall down now. I’ll catch you.” 

Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

There is a lot to dig into in the novel. Evelyn Hugo was a Hollywood star during its Golden Age. She became increasingly reclusive in her old age and was famous not just for her movie roles but also for her seven marriages. She chooses Monique Grant, an unknown journalist to write her tell-all biography that can only be published after her death. The narrative bounces between Evelyn’s retelling of her rise in Hollywood and Monique’s struggle to come to understand why Evelyn chose her of all people to write the book.

I picked this up because of how much I enjoyed Daisy Jones and the Six. The narrative structure and setting are very different in Evelyn Hugo, but Reid’s ability to create complex characters is common to both novels. Evelyn especially is both captivating and ruthless, drawing the reader into her experiences as she reveals her life’s secrets to Monique. Another thing I appreciated about this novel was how Reid presented the difficult choices that members of the gay community working in Hollywood had to face at the time. Reid is unflinching about how perilous being openly gay would be been to her character’s careers but also to their reputations and possibly to their personal safety. Evelyn’s time in Hollywood is set when people were still being sent to mental asylums for being gay. Reid examines the price of fame through portraying the choices her characters had to make in order to keep their careers afloat in the cut-throat world of the film industry at a time when studios basically “owned” the actors who were contracted to them.

I think Reid does a great job of capturing the eras in which she writes. She is able to create characters that are flawed yet still sympathetic. In the same way that I thought that Daisy Jones read like the transcripts of a real rock biography, Evelyn Hugo feels like a real celebrity tell-all but Reid is able to build strong characters and thus avoids plots that seem superficial or stale.

As a side note, what it with all of the books with “seven” in the title lately? The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, A Brief History of Seven Killings …

The next post will be a memoir, The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap by Wendy Welch. Stay tuned! Until then, happy reading!