So as I mentioned in my last review, I am now a massive fan of Taylor Jenkins Reid. I loved Daisy Jones and the Six so much that I immediately wanted to read The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. I’d heard this book mentioned loads and the title definitely made me think who the hell has seven husbands? It’s intriguing and it makes you want to understand why Evelyn Hugo has had so many husbands, did she kill them? Was she after the money? You want to know, already building this femme fatale, black widow image in your mind. Reading it you realise it’s so much more than that, which is exactly Jenkins Reid’s point, and I love it. This review will be spoiler free!
So I keep saying I love it when it comes to Jenkins Reid, but it is so true, I love the worlds she creates and the characters she writes and I can’t wait to see what she’ll do next (trust me I will be working my way through her older novels soon enough). The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo focuses on the Hollywood actress Evelyn Hugo who started featuring in movies during the 1950s and the lovers she has over the course of her career and later. It’s set slightly similarly to Daisy Jones and the Six in that its an interview setting but it is completely told from the point of view of Evelyn and the interviewer, Monique. It has all the glitz and glam of old Hollywood, but also focuses a lot on the drawbacks and nasty things that happen behind the scenes in that world.
One of the interesting things that you try and guess at throughout the book is Evelyn’s motivations for speaking out, about her past and why now? Why this interviewer? I found it really interesting to guess at, and while it wasn’t a completely shocking surprise later on, I still really enjoyed it. Evelyn was written so well that you felt how complex she was as a character. She made it clear from the start that she was not a good person, that she did not want her autobiography to reflect her as an angel, but rather as a deeply flawed and complex person, and that is what the book does. You see Evelyn reflect on realising her own flaws, and while you can’t help but feel for her in some instances you still realise she is not a perfect person, and as you struggle with this so does Monique which helps the reader along the way, because Monique is just as clueless as us. I think that really helps the reader resonate with Monique and with Evelyn, and I liked to read what Monique thought.
One of the themes of the book is that throughout the interviews with Evelyn, Monique starts to realise how she can fix problems she’s having in her own life through thinking about Evelyn’s own experiences. It’s one part that I really love, how you can directly see that the meaningful things Evelyn says do have an impact. I think we probably all have something to learn from Evelyn and the way that she is written. Evelyn is a strong and smart woman who ultimately tries to do the right thing for those that she loves and is aware of how she can use her position and sex appeal to do so. Evelyn constantly reminds us to take what we deserve and grab opportunities with both hands, she reminds us that we don’t deserve to feel beholden to those who don’t care about us. I find her to be a really empowering character.
By the end of the book I cried, and I don’t mean nice crying. I'm talking full on ugly crying sobbing and nose streaming at midnight crying. I was a mess. Even though I’d guessed at what the plot twists were I couldn’t stop crying, because of the way it was written, and some of the lines really stood out to me in a heartbreaking way because I could relate to them and they made me think of some of my own issues. And these lines weren’t even meant to be sad, but to me they were, and I think that is what makes this book so powerful. That even the lines which are meant to be happy and comforting to the reader can be completely heartbreaking to other readers who have different life experiences. But I loved it as it made it more special in a way, and more relatable to myself.
Another thing I really enjoyed about the book was how it dealt with the LGBT issues that people would have been facing in Hollywood at the time. The book starts in the 50s and goes through some really monumental points in time for LGBT history like the stonewall riots and the AIDS crisis and it was really interesting to see how these played out in the background of the characters lives and how they may have been prevented from helping the LGBT community because of their fame. This book really highlighted how hard it would have been for people in Hollywood who were LGBT and it made it a really special and important part of the book, because you can really imagine how scary it would have been for them at the time. I think the way Jenkins Reid writes encompasses these issues perfectly, even when in the more modern setting of the book. She also writes the women in her stories as feminists and I love it, although again like in Daisy Jones and the Six, it is in different ways. I think Jenkins Reid has a really interesting way of writing these characters that shows the subtlety of their thinking and how that influences them, even though it is written from a first person perspective. It’s something that I can only hope to try and encompass in my own future writing.
I think that this book is just as good, if not better than Daisy Jones and the Six, and to anyone who wants a new book to read, I really recommend you start here. They’re both full of intrigue and beautiful imagery, and deep meaningful insights into the world, I have genuinely loved reading them because they make me think. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a lovely writer and I look forward to reading many many more of her books.
Let me know if you read it!
Love,
Carey
Comments