A review by wardenred
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

emotional reflective medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

All of these things you’re so desperate to know, I promise I’ll answer them before we’re done. But I’m not going to answer them one minute before I want to. I call the shots. That’s how this is going to go.

Well, this was… a source of lots of mixed feelings. I absolutely adored Daisy Jones & the Six earlier this year, so I expected a lot from my next book by Taylor Jenkins Reid, especially since I’ve heard so many good things about this one. But where with Daisy Jones, the “written mockumentary“ format added a lot to the story, here, the “writing Evelyn’s memoir“ framing device fell flat for me. I feel like I see where the author was going with it; it offers that extra smoke screen, a level of separation between the reader and the larger-than-life movie star. Unfortunately, it ended up feeling more like a gimmick and, more often than not, a distraction. 

It didn’t help that Monique was one of the most uninteresting characters I’ve “met“ lately and did absolutely nothing interesting as a journalist. It was also cringy how from the start, given this unique opportunity to write Evelyn’s tell-all, she immediately jumped to the husbands angle and the “Who was the true love of your life?“ question, especially since that question was asked before she had any hint of Evelyn being queer. Here you sit in front of a woman who’s been a cultural phenomenon for decades, her creative work influencing generations, and the main thing you want to know about her life is… which man in her life defined her? Meh. Honestly, even with the fact that Evelyn’s actual true love was a woman, I find this approach cringy, because while love is important, we all exist outside of our relationships, too, romantic or otherwise. Or rather, we exist in many relationships at once, and outside them, and between them, and to define one person solely through one specific romantic relationship is odd. Not to mention that I generally tend to roll my eyes at that “one true love“ concept, because it’s possible to love more than one person in a lifetime, and no one love should diminish or erase others.

I do feel that the story itself eventually did a good job of addressing these things. Evelyn does make a point of reaffirming that while Celia was the love of her life, she had genuine feelings for some of her husbands, too, and she also loved other people in a non-romantic way: Harry, Louisa, her daughter, her mother’s memory. So in retrospect, that heavy-handed pushing of the “so which husband was the most important, hmm?“ question as the central thread for the memoir was a very smart choice: create a faulty premise, contradict it with a follow-up. But something about the way it was presented at the beginning grated on my nerves.

I mostly enjoyed the character development here, even though, with the exception of Harry, there was hardly a single character that I liked. Evelyn was quite interesting; I liked how she didn’t shy away from admitting her flaws, and how while she didn’t hide that there were pretty awful things in her life that shaped her into the person she is, she refuses to paint herself as the victim and makes it clear that she made her own choices with what happened to her. She’s not a particularly likable character, but definitely a strong and compelling one. Harry was both interesting and likable; I admired how he toed the line between Hollywood cynicism and personal kindness, and how he was always there for Evelyn but also pushed her when she needed to be pushed, and pushed against her when he didn’t agree with the choices she tried to make for everyone. Celia, frankly, often annoyed me, but I did like how she was presented in the narrative: how Evelyn always spoke of her with so much love, but also showed enough of her flaws for the reader to be able to see them way before they got acknowledged. There were a few other characters who got to show up multiple times and grow and change over the decades in way that inspired no real sympathy in me but made me want to know what happens to them next. On the other hand, there were others who were barely more than slightly fleshed-out stereotypes.

What strikes me as odd was how little acting and film-making there was here, for a book about an actress. Evelyn talks a lot about the consequences of being a Hollywood star: the fame, the money, the recognition, the Oscars. But it’s only rather late in the book, and only for the sake of one specific plot point, that the actual *art* of it all gets some real attention. It was a stark contrast to Daisy Jones where songwriting and performing music took up a huge part of the narrative. Perhaps that’s because as a writer—also a creative artist—Reid had more to draw from as she wrote about people creating art, but a character’s who’s a performance artist was harder to tackle.

Overall, I liked it more than I didn’t, but I also felt like this was a queer story written very much with a straight eye, and in the last part of the book, it was all getting kind of… repetitive and needlessly dramatic for my tastes. I also wasn’t a big fan of the many rather obvious life wisdoms / truisms being presented as these life-shattering revelations. And I maintain that a lot more could be done with that framing device.
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