The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
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Taylor Jenkins Reid on The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A lost memoir and a love story hiding inside itThe whole project began with a piece of real Hollywood history: Ava Gardner’s lost memoir, reconstructed through interviews between Gardner and her ghostwriter. The format stopped Reid cold. She saw in it not a biographical curiosity but a structural key, a way to let a fictional woman finally speak.
When I read Ava Gardner’s lost memoir, which was told through her interviews with her ghostwriter, it felt like the perfect premise for a book about a fictional actress spilling secrets. I wanted to give this actress a stunning love story that the public never knew about.
The love story Reid imagined for that fictional actress was not chosen at random. She had been carrying the desire to write it for years, and the book became the occasion she had been waiting for.
I’ve always wanted to write a story about two women in love, in no small part in homage to some of the meaningful queer relationships I’ve seen in my own family. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was my opportunity.
That opportunity required courage Reid had to build deliberately. An editor had already told her that books about actresses tended not to sell, and she had shelved the idea once to complete a different project. When she returned to it, she went to her publisher with a position she had thought through carefully.
If it’s not going to do well, then fine, but this is a book that’s calling to me. It’s growing in my mind and my relationship to it is becoming deeper and deeper. I’m seeing it more clearly. It’s what I want to do next.
She also told her publisher directly that if they weren’t willing to take the book on, she understood and would look elsewhere. The book that editors said wouldn’t sell has since become one of the most-read novels of its decade.
How she wrote it
Plotting every secret before writing a wordReid’s usual method is to write toward an ending she already knows, discovering the middle as she goes. Evelyn Hugo broke that habit. The architecture of interlocking secrets, seven husbands whose stories each concealed something about the one that mattered most, made improvisation impossible.
Evelyn Hugo was the first book that I needed to really sit down and sketch out before I started writing. I knew all of her husbands and all of her secrets before I began. It’s not normally that way for me.
Research for the Hollywood setting came partly from Reid’s own years working in feature film casting in Los Angeles, but she also spent months with a single podcast before and during the writing. Karina Longworth’s series on classic Hollywood gave her the texture of scandal and secrecy she needed.
There’s this podcast called You Must Remember This by Karina Longworth, and I listened to that podcast so much before and as I was writing The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, because it’s all about scandals and events from classic Hollywood.
One scene inside the finished outline turned out to be the most rewarding stretch of writing in the entire manuscript. Reid named it when asked which of Evelyn’s seven marriages she most enjoyed writing.
I loved writing Evelyn’s elopement with crooner Mick Riva. It was the most satisfying work maybe of my life this far. It reveals a great deal of Evelyn and her inner life.
Revision kept returning Reid to the scenes between Evelyn and Celia, the great love at the center of the book, and to the moments where Evelyn names her own sexuality. Reid made a deliberate craft decision there, choosing clarity over ambiguity, and she was clear-eyed about what that trade cost her.
I will readily admit that my dedication to positive representation came at the expense of subtlety. There are conversations in this book that are spelled out very clearly — which left very little room for nuance and the beauty of language — because I wanted to make sure that any bisexual person reading it, any person who is questioning their feelings, felt supported with no uncertainty. It was imperative that Evelyn be explicit and proud of her sexuality.
That choice was also a personal one. Reid came out publicly as bisexual in 2025, years after writing a character whose pride in the same identity she had not yet claimed for herself in public.
The personal thread
Writing pride she had not yet claimed herselfReid came out as bisexual in 2025, and in the interviews that followed she described what the cultural messaging around bisexuality had felt like during the 1990s, the years when her own sense of her identity was forming. The dismissal she described ran directly through the book she had written years earlier.
The messages about bisexuality were you just want attention or it was a stop on the way to gayville. I found that very painful, because I was being told that I didn’t know myself, but I did.
For years, readers and critics read Reid as a straight woman writing a queer story as an outsider act of allyship. She did not correct them, but the cost of the silence accumulated.
It has been hard at times to see people dismiss me as a straight woman, but I also didn’t tell them the whole story.
What she wants us to sit with
One woman’s full life, not a categoryBefore the book was published, Reid worried that genre labels would give readers permission to exclude themselves. She wanted straight readers inside a queer love story, not reassured they could skip it. Her shorthand for what the book was actually arguing had nothing to do with genre.
Ladies, go on, get yours.
The line is a summary of Evelyn’s entire philosophy: take the career, the love, the pleasure, and do not wait for permission from a world that will not grant it.
Reid put specific pressure on herself to make Evelyn’s bisexuality one feature of a complete person, not its defining characteristic. She wanted a character whose sexuality the reader would feel as inseparable from but not reducible to everything else Evelyn was.
Evelyn is just a person. She’s a person who loved a woman and had to hide it to ascend to Hollywood power and keep hiding it to maintain that power. She’s also a loving mother and a loyal best friend and a liar and a master manipulator, and a user. She’s a hopeless romantic, and she’s also a cutthroat cynic. The fact that she loves both men and women is a big part of who she is, but it’s only a part.
Reid has described the book as a bigger risk than anything she had written before, and she went in knowing some of its themes would unsettle readers. Years later she was still willing to say plainly what she had been reaching for.
I am very, very proud of that book... I went in a new direction and I took on maybe a little bit darker, more controversial ideas and more complex characters. [paraphrased from audio]