The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a novel by the American writer Taylor Jenkins Reid, published in 2017, and it is the life of a film star as she finally chooses to tell it.

Evelyn Hugo has been out of sight for years when she arranges to auction her collection of gowns for a cancer charity and asks that a particular journalist cover it. Monique Grant has no connection to Evelyn and cannot work out why the interview has been offered to her. When they meet, Evelyn explains that she does not want an interview at all: she wants Monique to write her biography. The book is then divided into seven parts, one for each of Evelyn's husbands, and she uses them to explain what she was actually doing during the marriages and the affairs that happened around them.

Her account begins in a poor household in New York and moves through the studio system and the compromises it demanded of the people it made famous. Monique, who has reasons of her own for wanting the work, becomes the person Evelyn has decided to hand the whole story to, and the novel keeps circling the question of why she picked her.