Monique & Evelyn

I just finished an interesting book – The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I’m not quite sure what I think about it yet. Not entirely. If you’re planning on reading the book, don’t worry, I’m not giving away any big spoilers here.

This is a story within a story. The outer frame centers on Monique Grant, a mid level new writer at a Vanity Fair type magazine in New York. She’s in her mid 30s and recently separated from the man she’d married less than a year prior. Apparently, he accepted a job in San Francisco. She chose to stay in NYC. Sad but otherwise treated as no real big. Weird, eh? What’s up with that?

I'm not sure what, if anything, this brought to the story. How did it advance or enhance any of the various themes? It just seemed odd and shouted RANDOM PLOT DEVICE at me.

There’s a legendary, reclusive star of Old Hollywood, Evelyn Hugo, now in her late 70s. She’s auctioning off a bunch of her vintage ball gowns for charity and contacts Monique’s boss. The magazine can have an exclusive interview about the auction with pics but ONLY if Monique does the story.

And here comes the inner story frame. The story for the magazine was just a ruse, a hook to get Monique in the door. Evelyn wants Monique to write the never told before, true story of her life.

Her real origin (versus the fairy tale the studio system put out). The actual loves of her life (as opposed to who she married). Which happenings and reports were real and which were illusions manufactured to manipulate the movie making machine so that she could keep working and getting plum roles. Why she quit the biz and move to Spain when she did.

How do Monique and Evelyn's storylines intersect and come together?

We get the story of Evelyn’s life because she wants, has a solid need, for her reality – sins, pains, and glories – to finally be known. This, even though (or because) she knows she won’t be around to see whatever waves her big reveal may create. 

Why will she only work with Monique – an unknown writer who she’s never met? A couple reasons. There are hints to one motive but the larger reason doesn’t come out until the penultimate chapter. (NO spoilers – I promised!)

Gotta say, this is NOT my usual sort of book. I’ve no complaints about the author’s style, it’s just, well…not my taste. There were no spaceships, or sentient, talking cats, zero kaiju, no aliens or androids. 

There was all this painful reality of women not having equal rights and being treated like no more than sexy, disposable Pez dispensers. Included in the painful reality was the not at all distant history of gays and lesbians in Hollywood – having to be so deeply closeted that they needed oxygen concentrators to breathe. At the very least, careers would be trashed if word got ‘round.

So, Seven Husbands offered little distraction from the ugly real world.

Ethnicity and color come up but was pretty much brushed over.

i.e., Evelyn is Cuban and grew up in Hell’s Kitchen and starts out in Hollywood in the ‘50s. She dyes her hair bombshell blonde and the studio gives her voice coaching to eliminate her New York/Cuban accent. She’s passing as white, if not cornfed Iowa all-American. She doesn’t speak Spanish again for years.

Monique’s mother, who she’s close to, is white. Her father, who passed away some undisclosed years past, was Black. The most the book’s author says about this, to the best of my memory, is that Monique is biracial and light skinned. That's it.

The author, who’s white, only nods at Evelyn and Monique not being WASPs in a society built for WASPs (or otherwise very white, English as first/only language, white people). Maybe that’s for the best? What I mean is, I absolutely shudder when male authors ham-handedly write women as barely believable cardboard stereotypes – as though women aren’t fully human or they've never met one before.

So, is it good that the author didn’t write more on a state of being that she doesn’t understand? Or, in only mentioning Evelyn and Monique’s othered experiences in passing/without resonance, did she short-sheet the big picture?

I’m thinking it’s a bit of each. 

What I took away was that Evelyn passed for white (with a healthy glow) and that, apart from enjoying speaking her first language while living in Spain, being Cuban-American wasn’t relevant to her or the story. 

As for Monique being Black? This seemed to be, ultimately, just a plot device. Being Black in America isn’t an oh, by the way kind of thing but, to me, that’s how it seemed to be written. WTF?

Having said all this, it was fun following Evelyn smartly and craftily work the studios, the gossip rags, her suitors and husbands. I enjoyed watching Monique's triumphs and the subtle ways she learned from and connected with the older actress.

While soap operas are definitely not my bag, and that’s assuredly what The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is, it was worth the ride. 

Great beach read?