The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

I read Taylor Jenkins Reid's previous book Daisy and The Six a little while back. I loved it but had to google about 500 times whether it was a true story or not. So, this time I was thankfully wise to her ways and knew that Evelyn Hugo was not a real-life glamorous movie star. However, even if I hadn't read Daisy and the Six, I don't think I would have found this one as confusing. It is written as the product of an interview but in a novel/ auto-biography style whereas Daisy and the Six is written as a full transcript of the interviews.

Monique Grant, a journalist at the very beginning of her career, with a couple of successful blogs under her belt and a job as a junior writer at a fashion magazine, gets a call, via her work, from mega-star Evelyn Hugo requesting that she writes an article about an auction of outfits she is about to donate. No one really knows why Monique but she, of course, leaps at the chance. When she gets there Evelyn tells her that, in fact, she wants her to write her life story.

Evelyn was married seven times in her life and the one thing everyone wants to know is, which was the true love of her life. I was slightly irritated by that. Not the novel itself, which is a book about true love and about overcoming immense obstacles to have that love. But in the biography within the novel, interest in her entire life and career successes are minimised for the sake of finding out about her love life. When Evelyn asks Monique, “what’s the one thing you really want to find out?" and she replies, "Who was the love of your life?" I just groaned. I wanted to shout, "She's more than just a wife!!"

The biography and the novel are structured around her seven husbands, they punctuate separate chapters of her life and therefore they make up the seven sections of the book. Between these sections, Monique tells her own story. She's recently divorced, struggling to come to terms with that, but finding strength through Evelyn to adjust to single life.

Evelyn's husbands are:

• Ernie Diaz - she marries him when she's still in her teens and he takes her to Hollywood. She divorces him as soon as she gets her first contract.
• Don Adler - a glamourous actor whose star is slightly waning and he becomes violent and abusive.
• Mick Riva - married for one night and he asks for an annulment in the morning. Someone was being used.
• Rex North - they starred in a film together and married at the end of it before he leaves with another woman.
• Harry Cameron - Harry is her best and longest friend. He is gay and they marry to hide that fact. They have a daughter together, Evelyn's only child. They remain married and the best of friends until he dies in a car accident.
• Max Girard - Max directed Evelyn in several films and rescued her career in the early days after she left Don. He has professed to be in love with her for decades but is it the real her that he is in love with or the idea of her?
• Robert Jamison - Robert is Evelyn's friend Celia's brother. The three of them lived together in Spain until Celia's death. He is Evelyn's longest marriage, they remain married until his death in New York.

Somewhere in amongst all this is the love of her life. 

I found all the Monique sections a little bit distracting, little bits of side story which were interrupting me from finding out about the next part of Evelyn’s. I didn't really get why she felt the need to include what was going on in her life in between the story of Evelyn Hugo. But you are aware there's a mystery over why Evelyn chose Monique, so you go with it and it's worth it in the end.

And the ending. After one shocking revelation, you can feel the conclusion coming. You know exactly what's coming and you're torn between never wanting it to end and knowing it's the only ending there can be.

It's a triumph of a novel. Taylor Jenkins Reid creates characters so real that you find the line between fiction and reality completely blurred. You live their lives with them for a while, you feel their pain, their joy, their sadness, and most of all their love. I cannot wait to read the rest of her books.