The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017) is a historical fiction novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid. The 400-page tome as an audiobook clocks in at just over 12 hours, and is narrated by three different actresses. Most editions feature a beautiful blonde woman with dark eyebrows wearing an elegant green dress. You can read our website’s full review of the book here.
Evelyn Hugo focuses on novice magazine writer, Monique, and the final interview mysteriously given to her by dying Golden Age of Hollywood acting legend, Evelyn Hugo. Throughout the novel, Hugo details her entire life from her start as an actress, the husbands that made up her public love life …. and who she truly loved throughout it all, and the price she had to pay for it.
Evelyn is bi, but that is not the central conflict of her story — at least, not within herself. Evelyn is confident about this with herself, and her attractions to both men and women. Though she has many husbands throughout the narrative — some she is attracted to, some she is not, some who act merely as beards – her true love is another actress, Celia St. James. Much of the crux of conflict has to do with Celia and the husbands, particularly when Celia (a lesbian) continuously expresses jealousy of her husbands and often uses bi erasure on Evelyn.
Though queerness is important to the heart of the novel, it is not the sole defining trait of the titular character. Falling just short of antihero, Evelyn is stubborn, doesn’t think things through, ambitious to a fault, and ruthless. However, there is much to sympathize with here — this is a woman trying to live her truth as a queer woman spanning from the Hays Code to the AIDS crisiis. She is also a tenacious businesswoman going after roles to break her away from sexpot status, in a time when movies wanted one-dimensional female characters at best. Evelyn also fiercely defends her bisexuality, and has no problem using the term “bi” throughout the novel to define herself.
We interviewed Jenkins Reid at the time of publication on this website, where she did a deep dive about creating queer characters like Evelyn. You can read the interview here.
In 2025, Jenkins Reid came out as bi in an interview with TIME magazine. She discussed in the interview how Evelyn Hugo allowed her to explore queer themes for the first time in her work. More below:
“Her response was not the same when it came to writing about sexuality, but then neither was her experience. The publication of Evelyn Hugo, ultimately a love story about two women, led to questions about why Reid, who is married to a man, writes queer characters. “I am very private,” she says. “So at first, I just sort of let people assume what they were going to assume.” But now, as she prepares for the topic to resurface around Atmosphere’s release, Reid wants to be very clear about something those close to her have always known: she is bisexual. “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,” she says.
When Reid was a teenager, she began expressing herself through her appearance. “I got hit pretty quickly with, Why can’t you dress more like a girl? Why don’t you do your nails? Why do you talk that way? Can’t you be a little bit quieter?” she says. “I started to get people who would say, ‘Oh, I get why you dress like a boy—you’re gay.’” But that label didn’t feel right to her—her first love was a boy, and still people told her to just wait and she’d see. Then, when she fell for a woman in her early 20s, her friends also doubted her for that. “This was the late ’90s, so nobody was talking about bisexuality. And if they were, it was to make fun of people,” Reid says. “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.”
Evelyn Hugowas Jenkins Reid’s fifth published novel, but is often considered her breakthrough. It has sold over two million copies, in part due to its popularity with BookTok. It was also considered a critical success, and was translated into nearly two dozen languages. There have been movements for both TV and film adaptations, but at time of writing these efforts have both stalled. That said, Jenkins Reid (above) has given a lot of thought to whom she would cast.
Evelyn Hugo is many things — a smash hit, an iconic bi character in the world of queer literature who isn’t afraid to call herself bi, and a work of art created by a bi woman who finally, through the telling of the tale, felt comfortable enough to explore queer themes. For these reasons, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo remains a modern classic of bi representation in modern literature.