This one was a bit of light relief after ploughing through A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara for the previous two weeks, and I was glad to be able to rest my nervous system.
Evelyn Hugo is a Hollywood icon who has provided plenty of column inches for the movie press over many decades. By the age of fourteen she was already turning heads and it didn't take her long to realise that her generous curves and striking looks could help her get whatever she wanted in life. While she was still a teenager living in Hells Kitchen, New York, she persuaded a young man to marry her after she heard he was headed to Hollywood to work as a grip in the movie studios. She later said that she traded her virginity for a ride.
Once she got to Hollywood she wasted no time in re-inventing herself, and out went dark haired Evelyn Dias of Cuban heritage, and in came a blond bombshell with heavy dark eyebrows and a dramatic style all of her own. While her husband was out working in the studios, she was out attracting attention to herself in coffee houses that she knew were popular with the movie producers. It didn't take long before she persuaded one of them to give her a chance, and from then on it was a short step to becoming a movie icon.
Evelyn Hugo's life had been well documented all through her career but in her old age she wanted to set the record straight on a number of matters and decided to do that through a biography. Any number of writers would have jumped at the chance to pick up that kind of work, but Evelyn only wanted one person to do it, and that was a Monique who had only recently started working as a reporter for a fashion magazine. The offer to write Evelyn Hugo's biography came through Monique's editor, and neither of them had any idea why she had been chosen, but Evelyn Hugo was clear that it had to be Monique or no one would get the story.
As Evelyn's story unfolds, Monique realises she had lessons to learn for her own life and so the author, Taylor Jenkins Reid, binds two stories into one. This is quite a neat trick as it makes the book more relevant to younger readers and allows some modern perspectives on the way Hollywood operated when the stars were treated as studio property. It is also starting to dawn on Monique that Evelyn Hugo has some kind of ulterior motive for choosing her to write the book, but Evelyn will only say that all will become clear by the end of the book.
As the book is titled The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, every time she ties the knot, you know which way the marriage is heading and its just a question of how. It could become tedious but, as Paul Simon famously sang, there are fifty ways to leave your lover and the author only had to find seven of them. It's a good read, even when some events seem a bit unlikely in real life but that's what fiction is there for.
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