The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Evelyn always leaves you hoping you’ll get just a little bit more. And she always denies you.

When you’re given an opportunity to change your life, be ready to do whatever it takes to make it happen. The world doesn’t give things, you take things. If you learn one thing from me, it should probably be that.”

He told me he wanted to do work that invigorated him. He said, “You have to do that, too, Monique. When you’re older. You have to find a job that makes your heart feel big instead of one that makes it feel small.

Most people still called me by my first name, Elizabeth, back then. Elizabeth Monique Grant.

And then my father died, and I felt like I was one-half my mother and one-half lost. A half that I feel so torn from, so incomplete without.

People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is “You’re safe with me”—that’s intimacy.

Sometimes reality comes crashing down on you. Other times reality simply waits, patiently, for you to run out of the energy it takes to deny it.

She smiled. “You love me?” she said. “Oh, my God, what an understatement,” I told her. “You love me so much you can’t see straight?” “I love you so much that when I sometimes get a look at all the crazy fan mail you get, I think, Well, sure, that makes sense. I want to collect her eyelashes, too.”

It was around that time that I started to believe that friendships could be written in the stars.

You don’t have to make yourself OK for a good mother; a good mother makes herself OK for you.