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.

Isn’t that the very definition of power? Watching people kill themselves over something that means nothing to you?

“I’ve either not been able to afford it or have been so rich someone would do it for me. Never anywhere in between.”

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.

“It’s not wrong,” Celia said. “It shouldn’t be wrong, to love you. How can it be wrong?” “It’s not wrong, sweetheart. It’s not,” I said. “They’re wrong.”

But as I looked around my house, seeing no pictures of my family, not a single Latin-American book, stray blond hairs in my hairbrush, not even a jar of cumin in my spice rack, I realized Luisa hadn’t done that to me. I had done it to me. I’d made the choice to be different from my true self.

We went out to dinner in public, the four of us looking like two pairs of heterosexuals, without a heterosexual in the bunch.

It’s always been fascinating to me how things can be simultaneously true and false, how people can be good and bad all in one, how someone can love you in a way that is beautifully selfless while serving themselves ruthlessly.

I lost the woman I loved because I cared about being famous as much as I cared about her.

“I’m not a good person, Monique. Make sure, in the book, that that’s clear. That I’m not claiming to be good. That I did a lot of things that hurt a lot of people, and I would do them over again if I had to.”

Sometimes divorce isn’t an earth-shattering loss. Sometimes it’s just two people waking up out of a fog.

And that you have to be willing to deny your heritage, to commodify your body, to lie to good people, to sacrifice who you love in the name of what people will think, and to choose the false version of yourself time and time again, until you forget who you started out as or why you started doing it to begin with.

The media are going to tell whatever story they want to tell. They always have. They always will.