The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

My mother raised me to be polite, to be demure.

Fuck politeness

The world respects people who think they should be running it. I’ve never understood that, but I’m done fighting it. I’m here to be Frankie one day, maybe bigger than Frankie. To do big, important work that I am proud of. To leave a mark. And I’m nowhere near doing that yet.

vise.

PLEASE tell me she is finally ready to talk about all those damn husbands. (I can understand four, maybe even five, six if you are really pushing it, but seven? Seven husbands? Not to mention the fact that we all know she was having an affair with Congressman Jack Easton in the early ’80s. Girl. Got. A. Round.)

Hey, sexism. What's up?

me. I once read that charisma is “charm that inspires devotion.” And I can’t help but think of that now, when she’s holding my coffee for me. The combination of such a powerful woman and such a small and humble gesture is enchanting, to be sure.

“I never said anything about confessing sins. I said nothing about sins at all.”

She just knows where to go and assumes everyone else will catch up.

But I don’t regret it. Because I know I had my reasons, and I did the best I could with every thought and feeling that led up to it.”

I need to know that you will listen to exactly what I’m trying to tell you and not place your own assumptions into my story.”

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.

life doesn’t get easier simply because it gets more glamorous.

I said that being an actress would just be a fun lark, a thing to do to pass the time until my real job of being a mother began. Grade-A bullshit.

I’d told him I was someone else. And then I started getting angry that he couldn’t see who I really was.

It just goes to show that if you tell a woman her only skill is to be desirable, she will believe you.

“I can do anything,” I say. Evelyn laughs and says, “Good girl.”

“Celia St. James is going to ruin everything.”

Foreshadowing

People don’t find it very sympathetic or endearing, a woman who puts herself first. Nor

“Heartbreak is loss. Divorce is a piece of paper.”

But that’s a luxury. You can do that when you’re rich and famous. You can decide that wealth and renown are worthless when you have them.

I had done it to me. I’d made the choice to be different from my true self.

You should know this about the rich: they always want to get richer. It is never boring, getting your hands on more money.

But we are the chosen ones because we are extraordinary. And there is nothing an extraordinary person likes more than someone else extraordinary.

I told him no, and he walked out my door. Not every man would do that. Not every man had.

And as we hung up, I thought, If I’d told people what he was doing to me, he might not have had the chance to do it to her.

“Harry, I’m cynical and I’m bossy, and most people would consider me vaguely immoral.” “You’re strong and resilient and talented. You’re exceptional inside and out.”

It really makes you think, doesn’t it? That people were so eager to believe we were swapping spouses but would have been scandalized to know we were monogamous and queer?

And here they were, revolting against the police, in the name of their right to be themselves. While I was sitting in a golden prison of my own making.

And I started crying when I realized those men were willing to fight for a dream I had never even allowed myself to envision.

I knew it was imperative that I hide, and yet I did not believe I should have to. But accepting that something is true isn’t the same as thinking that it is just.

She liked to ignore the fact that I had truly loved Don Adler once. She liked to ignore the fact that I had made love to men and enjoyed it. She liked to ignore it until the very moment she decided to be threatened by it. That seemed to be her pattern. I was a lesbian when she loved me and a straight woman when she hated me.

And taking pride in your beauty is a damning act. Because you allow yourself to believe that the only thing notable about yourself is something with a very short shelf life.”

I look back on it now, and I wonder where I got off, throwing money around so casually, as if the fact that it came easily to me meant I had no responsibility to value it. I find it mildly mortifying now.

a mess and a joy of my own decisions,

Women have sex for intimacy. Men have sex for pleasure. That’s what culture tells us. The idea that I’d be shown to enjoy my body, to desire

the male form just as strongly as I was desired, to show

a woman putting her own physical pleasure at the forefront . ...

I liked the idea of showing a woman having sex because she wanted to be pleased instead of being desperate to please. So in a moment of excitement, I grabbed my coat, put out my hand, and said, “I’m in.”

What I should have done was tell him I had to think about it. What I should have done was tell Celia about it the moment I got home. What I should have done was give her a say.

should have given her the opportunity to express any misgivings. I should have respected that while she had no place to tell me what I could and could not do with my body, I did have a responsibility to inquire about how my actions might affect her.

That the root of most of my problems is that I need to be secure enough in who I am to tell anyone who doesn’t like it to go fuck themselves? Why have I spent so long settling for less when I know damn well the world expects more?

But my heart wasn’t in it. My heart was never in the craft of acting, only in the proving. Proving my power, proving my worth, proving my talent.

“I think being yourself—your true, entire self—is always going to feel like you’re swimming upstream.”

No one is just a victim or a victor. Everyone is somewhere in between. People who go around casting themselves as one or the other are not only kidding themselves, but they’re also painfully unoriginal.”

Knowing to look for it, knowing there are all different types of great loves out there, is enough for me for now.