Books Like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo — 8 Novels You'll Love

What Reid does with The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo that most celebrity-fiction doesn't attempt is build a genuinely unreliable narrator whose charm is the mechanism of her unreliability. Evelyn Hugo gives Monique her story because Evelyn needs something from Monique — a fact the reader understands before Monique does, and that casts every revealed secret in a different light. The novel is structured as a confession, which means everything Evelyn tells us is technically true and strategically partial: she controls what she reveals, when, and in what order. That narrative architecture, combined with the sweep of mid-century Hollywood glamour, is what makes the book so immersive and so re-readable. The books below share specific qualities: charismatic women navigating systems that constrain them, secrets that reshape what you thought you understood, and the particular emotional register of love that can't be lived openly.

Taylor Jenkins Reid also wrote Daisy Jones and the Six, Malibu Rising, and Carrie Soto Is Back — see our full Taylor Jenkins Reid author guide for her complete bibliography and reading order.

More Taylor Jenkins Reid & Old Hollywood

Pick #1

Daisy Jones & the Six

Taylor Jenkins Reid • 2019

Reid's closest sibling to Evelyn Hugo — another oral history structure, another charismatic woman at the centre, another question about what exactly happened and who gets to define it. Daisy Jones is a fictional 1970s rock star, and the novel is told entirely through retrospective interviews with band members, roadies, and exes. Like Evelyn's confession to Monique, the interview format means every source has an agenda, a memory that flatters them, a version of events that protects something. The love story at the centre is similarly impossible — not because of Hollywood's closet, but because of timing, addiction, and the specific cruelty of wanting someone who is also your rival. If you loved the structural ingenuity of Evelyn Hugo, this is Reid's most technically similar novel.

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Pick #2

Malibu Rising

Taylor Jenkins Reid • 2021

Four adult siblings — children of a famous, absent 1960s musician father — converge on their Malibu beach house for a party that ends in fire. Reid tells the story in two timelines: the night of the party and the decades of family history leading to it. Evelyn Hugo appears briefly as a character, placing this novel in the same fictional universe. What it shares with Evelyn Hugo most directly is the examination of how famous men shape (and abandon) the women and children around them, and the specific glamour of mid-century California. If Evelyn Hugo gave you the feeling of a sweeping family saga, this delivers that more explicitly.

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Bold Women, Hidden Lives & Sweeping Decades

Pick #3

Lessons in Chemistry

Bonnie Garmus • 2022

Elizabeth Zott is a chemist in 1960s California who becomes, despite herself, the host of a cooking show — and uses it to quietly radicalise the housewives watching. Like Evelyn Hugo, she is a woman who operates within a system designed to limit her by appearing to play along while actually dismantling it from inside. Garmus writes with more comedy than Reid — Lessons in Chemistry is frequently very funny — but the underlying preoccupation is the same: what a brilliant, determined woman does when the system refuses to make room for her on honest terms. The 1960s setting gives it the same period glamour as Evelyn Hugo's Hollywood sequences.

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Pick #4

The Women

Kristin Hannah • 2024

A woman who served as an Army nurse in Vietnam returns home to find that history has written her out of the war it's chosen to remember. The connection to Evelyn Hugo is thematic and structural: both are books about women who did essential, real things that the dominant culture refused to record on their terms, and both use a retrospective structure — the reader always knows we're looking back at a life — to give the protagonist authority over her own story's meaning. Hannah writes with similar emotional amplitude to Reid, and The Women has the same quality of making an era feel lived-in and specific rather than costumed.

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Pick #5

Queenie

Candice Carty-Williams • 2019

Queenie Jenkins — same surname as Taylor Jenkins Reid, a coincidence — is a twenty-five-year-old Jamaican-British woman in London spiralling through a breakup with a white boyfriend and making increasingly catastrophic decisions. The connection to Evelyn Hugo is voice: both novels are built around an enormously compelling female narrator who is doing things the reader can see are self-destructive while the narrator can't, and the reader's relationship with both women is that specific combination of affection and exasperation that makes you unable to put the book down. Queenie is funnier, more contemporary, and more raw — less glamour, more group chat — but the central dynamic is identical.

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Pick #6

One True Loves

Taylor Jenkins Reid • 2016

Reid's earlier novel — before her career transformed with Evelyn Hugo — about a woman whose husband is presumed dead in a helicopter crash, who rebuilds her life and gets engaged to someone new, and then discovers her first husband is alive. It's a more conventional romance novel than the later Reid, but it's examining the same question Evelyn Hugo raises about love: can you love two people fully, and what do you do when the timing of your loves refuses to be convenient? For readers who loved the emotional core of Evelyn Hugo — the impossible love, the guilt, the question of what you owe different people — this is Reid unfiltered by the structural ambition of her later work.

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Pick #7

The Personal Librarian

Marie Benedict & Victoria Christopher Murray • 2021

The true story of Belle da Costa Greene, J.P. Morgan's personal librarian — a Black woman who passed as white to pursue her career, building one of the great art collections in American history while hiding her identity from everyone including the man she loved. The structural DNA of this story is exactly Evelyn Hugo's: a brilliant woman living a hidden life, performing a public identity that conceals something essential, making choices about love and ambition that the society around her has made mutually exclusive. The historical detail is meticulous, and the emotional cost of Belle's passing is rendered with the same unflinching clarity Reid brings to Evelyn's closeted marriage.

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Pick #8

The Paris Wife

Paula McLain • 2011

Hadley Richardson Hemingway narrates the story of her marriage to Ernest Hemingway in 1920s Paris — the expatriate literary scene, the drinking, the affairs, the slow and devastating dissolution of a woman who gave up her own ambitions to support a husband who eventually replaced her. Where Evelyn Hugo is the architect of her own legend, Hadley is conspicuously absent from hers — the story Hemingway told about his own life erased her almost entirely. McLain gives Hadley back her perspective, and the effect is very similar to what Reid does: recovering a woman's full experience from behind a more famous story. For readers who loved the period glamour and the question of what women sacrifice.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo about?

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid is the fictional autobiography of Evelyn Hugo, a Cuban-American Hollywood actress who rose to fame in the 1950s and became one of the most glamorous stars of her generation. Now in her seventies and reclusive, Evelyn grants an exclusive interview to Monique Grant, an obscure magazine journalist — and over the course of several days reveals the full story of her seven marriages, her rise and fall, and the great love of her life, which was none of the husbands. The novel is structured as Evelyn's confession to Monique, with a twist about why she chose Monique specifically that reframes everything.

Is Evelyn Hugo a real person?

No, Evelyn Hugo is entirely fictional. Taylor Jenkins Reid has said in interviews that she drew on several real Hollywood figures for inspiration — most notably Elizabeth Taylor (multiple marriages, magnetic screen presence, enormous fame) and Rita Hayworth (Cuban-American heritage hidden by the studio system) — but Evelyn Hugo herself is invented. The novel is set within real historical events (the Hollywood blacklist era, the emergence of television, the AIDS crisis) but all characters are fictional.

Is there an Evelyn Hugo movie or show?

As of 2025, no. Netflix acquired the rights to adapt The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and the project has been in various stages of development since 2021. The adaptation has faced challenges — including the departure of its original director — and no release date has been confirmed. See our Adaptations page for the latest on major book-to-screen projects.

What should I read after The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo?

If you want more Taylor Jenkins Reid, read Daisy Jones and the Six next — it uses the same oral-history structure and is her most technically similar novel. If you loved the period glamour and hidden identity most, The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict is the closest match. If you loved the impossible love story most, Normal People by Sally Rooney explores the same territory of two people who love each other but can't quite be together, in a contemporary setting. See our full Taylor Jenkins Reid reading guide for her complete bibliography.

How does Evelyn Hugo compare to Daisy Jones and the Six?

Both are retrospective narratives centred on charismatic women in the entertainment industry, both use an unusual structure (confession/interview format), and both have an impossible love at their centre. The main differences: Evelyn Hugo is more conventionally plotted — it has a mystery structure and a reveal — while Daisy Jones is more fragmented and polyphonic, told through multiple interview subjects without a single guiding intelligence. Evelyn Hugo covers more time (decades) and has more emotional sweep; Daisy Jones is compressed into a single band's rise and fall. Most readers who love one love the other — but if you respond more to single-voice narrators, start with Evelyn Hugo; if you prefer ensemble storytelling, try Daisy Jones first.

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