We’re finally going to see Evelyn Hugo on Screen

"Because they are just husbands. I am Evelyn Hugo." – An excerpt from The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid (2017)

I’ve been in years-long reader’s block. Although I’ve been reading good stories of my taste on Wattpad, I haven’t finished all the books at hand that I told myself I would. The Japanese literature that my college classmate shared with me is probably starting to have virtual spider webs as it's been untouched for more than a year. That gradually changed when I got to the “BookTok” side of TikTok where bookworms interact in videos shared by fellow bookworms about their book suggestions, reviews, fan video edits, and any book-related content.

I love watching book recommendation videos that are based on different story tropes. That’s where I encountered The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. Its title is not the only interesting thing about it. I actually got so curious about it because of this question in my mind, “Why is it in almost every trope?” I got even more curious about it when I found out what the novel is about. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a historical fiction that tells the story of Old Hollywood star Evelyn Hugo in an all-tell interview at the age of 79 with a journalist picked by Hugo herself, Monique Grant. As a Journalism student myself, I got so intrigued and decided that it will be my nth attempt in getting back to reading novels—and I did finish the novel and I’ve grown fondness over the course of time I was reading it and beyond.

Previously in 2019, it was reported that Freeform would make a series adaptation for the novel but in 2021, the author confirmed that the Freeform adaptation project is canceled and that another platform has taken the project. Fast forward to 2022, Netflix announced in March that The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo will have its feature film adaptation. A lot got excited about it, including me, but a lot have also expressed that the bestselling novel deserves a series adaptation.

I share the same sentiment with them because the book chapters themselves are divided into seven parts. There are readers who are commenting that Evelyn’s stories with her seven husbands may not fit in a full-length film. I think it would be nicer if every phase Evelyn Hugo had in her life with every husband she was paired with would be given enough time to flourish on the screens of the viewers. Nevertheless, a feature film is still a win for its readers who have been longing for a live adaptation.

If you haven’t read this book or haven’t heard of it at all, the first thing that probably comes to your mind just by what the title suggests is that the story will revolve around Evelyn Hugo’s seven husbands and that it will turn scandalous along the way through the novel. While it is true that the story will unfold Hugo’s husbands part by part, it is not just about that as much as how Evelyn Hugo is not just the Hollywood icon who had seven husbands in one lifetime. It tells the story of Evelyn as a woman, dreamer, actress, wife, lover, and mother.

There are two questions that kept the readers flipping the book pages or scrolling through their e-copies while they were reading the novel. One is, “Who is Evelyn’s love of her life?” The other is, “Why Monique Grant?” In the all-tell interview, Monique Grant spent days after days in Evelyn’s apartment where the Hollywood star reveals her story right from the very start; from her calculated beginnings when she left home and made her way to Los Angeles in the late 50s, to building her name up and bursting into stardom in the Golden Age of Hollywood then to finally retiring from the show business in the 80s and her life since then.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a story of dreams, fame, lies, truth, love, and loss. It is a story that teaches one about how a person’s morality is more than just a black-and-white—that most of the time, life gives you instances where you find yourself in between. To those who are planning to read the book before the Netflix feature film gets released, I’ll leave some quotations from the novel that will hopefully make you want to read the book instantly right after the moment you’re done reading this article.

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