Throughout her life, Evelyn’s desire to uphold a favorable public image with the media and her fans causes her to lie about herself and her relationships. For instance, her fear of public backlash motivates her to keep her romantic relationship with Celia St. James a secret; Evelyn’s secrecy causes lasting damage to her relationship with Celia, and it also prevents her from fully embracing her identity as a bisexual woman. The novel drives home the media’s role in Evelyn’s life by punctuating several of its chapters with clippings from tabloids that have spread rumors about Evelyn, her friends, and her loved ones. Whether these articles misconstrue or accurately depict Evelyn’s public appearances and lifestyle changes, the one thing they have in common is their tendency to report the story that’s most likely to get people talking. Evelyn capitalizes on the fickleness of the media in many instances, like when she asks her friend Ruby to alert a photographer to her tryst with Harry in order to deliberately start rumors about their relationship and take the focus off her romance with Celia, using rumor as a shield.
Eventually, though, Evelyn’s constant obsession with the media and public opinion causes her to concoct ridiculously complex plans to distract people from seeing her real life. For example, her elopement with Mick Riva—a highly public stunt she created to deter rumors about her and Celia’s relationship—backfires when Celia realizes the lengths Evelyn went to in order to make the situation seem authentic (Evelyn had sex with Mick), ultimately viewing the sex as a betrayal and breaking up with Evelyn. Evelyn eventually begins to resent the power the media has over her life, which contributes to her almost immediate distaste for Max Girard, whose obsession with Evelyn as a star rather than a person comes to light as soon as she marries him. Ultimately, Evelyn realizes that in her obsessive quest for public admiration and approval, she has sacrificed her personal relationships—and lost a lot of herself in the process, too. As Evelyn nears death, her decision to share her true story to the world in the biography she tasks Monique with writing shows that her priorities have shifted. Ultimately, Evelyn realizes that in order to live a happy life and cultivate genuine relationships, she must prioritize her true desires and the needs of her loved ones above public approval.
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Truth and Identity Quotes in The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
There are two men seated next to her, names lost to history, who are staring at her as she looks ahead at the stage. The man next to her is staring at her chest. The one next to him is staring at her thigh. Both of them seem enraptured and hoping to see the tiniest bit farther.
Maybe I’m overthinking that photo, but I’m starting to notice a pattern: Evelyn always leaves you hoping you’ll get just a little bit more. And she always denies you.
I sit on my couch, open my laptop, and answer some e-mails. I start to order something for dinner. And it is only when I go to put my feet up that I remember there is no coffee table. For the first time since he left, I have not come into this apartment immediately thinking of David.
Instead, what plays in the back of my mind all weekend—from my Friday night in to my Saturday night out and my Sunday morning at the park—isn’t How did my marriage fail? but rather Who the hell was Evelyn Hugo in love with?
And then, of course, there was the three-page questionnaire I had to fill out about my life until then. What did my father do for a living? What did I like to do in my spare time? Did I have any pets?
When I turned in my honest answers, the researcher read it in one sitting and said, “Oh, no, no, no. This won’t do at all. From now on, your mother died in an accident, leaving your father to raise you. He worked as a builder in Manhattan, and on weekends during the summer, he’d take you to Coney Island. If anyone asks, you love tennis and swimming and you have a Saint Bernard named Roger.”
He opens the parked car’s door and pushes you out.
When he comes crawling to you in tears the next morning, you don’t actually believe him anymore. But now this is just what you do.
The same way you fix the hole in your dress with a safety pin or tape up the crack in a window.
It was expensive wine. I liked drinking it as if it was water, as if it meant nothing to me. Poor girls from Hell’s Kitchen can’t drink this kind of wine and treat it like it’s nothing.
“Evelyn!” he yelled.
I liked how the glass between us took the edge off his voice, how it muffled it enough to make him sound far away. I liked the control of being able to decide whether I listened to him at full volume.
Rex put out his hand, and I shook it.
“Well, I should be going,” he said, checking his watch. “I have a date with a particularly eager young lady, and I’d hate to keep her waiting.” He buttoned his coat as I stood up. “When should we tie the knot?” he asked.
“Did you ever love me?”
“Yes, I did. When you made love to me and you made me feel desire and you took good care of my daughter and I believed that you saw something in me that no one else saw. When I believed you had an insight and a talent that no one else had. I loved you very much.”
“So you are not a lesbian,” he said.
“I think being yourself—your true, entire self—is always going to feel like you’re swimming upstream.”
“Yeah,” she said. “But if the last few years with you have been any indication, I think it also feels like taking your bra off at the end of the day.”
She smiles for the camera, her brown eyes sparkling in a different way from anything I’ve ever seen in person. She seems at peace somehow, in full display, and I wonder if the real Evelyn isn’t the woman I’ve been talking to for the past two weeks but, instead, the one I see before me right now. Even at almost eighty, she commands a room in a way I’ve never seen before. A star is always and forever a star.
Evelyn was never going to let the thing that made her be the thing to destroy her. She was never going to let anything, even a part of her body, have that sort of power.
Evelyn is going to die when she wants to.
I said, “Doesn’t it bother you? That your husbands have become such a headline story, so often mentioned, that they have nearly eclipsed your work and yourself? That all anyone talks about when they talk about you are the seven husbands of Evelyn Hugo?”
And her answer was quintessential Evelyn.
“No,” she told me. “Because they are just husbands. I am Evelyn Hugo. And anyway, I think once people know the truth, they will be much more interested in my wife.”
