#26: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
On septuagenarian bisexuals and who gets to tell queer stories
Hi.
I hit pause on the newsletter last week because it didn’t feel right to send out a light and fun queer pop culture dispatch less than 48 hours after the horrifying hate crime in Atlanta. A white gunman killed eight people, six of them Asian women, then told police that his actions were in an effort to “eliminate temptation”—a statement that somehow led police to conclude that the shootings were “not racially motivated.”
This refusal to call a hate crime a hate crime is infuriating but not surprising. A new report from Stop AAPI Hate shows a total of 3,795 reported hate incidents between March 2020 and February 2021—yet before last week, these incidents rarely received widespread coverage. NYC in particular saw a 1900% increase in anti-Asian violence, but few of these stories have been covered in the media.
In this piece, Lori Keong spells out why it’s past time to start calling these hate crimes what they are. She also lists a handful of educational resources and organizations to support at the end, which I found very helpful.
Several of the victim’s families have also created GoFundMes to pay for funeral costs, childcare, and other expenses. You can find a list of these here.
Since then, we’ve seen several more shootings, including the Colorado attack that left 10 people dead and marked the seventh mass shooting in seven days in the United States. But does this make it any more likely that the proposed ban on assault weapons will pass the Senate this week? I’d be willing to bet not.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that I’d originally planned to write this intro about the mess happening with Substack right now. If this is news to you, the short of it is that Substack has now given several sizable advances (like… $250k) to anti-trans writers, while refusing any sort of editorial responsibility for these choices.
As a result, several trans writers and allies have announced that they’re leaving the platform altogether. This is an entirely valid decision, especially given that some of these writers’ newsletters are generating revenue for the company that could, in theory, be supporting the work of awful people.
I’m still figuring out the moral implications of staying on this platform and trying to learn more about what my other options are. In the meantime, it’s nice to know that as someone who makes precisely zero dollars here, what I’m doing at least isn’t funding anti-trans bullshit.
— Becca
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Fiction, June 2017
Fair warning: lots of spoilers in this review.
I have a lot of thoughts about this book, but I’ll start with a plot synopsis:
Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. When she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself. … As Evelyn’s life unfolds—revealing a ruthless ambition, an unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love—Monique begins to feel a very real connection to the actress.
Based on this description and the title alone, I wouldn’t have picked it up. But as you may have guessed from its inclusion in this newsletter, it’s gay. That “great forbidden love”? She’s a woman, as we learn roughly a quarter of the way into the story. Juicy!
Anyway, people love this book. As of this writing it has an impressive 4.4 stars on Goodreads, with 41,633 reviews and a whopping 298,209 ratings. It was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award for Best Historical Fiction of 2017, and a finalist for Book of the Month’s Book of the Year award the same year.
And I get it.
Evelyn Hugo is 79, glamorous as all hell, and decisively bisexual—a combination that I truly could not get enough of. I would read dozens, nay hundreds, of books with charismatic septuagenarian bisexuals in the lead if they existed, and I feel confident that I’m not alone in that statement.
She’s shrewd, successful, and so shameless about the ways in which she’s used people to get ahead that all you can do is respect her honesty. She also has amazing tits, which the author reminds us of every twenty pages or so.
All in all, it’s a fun read. But it’s not necessarily a good one.
I first got a weird vibe three pages in. The narrator describes a Black character as “not conventionally attractive,” her features as “severe ... her eyes very wide apart,” and notes that with “her short-cropped Afro, her affinity for bright colors and big jewelry,” she is “someone you can’t help but look at.”
Something about that description felt very off to me, so I Googled the author and quickly learned that she’s a straight white woman.
It’s a notable fact, I think, given that her main characters are Evelyn, a bisexual woman and the daughter of Cuban immigrants, and Monique, a biracial woman with a Black father and a white mother. Each of these details plays an important role in the respective characters’ storylines.
So… why did this author choose to write this book, with these characters?
When asked in an interview whether she thinks it’s her “place” to tell the stories of marginalized groups as a straight, white person, she began by responding, “Yes, and no. Most importantly, no.”
Interesting.
The entire answer is long, but boils down to this:
The reason why I wrote this book despite not being queer or biracial is because, due to my work writing about straight white women, I have an audience. I continue to be handed a microphone. I have a book deal. And my feeling was that I could use that book deal, that immense privilege, to continue to write about people like myself or I could use it to write about people that often get pushed to the sidelines.
I understand the logic and I think I appreciate the sentiment. But I also feel certain that this book would’ve been better had it been written by a queer person of color.
The pieces of the story that center on race would’ve been a lot more nuanced, and at the very least it could’ve avoided a headfirst dive into the Bury Your Gays trope. (I want to say more, but even that feels like a spoiler.)
I’ll leave you with the knowledge that the book was recently picked up for development by Freeform, with Ilene Chaiken and Jennifer Beals and set to executive produce. So despite this lukewarm review, I will still likely be watching the pilot when it comes out in hopes of a cameo by Bette Porter.
Queer points:
+2 for the Ilene Chaiken seal of approval
+6 for a bisexual lead with no confusion about her sexuality
Buy it from your favorite bookstore on Bookshop (or check it out from your local library)