The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo // my thoughts *spoilers I cried*

even though i did sob uncontrollably and still threatened to cry multiple times throughout this video [Music] hello and welcome back to my channel or hi if you're new my name's em complete grad film student and i know i don't usually do these kinds of videos where it's just about one book i don't think i've ever actually done a video about just one book but you guys told me to read the seven husbands of evelyn hugo i did erect me when i finished reading this i knew there was literally no way i couldn't talk about it i read this in three days this is a 400 page book i am dyslexic i read this in three days this is it's up there with the fastest things i've ever read i could not put this down first things first this is gonna be full of spoilers if you do not want spoilers this isn't a video for you i don't really know how to do these videos yet without spoilers because i feel like i can't talk about it fully if i'm trying to basically sense myself by not ruining it for everyone so that's your case not the video for you i'll be back this weekend with a vlog so stay tuned for that instead but everyone else yeah this ruined me first of all happy june happy pride month i feel like my sit-down videos this month will be pride themed as those of you have read this will know so this kind of hit a lot of my favorite things that i like to talk about that i've talked about so many times on this channel marriage love and like you know it's always nice to have a canonical bisexual character i'm i'm bi so it makes me really happy because there aren't very many this is one of the first times that i have read a book with a canonical by character that's by like has a lot of the complexities explored so those are a couple things i definitely want to talk about the seven husbands of evelyn hugo is a 2017 book by taylor jenkins read i haven't read any of her other books the reason i bought this one i think i bought in that wall so very very recently was because a lot of you had recommended it to me often i tend not to read more contemporary things purely because i don't know if it's good or not so i often don't want to waste the energy and the brain power involved in reading it like i said i'm dyslexic so i get very selective in that sense i just don't want to read something bad something that is not worth the energy reclusive hollywood icon evelyn hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life but when she chooses unknown magazine reporter minnie grant to write her story no one is more astounded than monique herself from making her way to los angeles in the 1950s to leaving show business in the 80s and of course for seven husbands along the way evelyn and spools a tale of ruthless ambition and expected friendship and a great forbidden love but as evan's story nears its conclusion it becomes clear that her life intersects with monique's own in tragic and irreversible ways so like i said i really enjoyed this i gave this on goodreads four stars rather than five for one super super important reason it's not incredibly written which is very counterintuitive for what i'm going to say to you in the rest of this video i'm not very big fan of the way this is written my biggest problem with the writing in this is every time it switches to monique's point of view so structurally this is from the point of monique grant she's writing evelyn's memoir so essentially this book is the conversations that they have where evelyn is explaining her life story so it's not really like the memoir it's the sort of the setting is it but that happens before the book is read so obviously then we read what happens is it's told rather than as it's written monique is this just 35 very newly divorced journalist who's still trying to sort of make it um and every single time it's her perspective the writing is absolutely insufferable and i am not joking when i found it in sufferable and that's like the first 25 30 pages of the book and i was genuinely very tempted to suck it off as a character she's just very very two-dimensional and quite wingy if i'm completely honest very windy and not like why me which okay maybe that's her character but it's incredibly i personally don't like people who are like that anyway so she just it's a kind of character leaves a bad taste in your mouth um and also because i feel like she doesn't progress she's almost equally as windy by the end but then in a different way because she starts doing a lot of this like girl boss kind of thing some of you may have heard from the discourse around the idea of the whole like girl boss thing is actually not the women's empowerment that it claims to be that it's a completely false economy that when you're parading around being like girl boss all you're actually doing is othering yourself instead of just being someone's boss you're basically unnecessarily feminizing this whole idea that you're in charge and in a way that's like covering it in glitter almost but you're not actually doing anything to help women get into those positions of power those managerial roles so it's a super a super toxic environment as well in terms of our whole like side hustle grind thing nowadays we don't have the best relationship with the idea of being productive etc anyway um so i think monique is kind of sort of a product of that that sort of um it's a very millennial thing i think gen z are aware of how bad it actually is but i don't think the millennials are aware of it yet so it's almost like this girl boss thing is a slogan but it doesn't actually help women in any way and it's very counterintuitive and that's kind of the character that i see monique has it's very being like so each bit that was written from her perspective genuinely insufferable and it's not even just her voice as a character just a lot of the writing i found very irritatingly repetitive like very annoyingly repetitive um and it was very off-putting so then by the time that i got to the portions where evelyn is speaking or it's her voice the transformation in the writing is really shocking almost because you're like why is make so badly written and it's not just her character it's just very bad writing but then when you get to everything like wow [ __ ] the main thing for me is why i didn't give it five even though i i sobbed my eyes out at the end the reason i didn't get five was because my writing isn't the best thing ever but as far as plot and character driven so good the thing is i can put i read fan fiction so the fact this thing i can get over it as long as this is excellent and honestly it is so you can have bad writing and still have a good book if you have good story and characters if you have bad story and characters and great writing you don't have a book that's my opinion the writing isn't great but if you can stand it you're in for a [ __ ] treat one of the things i really enjoy about this book is its commentary on marriage she goes through seven marriage as well technically eight she goes through seven marriages during the course of you know her entire life she gets married for the first time when she's about 14 she's 16 or 14. and so each time she's married for quite a few years her longest one is 14 years i think well her sure just one is a knight but for like logistical reasons so it's just one of these that's like interesting in terms of how people define a failed and a successful marriage she marries for very different reasons she marries wants to get out of new york and to go to la she marries once to somebody that she is she is very much in love with them at the time but it's also a bit of career progression she marries like a fellow star you know having the names attached to gary is you know very good for show business especially because he comes from a kind of like acting dynasty and whatnot but then when their marriage ultimately fails because you know he's an abusive dick and she moves on to a quick marriage because she's a star in order to like deflect attention from her actual relationship and actual feelings so that's like a little that's a very manipulative one but again it serves the function that she wanted the next two of her marriages again are super functional she marries somebody very much as a publicity stunt but they get on really well they have a nice life together and you know they're doing their things on the side with that open see an open marriage because it's not really a marriage again she's married to a fellow movie star and it really helps both of them with publicity but one after this she's married to someone called harry cameron and all of this really really broke my heart but we'll talk about that in a bit um and then she's married again for love after that and then after that she's again again married for function it's a really just interesting thing to look at in terms of what you then mean about any of these marriages being failed and by what terms do you define a successful marriage and by what terms do you even view marriage in the first place because a couple of hers were very very successful by all means particularly her marriage to fellow movie star rex and then to her long-time friend and producer harry cameron those are by all intents and purposes and then to have a final marriage to the financier robert like those are by all means very successful marriages because they all sort of and even her marriage to that mick river guy like they all fulfill exactly the goal that she wanted what do you mean that it's a failed marriage one of my other gripes like socially is that we all seem to think about like love and marriage being like the main thing together for example i wouldn't marry someone i didn't love but i wouldn't marry somebody just because i love them it sort of sheds light on the different almost kinds of relationships that you need within a marriage for it to be functional you're making an arrangement with someone you're entering a legal arrangement a domestic arrangement a relationship arrangement it's like it functions on so many different levels and i always worry if we give that enough attention um nowadays especially like in terms of media representation so that's why one of the reasons i really like this because it speaks to that this whole thing where a lot of people seem to be marrying their friends and having kids in those kind of relationships instead of having one in let's use the old fashion term i love match and this is something i really appreciate in this sense and also the different kinds of them love that you can feel for a person this is more than anything in her marriage to harry cameron because of course evelyn hugo is very much in love with celius and james and their relationship is fantastic but we're not going to talk about that yet we're going to talk about harry cameron first so harry and evelyn are married celia and james are married they are cobbled up so just a couple of beards and i would really love some more movies on this are there any good movies set in the 1940s 50s 60s about this because if there are please let me know it's a great arrangement because it's so functional for them for many years i think 15 years it works for them um and evelyn and harry even have a child in that time so again it's like they're the ones having the baby even though these are the couples but then they're raising the child like almost like as a family for a little while it's just a reminder there are so many different ways to do this and also you don't necessarily need to in any legal way marry somebody is like an ultimate declaration of your love you don't need to do that what kind of blows my mind often is that even now we're still so it's marriage something we're still so peddled towards as well i think the concept of a wedding is actually more pedal towards us but then it's like you know if you have a wedding it you probably need to get married too and it's just something that in a lot of ways in society now we don't need them but then like and i know there's also rationing but then what's like why do i want to get married how how deep does this conditioning run you know in many ways in this book like evelyn's love for harry because it's not i don't know there's kind of suggestions but it is a little bit romantic but with harry being gay and evelyn being you know so in love for such a long time with celia it's like it's quite subtle undertone for this but like they are very much in a lot of ways in love but romantic love like this whole like aerosol thing isn't everything they have so much like failure and agape and it's like i've banged on about this many many times about like the different kinds of love that you can have according to the greeks and this is how i prefer to see love rather than just like romantic and platonic because romantic and platonic doesn't really give enough depth to what is such such a complicated set of feelings and emotions each of evelyn's marriages represent a different kind of these loves and her marriages that are the most successful are the ones that are very much serving their function especially because there is no love involved her most successful marriages are ones that fulfill the function without any kind of errors getting in the way especially because you know eros and mania things go very well together because they make us all do really dumb stupid [ __ ] and often you're very very very unreasonable with these whereas with things like failure and agape because they're they're more like a slow burn it's like this is like a firecracker over here fireworks and this is just more like your wood burner on a winter's night and a log that's sort of been fiery now it's kind of that warm glow it's nothing spectacular but it's something that lasts a heck of a lot longer and also it's like warmer than that nurturing um so it's like how do you how do you do both i think representations of love and stuff at the moment in um popular media or whatever we focus so tightly on this we focus so tightly on this and it's almost like if you don't have this you're you're a failure whereas in all honesty i think why don't we strive more towards this because this is something that is more sustainable and will ultimately be more fulfilling for us this is why i've said this on my channel so many times you know especially if you're in your teens and in your 20s invest in your friendships invest as much as you can like love and time and attention in your friends because this is very very fleeting but these are the people that i was gonna say these are the people that keep you warm at night i mean like emotionally like sustained and fed this is the way your love should be going when you're younger because you'll find this eventually but put your energy here i've had a lot of conversation with my friends recently about when we get to like when we get older and all of our husbands and whatnot die that we would very much all like to just buy a big house together um and live there instead of all being you know in nursing homes all over the shop we are friends of people who can grow old with you too because they're probably gonna outlive your spouses it's one of the reasons that like i think her relationship with harry is in a lot of ways more more real than her relationship with celia because that love is so so strong harry never leaves her they never leave each other they never leave each other's side for as long as really that they can and even when they do obviously divorce on paper it doesn't change it doesn't change the structure of their relationship because their marriage really was obviously more for sure anyway their partnership is something completely different romantic love and stuff is so fragile um and that's it's scary as a result right but the love that you can build with your friends it's not like there's very few like things you can do to instantly ruin it in a romantic relationship you could sleep with someone else when you [ __ ] up the entire thing and also i think because the pressures are so different her and harry almost are the more legit relationship because they love each other so unconditionally and i don't think that's the same with evelyn and celia celia is a lot more and she admits it later she's a lot more erratic and she always she wants more from evelyn than she can get and evelyn does try and give as much as she can but it never fully gets there vaseline later admits that a lot of her problem is that she wants evelyn to like publicly admit to their relationship but you know this is set in the 1950s and 60s 70s 80s like that wasn't gonna work wouldn't you want more of a like passionate expression more of a fight harry never wants anything from evelyn besides from a child a child no but the book is interesting in terms of it shows so many different ways to love someone harry and evelyn don't want anything from each other they just are i think celia and evelyn always want something from each other i think it's because this love that evan and harry have is so consistent it's so sustained the um obviously master spoiler with harry's death it's so heartbreaking and i'm gonna cry their love almost it is for more legit it is the more legit one because it's so sustained and it is so unwavering and it is so unconditional celia [ __ ] off so many times she gets crossed they have an argument she leaves she's done it she does it multiple times you know when you're so close with someone you can have so much friction and it can really you can you know it's a firework it can [ __ ] up it can explode i love with harry is so sustained it's like he is like the definition of her rock right it's really beautiful which is why yeah his death is just soul crushing because she is so glamorous she is for a lot of people we see this time and time again with her marriages for max gerard for example she's a trophy her beauty her sex appeal her glamour and her fame is a trophy for so many people but obviously because harry is gay it has no influence on his relationship with her because he doesn't want her he doesn't want to possess her because other people don't he loves her just because of her friends he doesn't want anything from her like i've said and most importantly he doesn't want to possess her body or her looks or her sex appeal and that's what she built her entire career and her brand basically on but celia does obviously again it's her wife her real wife so like that makes sense but i think this is again one of the reasons why harry and evelyn's like love is so much for me and at least more gripping which is silly for me to say right as a bisexual woman i'm like you would think that i would be like so i am about you know evan and celia but i think because of the way that i view love that that is a partnership that hurts my soul so much more so for me harry and evelyn's marriage is arguably out of all eight of them for me at least i think the most significant one in a way i kind of want to be like oh yeah celia and sierra and evelyn was there like a great love but their just relationship didn't do it for me maybe it's because i look for more the traits that you know evelyn and harry had in terms of the stability of their relationship even if it wasn't like necessarily romantic or sexual where celia in evelyn's is like it's one of those that burns really bright but it's for so much friction and there's so much capacity for it to go really wrong um which it does a few times as we know however where she is bisexual character and it's very explicitly stated is that it's not like suggested like that is very much very explicitly stated as what she is and how she views herself excellent like i said i don't read very much contemporary stuff i've read stuff you know about by lesbians definitely um by gay men but bisexual men and women aren't there's a whole concept of by eurasia a lot of people don't really understand it and i think the book tries to understand it um through you know evelyn's explanations and negotiations with mini cube doesn't understand as a concept and there's a couple thing it touches on which is why this video is going up in pride month couple of the big ones is the whole that you're not 50 50 anything it doesn't matter how where along the line your preference for men or women is you're not 50 50 anything you're not 60 40 anything you're not 70 30 anything you are it is a whole identity in and of itself when i'm dating women at disneyland i'm a lesbian and when i'm dating men it doesn't mean i'm straight and the book really does a point of hammering that home which i really appreciate like because people just still don't get it even the phrase by curious rubs me up the wrong way just a little bit and that bisexuals aren't necessarily seeing like gainer for lesbians but then maybe in some cases um too gay for straight man so it's just a bit but i think because monique is meant to go in with this like naivety it is a good standpoint then that's probably one of the reasons i don't like her as a character it's like a good standpoint to have in order to like explain these things and talk about it and i guess when yeah educate your audience there's a difference between sexuality and sex i use sex to get what i wanted sex is just an act sexuality is a sincere expression of desire and pleasure that i always kept facilia being bisexual didn't make me just loyal evelyn says one has nothing to do with the other nor did it mean that celia could only fulfill half of my needs when celie said she couldn't have all of me it was because i was selfish and because i was scared of losing everything i had not because i had two sides of me that one person could never fulfill it doesn't just pay lip service to this idea it's something that's also quite difficult sometimes to understand with yourself especially because like bisexuality is its own entire identity and i think especially when you talk about like preferences for men or women you sometimes do feel maybe like 80 20 or like 70 30. it's a bit confusing but it has its own like it is its own identity like it has its own traits and like jokes and stuff and i think tick tock for me at least validated that enormously so it's nice to see it in a different kind of medium that also isn't just geared at like you and seeing teenagers and stuff you know because i'm from 98 like i am the oldest of gen z and the youngest of millennials i don't really fit in anywhere also by the way as somebody who you know grew up with tumblr i'm just seeing tick tock repeat all of these tumblr things just in a different slightly different format it's really really bizarre it's also interesting the way that it does separate sex and sexuality and does explain the thing with preferences because you can prefer one gender like romantically and one sexually and like it doesn't necessarily overlap so that's quite again a more complicated concept um but it's nice to sort of see it in more traditional form like traditional media can still do some better bisexual film and tv characters but i'm working on it but i do ultimately find celia and evelyn's relationship not as fulfilling as a reader and i also don't find it as sad i didn't find it that sad with celia's death over like the short time that they were given probably because it wasn't as tragic is harry's death um because i always kind of felt like they built more of a life together but um this is also probably to do with the fact that the last like 25 years of her life are like a tiny section of the book there's like one page for like 10 years suddenly go by this book does like yeah it's almost like the juicy bits of your life are supposed to happen in the beginning of the book and then the end of the book when everything comes in and when you're more stable you know not as much happens like in a long in a way i feel like this book sort of personifies the writing and the story personifies the idea that you know the days along with the years are short maybe that's the same with any kind of memoir also memos are always inherently sad right someone dies at the end spoilers but i definitely felt like reading this especially somebody who as somebody who documents their youth as much as i do i'm very aware that this will not last forever um and i feel like evelyn sort of feels that through the entire like not like for the entire book she kind of like enjoys the time she has because with what she does she knows it's so fleeting she's a movie star she's a film star she knows that her time in the spotlight is limited so in a way that filters down into the rest of her life she knows the good moments are limited it seems like then she savors them more as a result and i don't think she's a character that takes things for granted she worked so hard to get to her positions of wealth and her status and her talent she was very ruthless in many of the ways that she got there so she seems to just savor it that little bit more because she doesn't like acknowledge it's like her birthright or something um maybe in the way that i think celia does celia slides for her life a little bit easier than evelyn does it's kind of like celia's only real-life problem is that she's a lesbian being a lesbian in the 1940s 56 easier that's not a good one but i feel like that's like her main issue and i feel like evelyn has more deep-rooted trauma than that and then has the added confusion of being bi being bi can be very confusing there isn't very much media out there and you see that with evelyn it's so easy to be conflicted because she doesn't know what it is that she feels and then it's easy to like not address it almost if you don't want to there's a privilege in that sense it's like you can hide from it especially yeah because evelyn knows that she's attracted to men and she knows she likes having sex with them so then you throw a woman into the mix and you feel all these feelings and you're like that's that's a lot of that's a lot of feelings to process often you're like what what the [ __ ] is going on so yeah in a funny roundabout way for at least in my case i feel like tumblr explained to me the concept of like bisexuality and then tick tock elaborated it is an identity and then i think this book did that again for me because it just hit a lot of likes of yeah here a lot of the cliff notes which is just nice and i appreciate it is it the best representation ever no is it a nice fictional representation yeah being bi is complicated and it is confusing so maybe something like this will confuse someone a little bit less and it is a devastating plot and the characters are really great with the exception of monique because she's annoying i do have to say i called it i called the two the two big plot twists i called it super early on i called it from the back of the blurb great forbidden love obviously they're less like obviously maybe this is because i'm bi that i got this i was like obviously with the great forbidden right now it's not gonna be with a man or grisly not those of you who are straight did you clock that i clocked it and then also i confirmed to me when in the beginning it was like oh it's donated millions to lgbtq plus charities i'm like ah straight people don't do that so if you're straight was it any point where you clocked this before it happened was that like a bad writing thing or was this just to me being able to spot the queer things discuss i'm genuinely curious about this and then also the whole plot twist at the end i was thinking oh monique interviewed evelyn's daughter who the whole beginning of the book is the premise that she's you know doing interview because she's selling off some of her get auctioning off some of her gowns to raise money for breast cancer awareness because her daughter died of it so that's like the initial premise of the book i thought that all monique had written about the daughter without realising or it was gonna be something to do with her dad which ultimately as we know it was and i was calling it i was gonna be like evelyn will have him with a car she will have hit him with her car that's what i was waiting to happen because when they don't explain how the dad dies i'm like obviously shame with the car but i have to say with the way that scene is written you're so devastated by harry's death and by evelyn's actions and how she feels and stuff that you don't think about the other person at all so maybe in a way because we also get so sucked in and focused in on harry and evelyn's just like deep personal tragedy and horror because i sobbed so much when i read a bit about the crash and where evelyn places harry's body in the passenger seat so that he wasn't doesn't look like he was in one drunk driving you're so wrapped up in them that you really only have tunnel vision you know you see that and you're like yeah you can kind of understand why she did what she did um and then you know you can debate but would you have done it any other way especially for somebody that you love that deeply and i think many experience as well sort of express again a different kind of marriage and it very much fits into the book's whole theme almost of like there are so many different ways to have a marriage just because a marriage ends doesn't necessarily mean it's not been a successful marriage and then also you don't need to marry somebody that you love you don't need to do that either i think we've fed such a prescriptive narrative on you know love and relationships and marriage particularly um a lot of us when we get there obviously i'm not married i've never been married but then because we've had such a singular narrative on you know love relationship sex and marriage that when you get there a lot of us are ultimately disappointed because it's not what we thought because like anything um there are so many different ways for it to function that it's never gonna be live up to this like one narrative we've been told because there's so many of us and so many variables how could ever ever replicate itself that way so many times it's not going to it's never going to so in a way it's a reminder that we can define not just marriage but any kind of long-term loving partnership by you know your own means by you and your partner or you and your partners depending on how you just want to live those relationships and also that some relationships do come to an end and that's fine it doesn't just because it doesn't last forever doesn't mean it wasn't successful but to go back on my digression i think jenkins read does do the bit with the reveal of minik's relationship to evelyn i think she does that very well because she does distract us very much with the tragedy of harry's death and evelyn's grief the mental image that i had when evelyn's daughter dies and she's buried in the same cemetery that harry is buried in that evelyn ghost can't even talk about it but evelyn goes to harry's grave when her daughter's being married when their daughter is being buried or yeah i haven't been this upset by a book in a very long time but yeah she does a reveal very well because she distracts us with their love and tragedy um and so we don't even look at they'll think about the other person involved in the crash which then turns out to be monique's father i'm still not entirely sure why he was in the car with harry though that's i don't even misread something i still don't understand why he's in the car if there's also a letter that's really like big big ass plot hole that might yeah i think it's again a product of the bad writing being that i could clock the two big plot reveals very early on one of them from the back of the from one of them from the blurb come on do publishers do better that i shouldn't have been able to guess it from the back um still worth it though still absolutely worth it but that's why i would never give us five even though i did sob uncontrollably and still threatened to cry multiple times throughout this video it's very very well plot driven and very very well character driven but in terms of the writing it could have been written a lot better um it's one of these things that is a shame it's almost like a good story and good characters wasted on a bad writer those are just my opinions you're more than welcome as ever to find me in the comments in fact i encourage you to do so but i do just want to thank you guys again for recommending this to me you all know my taste very well at this point and so many of your recommendations been uh stella it's also the last line of this book that i feel is frankly absolutely excellent 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 quintessentially evelyn no she told me because they are just husbands i am evelyn hugo and anyway i think once people know the truth they'll be much more interested in my wife that is a cracking last line of a book that is and of course the fact that it's in hollywood the film industry you know that floats my boat of course it does you know it's about hollywood golden age for glamour she this basically just is liz taylor and in that sense you can fill in a lot of gaps it's like almost an archetype a powerful glamorous sexy woman who marries so many times thoroughly enjoyable and evelyn is given a lot of depth and a lot of complexity which i very very much enjoy and there we are those are my thoughts on that if you've read this please let me know how you found it i'm dying to know that's all for this video my goodreads is of course linked down below as my instagram and my film channel you can call me a book channel as long as you go and subscribe to my film channel but anyway thank you very very much for watching like subscribe and all the jazz and i will see you guys very soon [Music] look at it girl

Channel: Emma Angeline

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Keywords: emma, angeline, sarcastic, fish, youtuber, vlogger, London, the seven husbands of evelyn hugo, taylor jenkins reid, book review, booktube, booktuber, seven husbands of evelyn hugo book review, seven husbands of evelyn hugo audiobook, emma angeline books, emma angeline annotate, emma angeline bookshelf, bisexuality, pride month, lgbt books, lgbt books recommendations, queer books, wlw books, best bisexual books, bisexual books fiction, bisexual books ya, reading vlog, evelyn hugo

Id: EU-f-MSc09A

Length: 33min 48sec (2028 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 08 2021