It was easy enough to not clock historical fiction megahit The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo as a gay book — for starters, we had the title of said book, which suggested its protagonist was not merely a woman who liked men exclusively, but in fact had liked seven of them well enough to marry them. It was a massive bestseller and a BookTok phenomenon, and I’ve been alive and literate for long enough to know that queer books are generally not massive bestsellers. But, although the jacket illustration, the title and even the description did not scream “gay,” Evelyn Hugo turned out to be, in fact, extremely gay. The titular Hugo didn’t just have seven husbands. She dated women, too, living her glamorous Hollywood life partially in the closet. It was also extremely good. I devoured it, I adored it, I wanted to read ten more books just like it.
I read it a few years after its 2017 debut, and came immediately to the office with questions — why wasn’t everybody talking about this book? Why hadn’t we written about it here, on Autostraddle, when everything about it seemed so targeted to our demographic? (Historical Hollywood lesbians!!) Well, I was told, we didn’t give it an standalone review because the author of Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was straight, and we review books by queer authors.
Well, big news for me, today, as per a Time cover story: 41-year-old Taylor Jenkins Reid doesn’t just have one husband. She dated women, too. “I am very private,” she told Time, regarding questions that arose upon the book’s publication about why a straight author chose such a queer subject matter. “So at first, I just sort of let people assume what they were going to assume.”
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Her ninth book, Atmosphere, a space thriller romance, debuts this June, and has already been picked up for a film adaptation. Its protagonist, Joan Goodwin, is an astrophysicist who joins NASA in the early ’80s, where she meets Vanessa Ford, “a woman who challenges her understanding of who she is.” Reid “wanted to explore how intimate a connection could be between one character in space and one on the ground, and that those characters would both be women.” (Interestingly enough, this dynamic actually has appeared before, in Netflix’s short-lived space series Away and in Apple TV’s Invasion. Both series feature one woman in space, while her secret lover works the mission’s ground game.)
Time writes that Reid knew “this choice would lead her into another debate about identity.” There’s a lot of controversy in book publishing around who gets to tell which stories, and that conversation tends to be especially heated in queer spaces. But it’s a conversation that can leave little room for the artist to keep their private life private, or to be on their own journey. For example; after being accused of being “a straight woman writing shitty queer books for the straights, profiting off of communities [she wasn’t a part of],”, Simon vs the Homo Sapiens Agenda author Becky Abertalli came out in 2020, admitting that when she wrote the book, she hadn’t yet reckoned with her own sexuality. Abertalli’s coming out provoked a reckoning in the #ownvoices movement when it comes to sexual orientation or gender identity, and Reid’s may inspire a similar reaction.
This time, Reid is getting out ahead of the story, telling Time, “It has been hard at times to see people dismiss me as a straight woman, but I also didn’t tell them the whole story.” She recalls growing up as a tomboy, falling for a boy as a teenager, and then for a woman in her early 20s. “This was the late ’90s, so nobody was talking about bisexuality,” Reid told Time. “And if they were, it was to make fun of people… The messages about bisexuality were you just want attention or it was a stop on the way to gayville. I found that very painful, because I was being told that I didn’t know myself, but I did.” She says her husband views her bisexuality as “a room in the house that is my identity.”
Reid is one of the most successful contemporary novelists working today, and we can now add “queer” to that descriptor. Her first three novels did well, but Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was her breakout book, followed by Daisy Jones & The Six (2019),Malibu Rising (2021) and Carrie Soto is Back(2022). Collectively, she has sold more than 21 million print, e-book and audiobook copies of her books. Daisy Jones & The Six, a novel loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac, was adapted for Prime Video by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine — an adaptation that actually added a queer storyline not present in the book. Her 2016 novel One True Loves was adapted into a critically panned 2023 film.
In 2019, Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was picked up by Freeform to be adapted into a TV series, produced by Ilene Chaiken and Jennifer Beals. In 2021, Reid said the rights to the book were no longer owned by Freeform, and in 2022 it was announced that Netflix would be adapting the series into a movie, adapted by Liz Tigelaar (Little Fires Everywhere) and directed by queer director Leslye Headland (Russian Doll, The Acolyte.) So it’s been languishing in development for years as fans continue to share our unsolicited casting ideas. As per the Time piece, casting won’t begin until they have “a script that’s ready,” according to her producing partner, Bruce Mendelsohn. Meanwhile, he and Reid do envision a global theatrical release for Atmosphere, a situation which is unfortunately rare for lesbian love stories.
In conclusion, if you haven’t read it yet, I really would like to recommend Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo!
My timing is impeccable: I finished reading Evelyn Hugo for the first time last Thursday, immediately googled “taylor jenkins reid bisexual”, and saw she had literally just come out.
this is SO serendipitous !!
She was ever in?? Her books could not be more bithirsty