Reading recommendations

Books like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, for the secret rather than the glamour

Start with Inside Daisy Clover for the studio from inside, Here Lies the Heart for the real confession, and Love, Queenie for the invented self, told true. Last verified 10 September 2026.

What Highstreett returned for “books like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo”

  • Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir
  • The Master: A Novel, Colm Toibin (2004)
  • The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai (2018)
  • The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett (2020)
  • Daisy Jones & The Six, Taylor Jenkins Reid (2019)
  • The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein (1933)

See this result · run 11 September 2026

Editor’s verdict: it went straight for who gets to tell a life, with Beauvoir's memoir and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and found the passing thread in The Vanishing Half, but it put Reid's own Daisy Jones & The Six on the list and never reached the studio at all.

Why this list reads the secret, not the setting

We read eight live “books like” pages for this novel before choosing anything. Between them they make 93 recommendations, and they keep landing on the same few: three of Reid’s own novels, City of Girls, Tipping the Velvet and a run of recent Old Hollywood novels. Most match the setting. Very few match what the book is about: a closeted Cuban-American woman who let the studio erase her and then took her story back. None of the six picks below appears on any of those eight pages.

Three of the six are true stories, on purpose. Evelyn is invented, but the women she is built from were real, and two of these books show real versions that are stranger than the novel: a star who hid her heritage behind an invented birth until she died, and a woman who told her Hollywood love affairs too late and paid for it.

If you loved the studio machine, and what it cost

Evelyn is made by a studio: a new name, new hair, a marriage for the publicists. These two show that machine from the inside, one as a novel by a man who worked in it, one as the true story of a star it remade completely.

1. Inside Daisy Clover, Gavin Lambert (1963)

Under-listed · novel · short, sharp and sad

Daisy Clover sings her way out of a trailer park and into a studio contract, and tells it in her own journals. She marries the studio's leading man, Wade Lewis, in secret, and he turns out to be gay; he leaves, and her career goes with him. Lambert was a British-born screenwriter who worked in Hollywood and was openly gay, and he wrote this from inside the business at the end of the studio era. When Natalie Wood filmed it in 1965, Robert Redford would only play Wade as ambiguous, and the studio added a line that made it plain again, which Redford resented: a small studio erasure of its own. It is on none of the eight competing lists we checked. It is out of print in the UK, so it is a second-hand find. Differs: Daisy is a teenager, and her book is short and sardonic where Evelyn's is long and glossy.

2. Love, Queenie, Mayukh Sen (2025)

Under-listed · biography · the true version

The true story closest to Evelyn's own. Merle Oberon, born in British India with South Asian heritage through her mother, became a studio-era star behind an invented birth in Tasmania to European parents, and kept that story until she died in 1979. Sen makes the case that she was the first performer of colour nominated for an Oscar, unacknowledged at the time, and argues with the critics who wrote her off as a traitor to her heritage. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle's biography award. It is on none of the eight lists we checked. Differs: it is a biography, not a confession, and Oberon never gets to tell her secret on her own terms.

If you loved who gets to tell the story

Evelyn's confession is one she controls: she picks the writer, the order and the ending. These two are the real-world versions, one told by its subject late and at a price, one told by everyone except its subject.

3. Here Lies the Heart, Mercedes de Acosta (1960)

Under-listed · memoir · read its feelings, not its facts

The closest real parallel to Evelyn on this page. De Acosta, the New York-born daughter of a Cuban-born father and a Spanish mother, who called herself Spanish, was a poet and playwright who wrote this in 1960, ill and short of money, about her life among Garbo, Dietrich, Nazimova, Eva Le Gallienne and Isadora Duncan. She never states the love affairs outright, but they are on every other page, and it cost her: Garbo cut her off for good, one friend reportedly retitled it "Here lies the heart, and lies and lies and lies", and she died in 1968 in relative obscurity. Biographers have since corrected real errors in it, so read it as a woman telling her own life against people with more power to define it, not as the record. Reid wrote the version where the confession lands; de Acosta lived the one where it doesn't. The only current edition is a US facsimile reprint. Differs: nothing here is resolved or vindicated.

4. Edie: American Girl, Jean Stein, with George Plimpton (1982)

Under-listed · oral history · told by everyone but her

Edie Sedgwick, Warhol's superstar, died at 28 in 1971, and Stein built her life entirely from interviews with her family, friends and colleagues, so everyone tells her story except her. It is the inside-out version of Evelyn's confession, and a record of what happens to a manufactured star when nobody controls the story. It was an international bestseller when it appeared in 1982, and Vintage publishes it in the UK now. It is on none of the eight lists we checked. Differs: it is the 1960s New York art world, not the studios, and Edie never gets a chapter of her own.

If you loved the self she invented to get in

Evelyn's deepest secret is her name: a Cuban girl the studio remade as someone else. The literature of passing got there first. These are American novels about Black women who pass as white, and they are here as the tradition Evelyn's secret belongs to, not as the same story.

5. Imitation of Life, Fannie Hurst (1933)

Under-listed · novel · big, sentimental melodrama

Bea Pullman, widowed young, builds a waffle and restaurant empire on her housekeeper Delilah's recipes and Delilah's face on every box, trading behind her dead husband's business cards so nobody knows the seller is a woman. Delilah's light-skinned daughter Peola passes as white, cuts herself off, and Delilah dies heartbroken. It was a bestseller filmed twice, in 1934 and 1959, and it is read now with its problems in view: Sterling Brown attacked its picture of Delilah in 1934, and Langston Hughes parodied it. It is on none of the eight lists we checked, and in the UK it is the Duke University Press edition, ordered in. Differs: the ambition is Bea's, the passing is Peola's, and the book watches Peola from the outside.

6. Passing, Nella Larsen (1929)

Under-listed here · short novel · tense and unresolved

Irene Redfield could pass as white but lives among Harlem's Black middle class. Her childhood friend Clare Kendry has passed for years, married to a white racist who doesn't know. When Clare starts slipping back into Harlem through Irene, fascination turns to jealousy and fear, and the ending, a fall from a sixth-floor window, is never explained. Critics since Deborah McDowell have read Irene's feeling for Clare as desire, which makes this the one book here that carries both of Evelyn's secrets. It is famous, but it is on none of the eight competing lists. Differs: it is short and ends in catastrophe, not a late reckoning.

The honest bit

Sort these by how much truth you want. The two passing novels are the heaviest going: both end badly for the women who pass, and Imitation of Life sees its Black characters through a 1930s white writer’s eyes. Here Lies the Heart is a memoir its own subjects disputed, so trust its feelings more than its facts. The likeliest mis-sell on this page is Inside Daisy Clover to a reader who wants Evelyn’s glamour: it is short, sardonic and sad, and its star is a teenager.

You have probably been handed the usual shelf already, so here it is in one line: Daisy Jones & The Six, Malibu Rising, Carrie Soto Is Back, City of Girls, Tipping the Velvet, The Idea of You, Circe, Where the Crawdads Sing, Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?, All the Stars in the Heavens, The Spectacular, Great Big Beautiful Life and Goddess of Warsaw. The first three are Reid’s own, which makes them a shelf rather than a recommendation.

Questions

Is Evelyn Hugo based on a real person?

Not on one person. Taylor Jenkins Reid has named three stars: Elizabeth Taylor for the marriages, Rita Hayworth, who changed her name and her look to be cast as white, and Ava Gardner, who told a ghostwriter the secrets of her life. For the true stories closest to Evelyn's own, read Mayukh Sen's Love, Queenie, about Merle Oberon, and Mercedes de Acosta's memoir Here Lies the Heart.

Is The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo a true story?

No, it is a novel, but its pieces are real. Rita Hayworth did remake her name and her hairline to pass as white, Ava Gardner did tell her secrets to a writer late in life, and Merle Oberon hid her South Asian heritage behind an invented birth until she died in 1979.

Are there sapphic books like Evelyn Hugo?

Yes, and the most striking one is true: Mercedes de Acosta's 1960 memoir Here Lies the Heart, about her life among Garbo, Dietrich and Eva Le Gallienne, with the love affairs on every page and never named. Critics also read Nella Larsen's Passing (1929) as a story of desire between two women. For a closeted man inside the studio system, try Gavin Lambert's Inside Daisy Clover (1963).

What should I read after The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo?

Start with Inside Daisy Clover for the studio from the inside, Here Lies the Heart for a real Hollywood confession, and Love, Queenie for the true version of Evelyn's invented self. If you want more of Reid herself, Daisy Jones & The Six is the obvious next book; it is left off this list because an author's own books are not a discovery.

Tell the book search which part of Evelyn’s story you want more of, the studio, the secret or the confession, and it will look for that rather than for Old Hollywood.

Search for the part you loved

For the same move on another bestseller, reading past its setting to the books it really echoes, see Books like The Midnight Library, which follows Matt Haig back to two forgotten J.B. Priestley plays.