A few years from now, when publications start compiling rankings of the most defining literary voices of the 2020s, there is one author whose absence or presence on a list will indicate the honesty of its maker: Colleen Hoover.
At this point, Hoover’s vast body of work—primarily melodramatic romance novels, with occasional forays into melodramatic romance thrillers—is inescapable, as is its dominance of the publishing industry. In 2022, eight of the 25 highest-selling print titles were written by Hoover. (Fellow contemporary romance writer Emily Henry was the only other author to have more than one title on that list.) That same year, Hoover had outsold the Bible by early October. Her 2016 novel It Ends With Us and its sequel It Starts With Us were the two highest-selling books of 2023, both outselling Prince Harry’s memoir by around 65,000 and 16,000 copies, respectively. Now successfully adapted into a film, it seems likely that It Ends With Us will enjoy a third year at the top of the charts.
Both close and casual observers of Hoover’s rapid ascent find it hard to explain. Faintly bemused features from the Washington Post and the New York Times focus on the locus of her power: BookTok and its weeping young denizens who now control the publishing industry. Vox posits that maybe it’s the fever pitch of conversation around Hoover from stans and haters alike that provides the real driving force behind her continued dominance. Meanwhile, her many critics warn that her popularity is a sign that some children were indeed left behind.
None of these explanations are technically incorrect. The algorithms that rewarded Hoover so handsomely have exactly one imperative: more. More time on the app, more products sold, more ads clicked, more views. An incredibly prolific writer until quite recently, Hoover was uniquely positioned to enjoy the loyalty of readers who tend to prefer quantity over quality. And to her credit, she saw the potential of BookTok before almost anyone else did. In the spring of 2020, Hoover, correctly intuiting the needs of a housebound and horny population, made five of her ebooks free (for all of her flaws, Hoover’s business savvy is unquestionable; in the past four years she’s struck deals with Hachette, Simon & Schuster and Atria while still self-publishing). Trend-chasing content creators did the rest. As of October 2022, the hashtag #ColleenHoover had amassed more than 2.4 billion views. Reading Hoover—whether rapturously or contemptuously—became a sort of performance. Young women would record time-lapse videos of the devastation wrought by reading one of Hoover’s 24 books, a trend that would eventually help boost the sales of more critically acclaimed tearjerkers like Madeline Miller’s Song of Achilles and Hanya Yanigihara’s A Little Life.
None of this is new information if you, like me, have been incredulously watching the rise of CoHo, as she is known to her fans who refer to themselves as members of the CoHort. Eva Illouz, in her 2019 book The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relation, argued that consumer culture has become the “fulcrum of modern identity.” She wrote, “The sharing of consumer tastes functions as an emotional and sensorial platform to forge intimacy.” Nowhere is that clearer than on TikTok, where creators try on and throw away identities as easily as they do their Shein hauls. Hoover’s work, which can generously be described as mediocre, is uniquely suited for readers to slip into. As she herself admitted to Texas Monthly earlier this year, “I don’t want to use big words. I don’t want to use flowery language. I hate description. Hate it. I’m a very ADD reader. I have ADD in my real life. And if I have to read more than two paragraphs without dialogue, I will skip it.” For the CoHort, less is more; paper-thin characters provide empty slates to project onto while Hoover’s overstuffed plots offer endless fodder for dissection—and now comparison against their film adaptations.
Widely regarded as her most ambitious work, and certainly her most successful, It Ends With Us is insipid at best. The most interesting thing about its two main characters, Lily Blossom Bloom and Ryle Kincaid, is their names. The two meet on the roof of a high-rise building in Boston; both are at the tail end of one of the worst days of their respective lives. Intoxicated by grief and sexual tension, they exchange “naked truths,” a phrase that is repeated no fewer than 18 times over the course of the novel. Lily’s naked truth is that she balked at giving a eulogy at her abusive father’s funeral. Ryle’s is that he watched a little boy die earlier that day—and also that he wants to fuck Lily.
From here, their courtship is standard romance novel fare. Ryle, a consummate commitment-phobe, finds himself so drawn to Lily that soon after meeting her, he knocks on all 29 doors in her building in an attempt to track her down. Despite not having shared her address with him, Lily finds his determination “as endearing as it is annoying.” (The movie thankfully drops this particular plot point, along with one where Ryle functionally abducts Lily from a party.) Still, Lily is haunted by the violence she witnessed as a child and is understandably wary, until suddenly she’s not. The two are engaged within six months.
I’m ashamed to admit that by the time (spoiler alert?) Ryle’s abusive nature is finally revealed, I was a bit relieved. At least something was finally happening. There are hundreds of sentences and dozens of writing tics that I could pull out to illustrate Hoover’s singular and exhausting writing style, but a brave Twitter user has already done that work for me. Instead, here’s maybe one of the most pivotal scenes in It Ends With Us, right after Ryle hits Lily for the first time:
We’re both upset and kissing and confused and sad. I’ve never felt anything like this moment—so ugly and painful. But somehow the only thing that eases the hurt just caused by this man is this man. My tears are soothed by his sorrow, my emotions soothed with his mouth against mine, his hands gripped me like he never wants to let go…
I don’t even know what’s happening to me. I’m hurting so much on the inside, yet my body craves his apology in the form of his mouth and hands on me. I want to lash out at him and react like I always wish my mother would have reacted when my father hurt her, but deep down I want to believe that it really was an accident. Ryle isn’t like my father. He’s nothing like him.
I need to feel his sorrow. His regret. I get both of these things in the way he kisses me. I spread my legs for him and his sorrow comes in another form. Slow, apologetic thrusts inside of me. Every time he enters me, he whispers another apology. And by some miracle, every time he pulls out of me, my anger leaves with him.
To Hoover’s credit, she does her best to capture the ambivalence that some survivors of domestic violence describe. It’s an ambivalence she herself has witnessed and experienced. In the afterword of It Ends With Us, Hoover writes that her first memory is of her father throwing a television set at her mother. “She divorced him when I turned three. Every memory beyond that of my father was a good one,” she continues. “He never once lost his temper with me or my sisters, despite having done so on numerous occasions with my mother.” Hoover and her father maintained a good relationship until his death—a fact she credits to her mother’s bravery in leaving.
To Hoover’s discredit, I’ve read more genuinely devastating scenes on Archive of Our Own, written by authors who most likely can’t legally drink in the United States. As for the sex, there’s not much to say except that the Ao3 teens have her beat there, too. The most frequent praise I’ve heard Colleen Hoover be paid as a writer by both fans and generous critics alike is that her books are easy to finish in a day. I did not find this to be true, nor do I see it as much of a compliment.
The film does what it can with the thin material it’s given. Blake Lively attempts to fill in the many blanks of Lily’s personality with wry laughter and some incredible shoe choices, but as Hannah Giorgis noted in The Atlantic, “Lively’s acting is particularly ill-suited to the gravity of bigger emotional scenes, which is especially noticeable when she defaults to the mischievous, flirty energy that defined her past roles.” Justin Baldoni (who also directed) does manage to inject his Ryle with a magnetism that gives way to genuine vulnerability and, eventually, barely concealed menace. Jenny Slate, who is perhaps miscast but charming nonetheless as Ryle’s sister, Allysa, delivers the film’s only other standout performance. Neither of them can transcend the movie they’re in, unfortunately. The most significant praise I can give for the overall product is that they did a truly phenomenal job casting 15-year-old Lily; it’s genuinely uncanny how much newcomer Isabela Ferrer looks and sounds like Lively.
Still, the film is poised to be a hit. It’s both a blessing and a curse to Hoover, who’s been facing writer’s block since 2022. Its success is likely to line her coffers even as it exacerbates her paralysis. In that Texas Monthly interview, Hoover revealed that the maelstrom of attention that now surrounds her is the source of her writer’s block. “I’m absolutely in that moment of panic now that I know how many people are going to read it,” she said. “Before, release days were kind of fun because I felt like I was writing for the people that love my books, but now it’s almost like I’m writing for the people who are just waiting to put out that negative video of my books, because it gets views. It’s just the popular thing, to hate, right now, and I wish I didn’t let that get in my head, but I do.”
The film’s release, and the drama surrounding it, will likely only intensify that hatred. My sympathy for Hoover is limited; she’s more than rich enough to pay someone to filter her social media. Still, the backlash against her work seems vastly overblown given the substance of the target. Hoover’s questionable grasp on grammar and style is more than fair game. Her most strident detractors, however, tend to make the mistake of substituting politics for criticism and insist that her (admittedly, at times, quite regressive) sexual mores are harming her hapless readers. Having ingested the Mormon propaganda that is Twilight at a young age, I promise they’ll either be fine or become bloggers. The CoHort, accurately registering the condescension, respond with their demographic makeup and suggest that to insult Colleen Hoover is to hate young women. And now suddenly we’re here, where journalists are being tasked with explaining the sociopolitical implications of a writer who once told the Washington Post, “I find when I’m writing, I tend to go a little too far sometimes with the emotions because then I can feel it. So I write, and if I don’t feel it, I make it sadder or scarier, depending on what I’m writing, until I actually feel something.” Those journalists, not wanting to also be accused of misogyny, tend to over-correct in their assessments of Hoover. A careful read of her many profiles will turn up descriptions like “eclectic” or “a Days of Our Lives writers’-room brainstorm.” Importantly, the words good or compelling or original don’t make an appearance.
Hoover is hardly the first mass-market author whose success vastly outstripped their writerly ability. But refusing to call a mediocre spade a spade does no service to the young women who adore her, not least because what they’re getting out of her work seems to go far beyond the uncomplicated words on the page. Thinly characterized but densely plotted, full of harrowing backstories and trauma bonding, Hoover’s novels provide incredibly fertile ground for a fandom which privileges big feelings over big ideas.
That those feelings are described and discussed in public, by thousands of fellow readers, is the appeal. To love Hoover is to be part of something vast and undeniably powerful. It’s an objective fact that the CoHort has changed publishing as we know it. If only they had picked a better writer as their champion.
