Why readers love — and love to hate — Colleen Hoover
This weekend, one of the most popular books of the decade is making its way to the big screen. Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, a romantic tearjerker about breaking the cycle of abuse that became a social media sensation after it was published in 2016, is now a movie starring Blake Lively. The moment means the mainstream coronation of Hoover herself, the former social worker from Texas turned queen of the New York Times bestseller list.
Hoover sells books the way Danielle Steel used to sell books. She sells the way Stephen King still does. She sells the way new authors usually don’t. In 2022, she held six of the top 10 spots on the Times’s paperback bestseller list at once and sold more books than the Bible. According to industry tracker Circana BookScan, Hoover has sold 28.9 million books in print, plus 7 million ebooks. It Ends With Us, probably her most popular novel, has sold 6.9 million print and ebooks combined. It has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 131 weeks, and it is currently at the top.
Hoover began as a self-published indie author, releasing her first novel, Slammed, in January 2012 when she was 42. She had already found what would become her sweet spot of melodrama combined with taboo romance: The book featured an 18-year-old grieving the death of her father and in love with her poetry teacher.
Slammed unexpectedly became a word-of-mouth hit among book bloggers. By August, the book and its sequel, published a month later, were on the New York Times bestseller list, and Hoover had a traditional publishing contract.
“Colleen Hoover superfan” and “Colleen Hoover hater” are both legible identities in a way that they are for few other authors
Since then, Hoover has published 24 books, counting her novellas, typically releasing at least one book a year, more frequently two and sometimes up to three or four. She has always sold well, but her career shifted into another gear in 2020, when the pandemic left readers in need of a good cry and BookTok emerged as a hit-maker. On BookTok, Hoover fans could film themselves weeping over her books, tossing them across the room out of pure emotional overwhelm, sighing over her heroes. Her sales figures exploded in response.
Yet Hoover hasn’t published a book since 2022. Asked why, she says she’s become very aware of how vast her audience is.
Hoover has a point: Her audience numbers in the millions. It’s also polarized. In the emotional landscape of BookTok, “Colleen Hoover superfan” and “Colleen Hoover hater” are both legible identities in a way that they are for few other authors.
If Hoover fans film themselves sobbing over her books, Hoover haters post about flipping her books around at bookstores so that the covers are backward. They create detailed video essays laying out all the things they think are wrong with Hoover’s books: her simple sentences, her melodramatic plots, her toxic love stories that they say romanticize abuse. Or they just point to a line of text she’s written and say, “What the fuck?”
There’s something about these books that seems to inspire intense reactions in their readers, ranging from sublime catharsis to visceral disgust. Here are the reasons so many of Hoover’s readers have become such ardent, adoring fans — and so many others have become such ferocious haters.
Hoover’s subject matter is heavy, but her writing style is bubbly and fun. The contrast is weird.
Hoover’s romantic melodramas tend to deal with intense real-life issues that some of her readers have surely experienced. All her characters are traumatized; all their children are destined for untimely deaths; all their love stories are twisted and tragic.
Ugly Love (2014) features a hero who, following the death of his newborn baby, has sworn he’ll never love again. All Your Perfects (2018) deals with a couple struggling with infertility. In November 9 (2015), a woman badly scarred by a house fire falls in love with a man still grieving the death of his mother, who died by suicide.
Part of what sets Hoover apart from other writers of melodrama (think: Nicholas Sparks) is that despite the trauma her characters must face, she writes them with a breezy romantic comedy charm. They meet cute, they banter, and they trade inside jokes as their worlds collapse around them.
The juxtaposition between Hoover’s bubbly prose style and the intensity of her subject matter creates a jarring contrast. Her books are almost magnetically readable: The sentences are easy and pleasant to read while the plots are shocking and intense. You can blaze through one in a day. You can, if you are so inclined, fall in love with her troubled alpha male heroes, her tormented and striving heroines.
They meet cute, they banter, and they trade inside jokes as their worlds collapse around them
For Hoover’s fans, this effect is something they love about her books. She makes reading feel straightforward and easy, even if you’re not naturally inclined to be bookish.
For Hoover’s haters, however, the contrast is one of the signs that there’s something dishonest, even perhaps morally wrong, about the way she writes. How, they ask, can she expect her audience to take her subject matter seriously when she handles it so lightly? These readers feel there is something crassly manipulative about the way Hoover dredges up tragedy to make her readers cry, and then tosses it aside when she doesn’t want to deal with any of the parts that might be trickier to write or read about.
There’s a paragraph in Ugly Love that has become something of a meme among Hoover haters that exemplifies how oddly her banter can read. It’s a conversation between Miles, one of the novel’s narrators, and his girlfriend Rachel after they’ve just had a baby:
“Thank you for this baby,” she says from the back seat. “He’s beautiful.”
I laugh. “You’re responsible for the beautiful part, Rachel. The only thing he got from me was his balls.”
She laughs. She laughs hard. “Oh my God, I know,” she says. “They’re so big.”
We both laugh at our son’s big balls.
Hoover haters love to roast her for everything about this paragraph: the idea of parents mocking their kid’s genitalia, the simplistic sentence structure, the non sequitur of the joke. The context around these lines, however, make the situation and dialogue perhaps even more off-putting.
First, the young parents in this novel are step-siblings who carried on their forbidden love affair in their parents’ house, a taboo plot twist that never pays off into any major revelations or insight into their characters. Second, the balls joke is followed immediately by tragedy: they get into a car crash, and the big-balled newborn baby dies. (I told you all the babies die.) For Hoover haters, the moment is an encapsulation of everything that makes her books bad: the cutesy romantic “joke” right up against the pointless and out-of-nowhere drama, all of it handled in the very worst of taste.
Hoover’s defenders, meanwhile, say that she writes books that are fun to read and that bring awareness to important issues. In particular, It Ends With Us has staunch fans who describe it, echoing the blurb on the cover, as the kind of book “every person with a heartbeat should read.”
Even most of Hoover’s haters will concede that It Ends With Us is one of her more ambitious books. Inspired by the marriage of Hoover’s parents, it puts readers in the head of our protagonist, Lily, as she first falls in love with and then grows gradually more afraid of manipulative, controlling, violent Ryle Kincaid. Lily thinks of herself as the kind of person who knows better than to stay with an abuser, but when Ryle gets violent with her — first hitting, then choking — she finds herself making excuses for him. It’s only when he eventually throws her down a flight of stairs and then sexually assaults her (and another potential love interest presents himself) that Lily finally decides to leave Ryle.
The result is a didactic novel clearly written to explain why a person in an abusive relationship might find it difficult to leave her abuser, and then show how she might find the strength to do so anyway. This is why It Ends With Us is deeply important to many Hoover fans. It’s the kind of novel, they say, that makes you cry for the terrible dilemma of its heroine, that has the power to change the way you see abused women.
Yet Hoover’s critics say It Ends With Us is just like the rest of the books in her oeuvre: crassly using big, complicated stories for cheap tears and easy money. Hoover’s male characters tend to be domineering, in a way that is often supposed to be part of their appeal. Ryle, they point out, isn’t the only Hoover hero to override his girlfriend’s “no” when he touches her — he’s just the only one labeled an abuser when he does so.
Haters cite Hoover’s It Ends With Us nail polish line and a planned-but-never-published It Ends With Us coloring book as evidence that domestic abuse, like the dead baby with large testicles, is just another thing that Hoover will take heavily when she wants to make you cry, and lightly when she wants to keep things easy.
The genre question
Part of the reason readers have a hard time grappling with Hoover’s work is the question of what genre she’s writing in, and what expectations they should hold for her. It’s hard to know what you’re going to get when you open one of her books cold, which is part of why it’s hard to know in what spirit to take her writing.
When Hoover transitioned from indie author into traditional publishing in 2012, she was positioned as New Adult author, a buzzy new marketing category. The millennial YA audience that had made books like Twilight and The Hunger Games such sensations would soon be aging out of their market, publishers feared. Surely they would need new books as they left high school and entered the real world: books that were just as fun and straightforward to read as the YA they’d left behind, but with the sexy darkness that had been trending up in YA made explicit. New Adult books would provide just such a thrill for readers 18 through 23. Hoover, with her grabby pacing, steamy sex scenes, melodramatic subject matter, and straightforwardly bouncy prose, was an ideal author for the new genre.
The problem was that New Adult never took off. Few bookstores ever installed New Adult shelves. The readers who wanted to keep reading YA-style books stuck to YA, which is now primarily read by adults. Those who wanted more adult books transitioned to other categories like romance or thrillers or literary fiction. The newly established New Adult writers were left at sea.
Today, Hoover’s books are generally sold as romance novels. For readers, that’s a label that comes with expectations. It means that the characters should strive towards a healthy and aspirational relationship, that they should finish the book happy together forever. That is not the kind of story Hoover is interested in writing.
Some romance readers say they’d be happy with Hoover’s novels if she would simply call them dark romance, a subgenre that comes with the presumption that there will be a fair amount of sexy toxicity. (If romance novels in the ’70s were all about wickedly brooding men kidnapping and ravishing innocent virgins, dark romance is where that formula lives on.) Hoover, obligingly, has a couple of her more twisted novels labeled as dark romance on her website. Still, she prefers not to follow the genre’s latest guidance for a page of “trigger warnings” at the front of her novels.
“I’ve received quite a number of negative reviews in relation to the lack of a trigger warning for the subject matter…and for writing about such unhappy things,” Hoover wrote in a now-deleted blog post in 2016. “As a fellow reader with my fair share of past experiences, I understand that there are issues some people do not want to read about. But as a writer, there are many things I don’t want revealed in the blurbs of my books.”
Hoover’s fans defend her distaste for content warnings as a display of artistic integrity. Her tragedies rely on an element of surprise for their immediacy: The reader is shocked by sudden horror in the same way the characters are.
Sometimes, that surprise is central to the intended effect of the book. It Ends With Us has a back cover blurb suggesting that Ryle’s fear of commitment will be the primary obstacle in the novel. The reveal that Ryle is not just opposed to marriage but is in fact violently abusive is part of how readers are brought to empathize with Lily when she finds herself making excuses for Ryle’s behavior, even though she thinks she knows better: We thought she was in a romance the same way she did.
For Hoover detractors, though, Hoover’s distaste for content warnings is another tell that she thinks of the issues she’s writing about as plot devices, not as real problems that affect real people. Why, they ask, is she prioritizing the element of surprise over the possibility of triggering trauma flashbacks in an unsuspecting reader?
Either way, Hoover once again finds herself at odds with the genre in which she’s been tentatively placed: too sad for traditional romance, too traditional for dark romance, too popular for New Adult. Readers coming to her never quite have a sense of what she’s going to give them, and the traditional signposts of publishing don’t seem to serve her well.
Hoover doesn’t necessarily seem to mind that she’s hard to pigeonhole. In an interview with Vulture in 2022, Hoover mused that her most popular books seem to be the inspirational It Ends With Us and the psychosexual Rebecca-inspired Verity. (Verity’s one of those books that merits the dark romance label.) “I like that my readers’ tastes land on opposite ends of a reading spectrum, and I especially love it when their two favorites are books that are nothing alike,” Hoover said. “It reinforces my decision not to stick to one genre.”
It’s true that Hoover’s readership tends to land on opposite ends of a reading spectrum — both in the way they like her books and in the way they hate them. But regardless of how many and how vocal the Hoover haters are, her books keep selling. Her reign at the top of the New York Times bestseller list will last as long as she has books to sell — which, depending on how long her writer’s block lasts, may be a very long time or no time at all.