It Ends With Us author Colleen Hoover’s long history of controversies and problematic behaviour

By Abby Amoakuh

Published Aug 15, 2024 at 02:50 PM

Reading time: 6 minutes

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Image courtesy of IMDb

Named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in 2023, American author Colleen Hoover has not only risen to a point in her career where she dominates bestseller lists, but has also garnered the power to influence cultural discourses and shape attitudes towards love, loss and abuse within the young adult landscape. Yet, the influence Hoover wields over young minds, particularly in the TikTok sphere, has been subjected to much scrutiny—and for good reasons.

Similarly, to E. L. James, who wrote the Fifty Shades of Gray novels, as well as Stephanie Meyer’s chaste but erotically-charged Twilight saga, Hoover is despised by critics for writing the kind of plainly commercial literature that doesn’t challenge the audience’s lower instincts as much as it caters to them.

Ever since Hoover’s best-selling book It Ends with Us was turned into a Hollywood movie with a star-studded cast, netizens have been taking to social media to discuss some of the author’s most controversial chapters. From her problematic son to her novels’ even more problematic themes, let’s consider the very successful, and very divisive, figure that is Colleen Hoover.

 

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The 44-year-old Texas native had a kind of inconspicuous lower-middle-class upbringing, with no signs hinting at the global phenomenon she would grow into. Raised in a small, unincorporated Texas community, Hoover attended Texas A&M-Commerce, a public university where she majored in and graduated with a degree in social work.

What followed was a string of unstable social gigs and teaching jobs. At the time that she started to write her first book, Hoover was making $9 an hour and living in a single-wide trailer that her stepfather had purchased. Hoover’s husband, William Heath, worked as a long-distance truck driver and their three sons were doing their best to get by in the small living area the trailer had.

When she self-published her first novel Slammed in 2012, Hoover did so without an agent, marketing team, or interviews on prestigious radio and talk shows. It was completely antithetical to how books become nationwide successes but seven months later, Slammed hit the New York Times best-seller list.

The sudden popularity of Hoover’s work was almost certainly underpinned by a new platform that, seemingly overnight, completely shattered the structure and meritocracy of the olden, well-trained publishing apparatus, seemingly overnight: the internet.

Hoover’s success was born out of the real excitement that cannot be manufactured by flashy press tours, advertising campaigns, and speaking arrangements. Her sales were driven by raving blogs, ecstatic online reviews, and suburban book clubs with wine-slurping moms who had been silently dominating the publishing industry for years at that time.

However, their new foray into producing bestsellers introduced a new audience-centred age in the literary industry, in which authors weren’t prescribed by critics anymore but picked by their readers.

Hoover’s meteoric rise that followed in the footsteps of Stephanie Meyer, L. J. Smith, and any other female writer who ever struggled to get their bestseller published, exposed the mainstream book machinery as out of touch and outpaced by a fast-changing society.

And what she revealed under the ruins of this shattered meritocracy was an untapped, overlooked female audience, eager to be fed.

While for some people, TikTok is an app best known for serving up short videos on everything from dance moves and fashion tips to cooking tutorials and relationship advice, it has also become a top destination for book lovers. Indeed, BookTok has one of the most devoted, and at times vicious, communities out there.

It’s driven mostly by women in their teens and 20s, who post videos of themselves reading or recommending novels. These reviews then end up being seen by millions. It was this same community that helped propel Hoover’s It Ends with Us to global fame.

The novel centres around Lily Bloom, a florist who moved to Boston to fulfil her lifelong dream of opening a flower shop. On one of her first days in the city, she meets the charming neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid and soon begins an intense love affair with the doctor. Their bliss is however soon interrupted by Ryle’s sudden and uncontrollable bursts of violence and the unexpected emergence of Lily’s first love Atlas Corrigan, who offers her a way out…

It’s a glittery, fairytale-esque novel, adequately dubbed as cliterature and hen lit, genres of literature that are imbued with drama, sexuality, longing, and the good old-fashioned love triangle. Considering that the novel also includes intense subject matter such as domestic abuse though, it has attracted a lot of controversy.

Anchoring stories of abuse in the contemporary romance genre, as Hoover did with It Ends with Us and its prequel It Starts with Us, has been labelled as sugarcoating abuse at best and glamorising and sanitising it at worst.

Domestic Shelter, a point of help for victims of abuse, echoed this argument in an op-ed on their website, writing: “Ryle is portrayed as a man who desperately wants to be good but is tormented by inner demons. This is, of course, a tired cliché that’s too often applied to abusive men. The first two incidents of abuse occur in “heat of the moment” scenarios in which Ryle loses his temper.”

Too often Ryle’s behaviour is described as a result of Lily’s, with Hoover depicting it as jealous and aggravated outbursts, rather than a result of his l shortcomings, according to DS.

In 2023, the author also had to apologise and cancel her plans for releasing a colouring book of the novel, since netizens were disturbed about the scenes potentially depicted. Understandably, people felt as though it was inappropriate to turn very serious themes of violence and abuse into a fun afternoon colouring activity.

Opinions on the authenticity of the abuse depicted differ greatly among readers, particularly those with their own experiences of abuse. This has made Hoover’s most famous novel incredibly polarising.

Likewise, accusations started to multiply that Hoover’s writing in general was subpar at best and unbearable at worst, particularly to those who had only gained small glimpses of her work.

Readers and some online sleuths started to uncover excerpts that were awkward, corny, unimaginative, and even slightly racist.

It should be noted that most of these excerpts can be found in the author’s earlier work, which was released without an editor or sensitivity reader. Contrary to writers like Sally Rooney, whom readers have recommended as an alternative, Hoover was not raised by two academics, didn’t attend writing classes while being raised between metropolises, nor had the opportunity to obtain two English degrees from an elite university, and publish her debut novel with the backing of one of the biggest publishers in her country. Yet, she managed to rise from complete infamy to the New York Times bestseller list completely by herself within seven months.

Colleen Hoover didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree, she exists in a context and it might be good to remember that before we call her a bad writer.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past two weeks, you’ve probably heard that the cast for the movie adaptation of It Ends with Us is allegedly beefing. And Hoover is apparently involved in it because both herself and the rest of the main actors unfollowed director and leading man Justin Baldoni on Instagram.

This subjected the author to renewed backlash because Baldoni has only praised the book and his co-stars, evoking the idea that this beef might be quite petty and one-sided.

On top of the accusations that her books romanticise abuse, Hoover’s 23-year-old son Levi was thrust into the public eye in 2022 after sexual harassment allegations surfaced against him on social media. The writer addressed the allegations in a private Facebook group to clear the air, but has faced calls for boycotts since the allegations came to light.

The author clarified: “I didn’t address it publicly because 1) I feel it’s not my place to talk about someone else’s experience and 2) everyone who knows me here has seen me parent these boys and hold them accountable. I’m sad this happened. You guys know I’ve tried my best to raise my children with respect and to show respect.”

There hasn’t been any update on the abuse allegations yet, but the situation has deeply embedded itself in the collective memory of her once unified and devoted fanbase.

So who is Colleen Hoover? A writer who managed to leverage her first-hand knowledge of abuse and the female condition into a book empire, or a mediocre and occasionally problematic author of commercial trash.

If her personal history and track record prove anything, it is that Hoover isn’t easily defined but easily underestimated. The author’s empire isn’t built on perfection and neither is that of any man who came before her. It must be noted that she is frequently asked to adhere to higher standards of quality, performance and behaviour than them when her status as the bestselling novelist in the United States has shown that she is a writer in her own right.

The 44-year-old continues a long tradition of mostly female writers, who have used the romance and domestic thriller genre to craft global phenomena that topple sales records and hold the middle finger up to the award shows, critics and literary gatekeepers. This includes those who discredit the female gaze and enforce rules that make popular literature too abstract and artistic to be enjoyed by a broader audience.

So, call Hoover’s work “smut” and roll your eyes at it, slap the labels “hen lit” or “women’s literature” on it to imply that it’s somehow inferior and not to be taken seriously. It won’t change the fact that the author has built the kind of audience and commercial force that have not only turned her into a publishing titan but one worth profiling and probing to unground what her work says about the author and us, her subjects.