Colleen Hoover, the biggest-selling author on the planet, shakes her head in disbelief. “This was never anything I even dreamed of,” she says. “I’m just living it. I wake up every day thinking: is this really my life?”
Hoover wasn’t aiming for stardom when she wrote and self-published her first book. The Texan social worker and mother of three completed Slammed, her debut novel, as a way of talking to her mother about the domestic abuse she witnessed during childhood.
“I feel like my mother is one of the most level-headed powerful women I’ve ever met,” Hoover says over Zoom from New York. “Knowing that she was in an abusive relationship, it always confused me, because we always think people that find themselves in these situations are a certain way. It’s not the case. Anybody could find themselves in these situations. And so I just wanted to put myself in her shoes and explore that.”
[ It Starts With Us by Colleen Hoover: A happy ending for star-crossed loversOpens in new window ]
Hoover returned to those themes of domestic abuse in It Ends With Us, her wildly successful 2016 novel. The book, part of the emergent new-adult genre, concerns Lily Bloom, a talented florist who encounters a charming neurosurgeon named Ryle. His aggressive behaviour tempers their meet-cute romance. Gaslighting defines their superficially picture-perfect relationship until Lily discovers that she is pregnant. The prolific Hoover describes the book as the hardest she’s ever written.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
Unsurprisingly, the bestselling novel of 2022 (and 2023) is now a major motion picture, starring Blake Lively as Lily and Justin Baldoni (who also directs) as Ryle.
“I just fell in love with Lily,” Lively says. “I wanted to tell her story because her emotional roadmap was so clear to me, yet there are so many ways she could be portrayed. I knew if I took her on, I would make sure she wasn’t a delicate flower but a woman with both feet firmly on the ground. Someone in her skin.
[ Colleen Hoover: What is it about her stories that people are drawn to?Opens in new window ]
“I thought it was important to see someone you think is settled in themselves get lost. It makes you realise you never really know what people are going through. We’re all on messy journeys that don’t always have a clear beginning, middle and end. I hoped it might help people feel less alone to see Lily simultaneously strong and vulnerable, put together and fallible, lost and found.”
The movie’s first trailer reportedly clocked up more than 128 million views in its first 24 hours online, in May, making it the biggest female-oriented trailer launch since Covid-19.
For Hoover, the Hollywood treatment is pleasing, but watching the film on the big screen is part of an ongoing therapeutic process.
“It actually really does continue to help,” the author says. “I’ve just been able to watch it with my mother. We both watched and cried the whole way through the film. And to watch her experience the film, and cry, the whole way through, I think that was so cathartic for both of us. But also just very healing.”
Not everyone is on board. Cosmopolitan has criticised the “rose-coloured” tone of the work: “There are real-life consequences to masquerading abuse as romance, particularly for young readers,” Shivani Dubey wrote, “and it’s likely that in our era of streaming, the movie will reach even more people than her books have.”
Fans claim that It Ends With Us perfectly articulates the emotional paradox of loving and leaving an abusive partner. Or, as Lily puts it, “Just because someone hurts you doesn’t mean you can simply stop loving them.”
‘There was no one I wanted to make happier with this adaptation than the readers’
“I developed some of my best friendships from this,” Hoover says. “So many good friends are readers. I love that interaction. I didn’t have an agent to tell me differently. But I got into this at a time when they were telling authors, ‘Don’t interact with your readers. Don’t respond to their emails.’ I was responding to everything I could respond to. I think it’s helped build my career this way. But I’ve had so many wonderful life-changing conversations from that.”
Hoover’s Cinderella publishing story is well-known. She and her truck-driver husband were raising their family in a trailer when she began writing on her mother’s work laptop at night. She didn’t have her own computer when her Wattpad romances first found a following among women book bloggers. There was no career masterplan. She opted to self-publish Slammed only because her mom had recently bought a Kindle. Seven months later, Hoover made her debut appearance on the New York Times bestseller list.
Hoover and several emergent stars of romantasy – the subgenre of romance and fantasy embodied by Sarah J Maas, author of A Court of Wings and Ruin – have ripped up the playbook for successful writing.
“I don’t even think I’d ever read a romance novel until I started writing romance novels,” Hoover says. “I was a little biased against romance, and now it’s my favourite genre. So I went into it with no knowledge, no ideas, just sitting down to write for fun. I wouldn’t change a thing. I think that that is actually what helped me.”
It Ends With Us has subsequently launched CoHo, as her devoted followers – aka her CoHort – call her, into the literary stratosphere. In 2022 she outsold Dr Seuss, James Patterson and the Bible in the United States. Her name has been shared billions of times on TikTok – or, rather, BookTok, its influential literary subsection.
By 2022, buoyed by her BookTok fan base, she occupied six of the 10 top spots on the New York Times paperback-fiction bestseller list, with another title, Point of Retreat, bubbling just below. Hoover sold 14.3 million copies of her novels in 2022, a 660 per cent increase on the 1.88 million books she sold a year earlier. Two and a half years later, It Ends With Us remains on the bestseller list. In fact, with the new movie looming, it’s back in the top spot on that New York Times chart.
Other BookTok sensations – Jenny Han’s The Summer I Turned Pretty, Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – may come and go. Hoover never falters.
“I feel that during the pandemic we were all in search of something else, and that’s when BookTok took off,” the author says. “It’s been life-changing for me. I felt like the books had done as well as they were going to do, as well as they could. And then BookTok happened. And oh wow: there is a whole other realm to this that I didn’t know existed. I’ve also seen it change the lives of my author friends. People who have never hit a bestseller list were suddenly in the New York Times because one of their books went viral on TikTok. It’s insane seeing the power that the readers have.”
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Hoover remains deeply loyal to her readership. Plans for a colouring-book edition of It Ends With Us were scrapped when fans clapped back. Hoover has stayed in control of her creations by striking parallel deals with three different publishers, sometimes holding on to the ebook rights. During the process of adapting It Ends With Us for the screen, Baldoni, Hoover and the screenwriter Christy Hall assembled a “brains trust” of superfans to give feedback on early drafts.
“I would not be where I am if it weren’t for the support of my readers,” Hoover says. “There was no one I wanted to make happier with this adaptation than the readers. Bringing them on very early on to read the first version of the script, and bringing them to a lot of the screenings, has been very important. We wanted to make sure we were capturing the feelings that they wanted to see. I don’t think we would have done the book justice without the input of those readers.”
Hoover still gets excited receiving new editions “in different languages with different foreign covers in the mail”, but her remarkable global reach and loyal CoHort mean she can’t simply write for herself any more.
“I do feel the pressure,” she says. “I haven’t finished a book in a couple of years. I’ve just been so busy with the film and everything that I haven’t had that time to dedicate to it. I honestly feel that readers can tell. They can tell if you are writing a book to please them or to please yourself. I’m hoping to jump back into it with that same attitude and just drown out all the noise, so I’m able to focus and write a story that makes me happy.”
It Ends With Us is on general release
