Colleen Hoover is the hottest author in America. She also may be the most controversial
By AJ Willingham, CNN
(CNN) — An author doesn’t rule the bestseller lists for months without plenty of praise or plenty of controversy.
Colleen Hoover, currently one of the most popular authors in the US, has attracted both in equal measure.
Hoover writes contemporary romance and psychological thriller books geared toward female audiences. The 43-year-old grew up in a small town in Texas, and within a span of 10 years went from self-publishing books on the side to selling 14.3 million copies of her work in 2022.
Her best-known title, “It Ends With Us,” was published in 2016 but has enjoyed a huge resurgence thanks to social media and word of mouth. A movie adaptation of the novel, starring Blake Lively, is set for release in 2024.
Hoover, known as CoHo to fans, also commands highly active groups of book lovers, with more than 940,000 followers on her Facebook fan page and 1.4 million on TikTok. She is the second-most followed author on Goodreads, after Stephen King, and her popularity shows no signs of waning. She was named one of TIME’s Most Influential People in 2023, and her books occupied three of the top five spots last week on the New York Times Paperback Trade Fiction bestseller list.
Hoover’s fans use words like “swoony” and “sweet-to-scorching” when describing her books’ appeal. It’s not unusual to come across TikTok images of readers in a post-Hoover haze, verklempt and clutching their tear-stained tomes, breathlessly teasing a shocking plot twist, sexy scene or emotional moment.
“Colleen Hoover books always leave me speechless and in tears,” one TikTok reader said.
However, there are plenty of readers who take issue with Hoover’s work and aren’t shy about pointing out what they see as dangers in her themes and storylines. For example several notable book influencers, and countless readers and writers, have raised red flags about “It Ends With Us,” saying it romanticizes abuse.
Many in the romance community also point out that Hoover’s work sometimes defies staid romance-novel conventions, making it a difficult fit for the genre.
In a word, many see Hoover’s books as problematic. These criticisms raise complex questions about the reader expectations around certain genres, how art presents difficult issues and how one author can be so popular and so reviled at the same time.
Some readers complain that Hoover’s books normalize abuse
(Spoiler alert: This section contains plot details about “It Ends with Us.”)
“It Ends with Us” tells the story of a woman named Lily Bloom and her contentious relationships with two men: her childhood love Atlas Corrigan, and her eventual husband, neurosurgeon Ryle Kincaid. The toll of domestic abuse is a clear theme of the novel and Lily is deeply affected by her mother’s abuse at the hands of her father.
In fact, the very title of the book is supposed to signify the end of this dangerous cycle in Lily’s life.
However, readers have shared their discomfort with the portrayal of Lily’s own abusive relationship with Ryle.
In the book, Ryle physically, sexually and emotionally abuses Lily, acting out in fits of jealousy and rage. This behavior is graphic; it is named. Other characters express their concern for Lily and she eventually ends their marriage over Ryle’s behavior.
The issue at hand, for many critics, is not that domestic abuse – a painful fact of life – is part of the narrative. Rather, it is that the behavior is central to the (doomed) love story in which readers are supposed to invest themselves.
Book influencer Whitney Atkinson says some stories are aspirational; readers want to imagine they’re part of the storylines. (Many romance or fantasy novels, for instance, prompt this response.) However, Hoover’s work, she says, blurs that line with the addition of painful – and decidedly non-aspirational – narrative arcs.
“(With) a lot of romance and romantic books, you want to be in that story, or part of that world temporarily,” says Atkinson, who has more than 90,000 followers across YouTube, Instagram and other platforms. “As for Hoover, I think people can more relate to the characters, but it’s not like you’re reading it for escapism, other than the fact that you’re gobbling it up just because it’s quick and easy and fun to read.”
Atkinson posted excerpts on social media from Hoover’s novel “November 9” in which the male love interest fantasizes about using physical force against the protagonist and refuses to hand over her car keys so she can leave. She pointed out what she saw as a pattern in Hoover’s books of women who endure disturbing behavior from their partners.
“It was the same theme over and over again: timid female characters and overbearing, abusive love interests,” Atkinson tells CNN. “I don’t think anyone’s arguing abusive or controlling behavior can’t be written about. It’s the way it’s written, as if it can be excused or is just part of a normal relationship.”
CNN has reached out to Hoover and her agent for comment.
As it happens, these depictions are also what lead readers to praise Hoover’s books as “raw,” “emotional,” and “compassionate.”
“It Ends with Us” is the most personal and daring and painful book Colleen Hoover has ever written,” reads one five-star review on Goodreads. “Abuse and domestic violence are a delicate subject, and when I found out they were this book’s main theme I thought about not reading it … But I owed it to myself, as a person and as a woman, to proceed. Because pretending a problem doesn’t exist does not make it disappear.”
Hoover also sees her books as tools for empowerment. The author has been open about witnessing the aftermath of her own parents’ abusive marriage, and has said “It Ends With Us” was inspired by her mother’s courage to leave the relationship.
“I’ve heard from readers who left terrible situations that my books inspired them to do so — that’s the most amazing thing I could ever hope to happen,” she told TIME in 2022.
Hoover has said she tries not to read criticism of her books.
“If people don’t like what I write, I just try to avoid that side of it,” she told Jenna Bush Hager in June. “I get it. It doesn’t bother me at all. I feel like when you have five books on the bestsellers list it’s very hard to be upset in any way by criticism. Because you know that people out there are enjoying your work, and I just keep my focus on that.”
Amanda Diehl, a member of the team behind the popular romance blog and podcast, “Smart Bitches, Trashy Books,” says people are drawn to Hoover’s works because of the melodrama and the intense feelings they stir up.
“It’s a lot of angst,” she says. “It’s a lot of big feelings of that first intense love or being attracted to someone that is, quote-unquote, bad for you.”
If someone opens a book knowing that’s what they’re getting, that’s their business, she says.
“I’m always a strong proponent of not yucking anyone’s yum. If this is what you want to read, I trust that you are an adult who can separate what you’re reading as fiction, and what you pursue in your own life.”
Complications arise, she says, when a book is marketed as something it’s not.
Her books spark debate about whether they fit in the romance genre
The debate about the portrayal of abuse in “It Ends With Us” and Hoover’s work in general leads neatly into a different debate over whether the book, which is marketed as “contemporary romance,” falls within the very specific — and very guarded — confines of the genre.
In the romance genre, a “happily ever after,” (HEA) or “happy for now” (HFN) is a requirement. Romance lovers open books — and, incidentally, keep the publishing industry humming — with this expectation in mind. To writers, readers and editors, this is not a negotiable issue.
“The HEA/HFN is vital to the romance genre as we know it, which makes Hoover’s books hard to classify,” says Jennifer Prokop, a professional book editor who specializes in romance. “But do bookstores and people who make listicles always have the ending in mind the way a romance reader would? Probably not.”
“It Ends With Us” does not have a romance-style happy ending, but some of Hoover’s books do. Its 2022 sequel, “It Starts With Us,” follows the romance genre’s typical beats more closely.
In a perfect world, books in the romance genre also strive to portray stories that are fulfilling, meaningful and empowering for readers, which set them at odds with a lot of readers’ judgment of Hoover’s work. Critics have found it difficult to consider her books romantic or empowering when they, say, encourage the reader to root for infidelity or to “depict an abusive fantasy.”
However, we do not live in a perfect world.
“I think that romance has always dealt with questions about what it means to be in healthy relationships, and how to handle being in unhealthy ones. That is the work of the genre,” Prokop says. “Although I would like to say that romance always depicts healthy romantic relationships and partnerships — that’s just not true.”
“I think that there are books in the genre that are, assuming best intentions, exploring how people can live happily in imperfect situations.”
Hoover’s background in self-publishing may explain why she straddles genres
Hoover’s popularity illustrates a growing number of genre-bending titles that have taken off in the BookTok age. According to Hoover and her publishers, her novels “fall into the New Adult and Young Adult contemporary romance categories, as well as psychological thriller.”
While novels like “It Ends With Us” carry an emotional weight and sense of feminine catharsis characteristic of the bygone, problematically named “Chick Lit” genre (now generally called women’s fiction), they also contain sexual content that aligns them with a growing, TikTok-driven desire for “spicy” books.
Even within the world of romance, the definitions and expectations of the genre are changing.
“Dark romance,” a subgenre with a large social media fan base, might contain something as tame as gothic spookiness or as graphic as any dirty mind could conjure. In this corner of the book world, there’s less expectation of a typical “happily ever after,” and many titles could be classified as erotica.
To make matters more confusing, traditional romances often contain some aspect of other genres: fantasy, murder, mystery or historical themes, for instance. Hoover’s books contain several of these overlaps at the same time – one essayist last year called them “the everything bagels of popular fiction.”
Diehl points out that Hoover’s success started with self-publishing, where things like genre and marketability are much more flexible. That may explain why her work is so hard to classify now that it’s represented by bigger publishers.
“Trade publishing has a lot more marketing behind it,” she says. “And once it makes its way into bookstores, obviously the bookstores and booksellers have more of a responsibility to accurately categorize the books that they are shelving.”
Managing reader expectations gets even more complicated when larger trends in the publishing space obfuscate the actual content of the book. Hoover’s books are cloaked in bright, fashionable colors, and her author website offers boutique-style merchandise with flowers and calligraphy and inside jokes from her books.
That doesn’t exactly square with a lot of her readers’ emotionally brutal reading experiences. But Diehl says that’s an issue that goes beyond Hoover’s books.
“Romance has a marketing problem, and it’s not just Hoover,” she says. “They love a trend, they love whatever is working on social media. It’s more important that a cover, say, looks good in an Instagram flat lay, surrounded by cups of coffee and things to create an aspirational scene, than accurately depicting what people have come to expect.”
Hoover herself is aware of the unusual classifications of her books that leave some readers disappointed but millions more waiting on her every word.
“I don’t like to be confined to one genre,” Hoover’s Goodreads profile reads. “If you put me in a box, I’ll claw my way out.”
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