#Title

OPINION

The world of Colleen Hoover does not warrant celebration
Writer and #BookTok queen Colleen Hoover is quite hard to escape in any bookstore or library these days. The hashtag, #colleenhoover on TikTok alone has over 560 million views, and that must say something. In order to truly understand the appeal to her books, I decided to take up a book she has written, and thus started a journey I wish I never took.
SYEDA AFRIN TARANNUM
It Ends With Us (Atria Books, 2016) navigates the world of the protagonist, Lily Bloom, after her college graduation. The novel starts with the death of Lily’s father, with whom she had a trauma riddled relationship due to his abusive tendencies. She then falls into an equally troublesome relationship with Ryle, a man with whom her relationship flourishes on the basis of creepy encounters. This includes Ryle framing an enlarged version of Lily’s photo without her consent, and outbursts of jealousy.
Only after multiple bouts of unnecessarily graphic imagery of domestic violence, a semi-heartfelt speech by a friend/past lover (who is also set in a world of incredible trauma during his own childhood), and a quasi-surprise pregnancy, does Lily realise she must end this cycle of abuse, and hence comes the title, It Ends With Us .
While I could go on for pages about my personal issues with this story, I want to highlight the issues I think are detrimental to anybody reading these books.
Firstly, most characters, especially the women, seem to have no agency, and no mind of their own to make clear judgements for themselves. The turning point for Lily in It Ends With Us is the birth of her own daughter, as if her own life, and the abuse delivered to her, had no real value.
Additionally, Colleen Hoover’s writing deals with toxic relationships terribly. What is probably meant as foreshadowing, are clear signs of inappropriate behaviour, harassment, and even abuse. However, her characters often fail to recognise these signs, and when they do, they continue to make excuses for those horrible actions. “Sometimes an unexpected wave comes along, sucks you up and refuses to spit you back out”, Lily says at one point in It Ends With Us . “Ryle is my unexpected tidal wave, and right now I’m skimming the beautiful surface.”
This depiction of love in the novel (as well as in Hoover’s other stories) are all immersed in abuse and problematic behaviour. Unless it is the “truer” love, which blossoms and is shared through trauma bonding.
Hoover’s reader base largely consists of young teenagers who are notoriously known to be impressionable. Depiction of such problematic forms of ‘romance’ and relationships surely distort the judgement of readers regarding love and romance. Not only that, Hoover’s habit of continually making her characters justify and excuse “lesser” forms of abuse, does the opposite of spreading awareness regarding the realities of abuse.
What is truly infuriating is that her stories are usually a cluster of one form of abuse after the other, each layered on top of the other without any attempt to unpack the event itself or its impact—on the surface level or through the characters—leading to no real positive impact to visceral scenes. It seems as if the only thing furthering the plot of her stories are these episodes of assault.
The author has been under immense controversy for her actions in real life as well, with accusations of turning a blind eye to her own son’s alleged harassment, and most recently for attempting to publish a colouring book for a book depicting graphic scenes of domestic violence and abuse.
This article has repetitively mentioned the words assault, trauma, violence and abuse multiple times, and that precisely, is where my problem lies with Colleen Hoover. With surface level characters, and nothing beyond trauma in her plot, Hoover continues to capitalise on what she calls “telling the reality of abuse”, which I would much rather like to call “glorification of trauma” at best.
Afrin Tarannum is a Sub editor at SHOUT magazine , The Daily Star.