You Should Read Colleen Hoover
Yes, really.
Recently, we read a novel that should be catnip for the literati. One girl, a helpless witness to her mother’s abuse, grows up and leaves home for good. Will she escape the cycle of domestic violence… or repeat it? In scenes of abuse, it’s unflinching; in moments of agonizing complication, such as when the protagonist feels pity for her abuser, it’s daringly true to life. Characters say what they feel, and it’s often uncomfortable. No softening the dialogue to fit the currently “correct” sensibilities.
Of course, we’re talking about Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel It Ends With Us. Have you read it?
The chattering class overlooks Hoover—and popular writers like her—to its own detriment. Not only has she been a quiet champion for free expression in literature, she’s a self-made, genre-defying, working-class maverick whose open, non-judgmental attitude gives her credibility and relevance across every division you could list: religious, cultural, political, national, and class. The disdain Hoover routinely receives (one representative guide to Hoover’s oeuvre is titled “the bad, the terrible, and everything in between”) says far more about the literati’s contradictory, perhaps even suicidal impulses, than the quality of her writing. And that says a great deal about how the divides in American life play out, and how Americans—even avid readers—are, so to speak, on an entirely different page from one another.
In a more capacious, and generous, state of mind, the literati would look past their hang-ups with Hoover and treat a writer like her as a golden opportunity to really understand the zeitgeist and to bridge cultural divides. Or, at a minimum, would be excited that somebody is reading something and would give “popular literature” the courtesy of trying to figure out what all the fuss is about.
In case you’ve been living in a cave the last decade, Colleen Hoover rose from self-published obscurity to become a record-breaking, word-of-mouth sales sensation. She released her first novel in 2012. Although she’s often described as a TikTok phenomenon, anointed to fame by luck and the algorithm, the truth is that she’s a hustler who built her audience of “CoHorts” from the ground up. According to The New York Times, when she self-published her first novel she was making $9 an hour and living in a trailer; she used her $30 royalty check to pay the water bill. Her years of effort have paid off, big-time. By 2022, she’d written six of the ten books on The New York Times Best Seller list. To date, Hoover’s books have sold over 50 million copies worldwide. Hoover inspires plenty of talk (CNN described her as America’s “most controversial” author), but as the literary agent and romance novel guru Alyssa Morris told us, “There’s not a real engagement with her actual books. It’s an engagement with her persona or the perception of her persona.”
In the chomping maw of internet discourse, Hoover is an avatar for a multitude of hot-button talking points: algorithmic slop, political correctness (in that she’s very much not), good reading vs. bad reading, and the gender wars. Outlets like The Atlantic and The New York Times tend to focus on Hoover’s rags-to-riches success and the adjacent, admittedly juicy personal dramas—particularly the legal battle between Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively, which overshadowed the 2024 movie adaptation of It Ends With Us. Meanwhile, regular readers respond in a very different way. They share how her stories make them feel: emotionally devastated, gobsmacked by twists, connected to the characters, and excited to read more, and more, and more. (Hoover is, at press time, up to 26 books, and counting.)
“But the sentences!” we hear you crying out. “They’re so bad!” Well, sure, yes. Some of them really are bad—and internet trolls have produced whole online exhibits dedicated to the very worst of her writing. Here, for instance, is one snippet of dialogue from 2014’s Ugly Love: “‘Miles,’ I say with a smile, ‘you’re looking at me like you fell in love with me.’ / He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t fall in love, Tate. I flew.’” Let that stand in for some sentences that are even less tasteful. But, as damning an indictment of Hoover’s writing as her own prose might be, clunky sentences abound in award-winning books as well. (Looking at you, Ocean Vuong, Rita Bullwinkel, and Colson Whitehead!) Hoover’s awkward phrases aren’t a sufficient explanation for why she’s become the approved target of so much reflexive disdain. Maybe it’s because she has no gatekeeper pedigree, only gumption, and her self-publishing origin story has left a permanent stain for reading audiences that insist on the imprimatur of high-end publishing companies. (The fact that she’s a fixture with the Big Five now doesn’t seem to matter.)
Part of it, we feel bound to say, may be simple sexism. Hoover’s been siloed as a “women’s issues” writer, and dismissed accordingly—there is so often a sneering belittlement towards her work. At the same time, there is an incessant suspicion of Hoover as being somehow toxic to her fragile female readers. The word “problematic” is so frequently appended to her that it might as well be an epithet. A common bugbear of anti-CoHos (yes, there is such a thing) is her refusal to spoil her twisty plots with trigger warnings—which the P.C. crowd likes to demand. And the myth that “BookTok” alone created her success makes her a stand-in for wider grievances with social media and the internet age. Hoover’s critics have won the vibe war. For many, Hoover’s been branded a uniquely bad writer, a novelist for the slop age.
What’s more, Hoover’s writing is often coded for—and we wish there was another way to say this—white trash. Instead of wealthy people behaving badly or saintly victims, we have baby daddies, incarceration, and student-teacher relationships. Her characters’ names (Ryle, Ledger), backgrounds (nursing student, ex-military, modest upbringings), and plot mishaps (accidental pregnancies, secret affairs) cue contempt among certain kinds of readers. Lily, the main character in Hoover’s most famous book, It Ends With Us, holds the common, often maddeningly forgiving attitude that her abusive husband Ryle is not a bad person, and that, as Ryle himself puts it at one point, “we’re all just people who sometimes do bad things”—a perspective that Lily herself seems to sympathize with and that is never entirely repudiated within the narrative. As writers ourselves, we admire Hoover for staying loyal to her protagonist’s mixed-up human feelings. The many readers (and media outlets) who took the novel to task for “glamorizing” domestic violence seem to have missed Hoover’s point entirely: domestic violence can happen to any of us.
In high-brow novels, being a victim of abuse will ruin your life and then kill you or those you love (Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, Anna Burns’s Milkman all serve as examples). They are novels without a lot of hope. In contrast, This Ends With Us dares to be unliterary. The heroine not only lives in the end, but finds a new, happy relationship with someone else and a co-parenting equilibrium with Ryle. Like it or not, this situation is one that many, many readers recognize, and arguably aspire to—down to the quotidian details of shuffling a child between two households. (Hoover describes the novel as being heavily drawn from her own parents’ relationship.) It’s worth pondering: Who’s out of touch here, the high-brow cynics or the humbler dreamers? Not to mention that high-brow novels almost never deliver the kinds of shocking, satisfying twists that Hoover has built her career on.
Reaching readers is harder than ever. More than half of Americans read no books at all. Maybe you pride yourself on reading daring, bold books, or perhaps you’re in the middle of a reading slump and desperate for a compulsive page-turner. Maybe you’re just an ornery contrarian (we can sympathize) who prefers to make up your own mind rather than leaning on received opinion. Regardless, we invite all readers to reject the culture of scorn and add a Colleen Hoover novel to their list.
Book culture is at its best when it’s also popular culture, but reading is rapidly becoming a niche hobby—and the entrenched snobbery of literary types isn’t helping. If we want to think clearly about the role of books in America, then we need to think clearly about Colleen Hoover and popular writers like her—and the way that Hoover, in particular, has put a voice to so many women’s experiences. Where many other writers, whatever their literary merits, fail to attract audiences, she wins readers over and pulls lapsed readers back into the fold. We dismiss her at our own loss.
Melanie Jennings is a MacDowell fellow whose short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Hotel Amerika, and Crab Orchard Review. She lives in Oregon where she is working on a novel. Here is her Substack.
Elizabeth Kaye Cook is a writer in New York City. Her fiction and nonfiction have been published in Carve, The Gettysburg Review, Three Crows Magazine, and others. Her newsletter is Notes from Elizabeth Kaye Cook.
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Or, you could just re-read the old tried and true classics. I just started "The Idiot." It's been a long time since my first reading, but I know I won't be disappointed. Lots of good sentences.
I'm going to push back on this a bit. If you're an author seeking to be published and want to get a sense of what sells, or you just want to be more plugged into the zeitgeist, by all means read Hoover. I guess you should also listen to Joe Rogan for that matter and watch Fox News.
But I have a limited amount of time in my day. I don't consume art because it's culturally relevant. I read books and watch movies and listen to music because I genuinely enjoy these activities. I can't think of anything less enjoyable than spending my evenings wading through turgid prose as an anthropological exercise.