Romanticise this!
Colleen Hoover's fall from grace, and the moral panic over "impressionable young girls"
In 2023 Colleen Hoover stepped in it.
The New York Times bestseller and oft-proclaimed BookTok darling, who sold more books than the Bible last year, announced she and her publisher, Atria, were issuing a coloring book for her biggest hit, It Ends With Us.
The negative response was swift and overwhelming for obvious reasons. It Ends With Us is a book about domestic violence. Hoover detractors who say she romanticizes abuse had a new weapon in their arsenal: How can Hoover pretend she takes the subject matter seriously while creating cutesy, juvenile merchandise?
I won’t lie to you— in the first wave of Hoover backlash I felt a little thrill up my spine. Finally, finally people were seeing what I was seeing; the Emperor has no clothes. The author that takes up a disproportionate amount of our time and attention (if BookTok promotes “the same five books” like the app is oft-accused of, then Hoover would have written at least four of them) can finally be shelved for a while.
That smug sensation I felt was brief because, as it often happens, the backlash became less to do with Hoover herself, and more to do with the young women who love her.
It Ends With Us
Hoover initially released It Ends With US in 2016, but thanks to a resurgence in popularity on social media during the pandemic, the book has become something of a lightning rod.
When I first joined BookTok it was generally understood that you criticize Hoover at your own risk. Her fans were like Swifties: fierce and loyal defenders who would absolutely flood your comment section with their displeasure if a review leans negative. As much as this phenomenon is attributed to Hoover’s TikTok stardom, YouTube timestamps prove that this isn’t the case. In a review of It Ends With Us in 2016, YouTuber Bookerly hedges her thoughts with the disclaimer: “I was really hesitant to put up this review, by the way. Really, I’m just afraid of the backlash.”
Even before the tasteless coloring book announcement, something shifted. Now when you search her name on both TikTok and YouTube the top reviews are not just negative, but downright scathing. Bookerly’s early video on It Ends With Us is no longer the “only negative” review on YouTube as the title claims— it’s buried underneath Hoover takedowns, some of which have hundreds of thousands of views.
The common refrain is that Hoover’s writing isn’t just bad — it’s harmful to her young fans, and this sentiment is echoed in comments, blogs, and tweets ad naseum. (In a case of extreme performativism, one Twitter user filmed themselves burning the book in protest.)
“Fiction, especially fiction read by younger audiences, can have a large effect on how people perceive topics like consent and healthy relationships. While Hoover is not a YA novelist, she has cultivated a base that is largely made up of young people through BookTok” according to The Mary Sue.
From Bookstr’s article, Let’s Leave Colleen Hoover Behind in 2023: “Hoover has curated an audience of young, impressionable minds, and the last thing they need to learn is that abusive relationships are okay and to be expected.”
The Mary Sue also has a summary of the coloring book debacle that points to three different college newspaper editorials as evidence that readers largely find that It Ends With Us, and Hoover’s work as a whole, romanticizes abuse. I’m not comfortable critiquing college editorials; I remember my college years as a time when I tried to synthesize my discomfort as a (former) woman and a queer person into an appropriate media target, as if I could eviscerate it so thoroughly that the world that inspired it could no longer hurt me.
But I am comfortable critiquing The Mary Sue, and I think it’s very interesting they lob criticism at Hoover from both sides: the college editorials that say she romanticizes abuse, along with a popular YouTuber they linked that called It Ends With Us didactic, or obnoxiously moralistic and instructional.
Which is it?
Shock and Didact
It Ends With Us is marketed as a romantic love triangle between a young woman named Lily, her yuppie surgeon love interest, Ryle, and her childhood friend Atlas. This is intentionally misleading — the bulk of the book is about Lily and Ryle’s relationship, which becomes abusive by degrees, slowly enough that when it finally hits you — Oh this is a book about domestic violence — it’s a legitimate shock. Ryle’s charisma and domineering nature are initially not all that far off from a specific (read: “alphahole”) type of romance hero, so while the red flags were clear enough, the false promise of genre romance (that this will work out in the end!) framed Ryle’s early behavior, if not in a sympathetic light, a wait-and-see one.
It Ends With Us, frankly, doesn’t work without this deception. The Ryle reveal is the emotional manipulation that gives this book a sense of heft. Without it, it’s simply a didactic story, a paint-by-numbers of how to recognize and respond to abuse. The title It Ends With Us is a nod to the moment when Lily, who had an abusive father, breaks the cycle of abuse by leaving Ryle.
I’m a little bit shocked that this book, this book, has become the moral panic du jour. I would understand if it all came post-coloring book, but the Colleen Hoover backlash was well underway beforehand. Even if the coloring book actually made its way into existence (it was canceled less than 24 hours after it was announced), it’s unlikely that anyone but fans of It Ends With Us would have purchased it in the first place. Barnes and Noble has famously “curbed the clutter,” so there’s very little chance that some unsuspecting child would pick up a book-themed coloring book, enjoy it enough to read It Ends With Us, and then sign up for intimate partner violence.
Impressionable Young Girls
Even before the Parents Music Resource Center raised the alarm about rock lyrics alluding to masturbation and sadomasochism in the early 1980s, modern media has been an easy target for our anxieties around children growing up in a world we can’t fully shield them from. Quite a few moral panics of the past few decades, including the PMRC’s drive to label (and therefore censor) lyrics, the Satanic panic of the 1980s (which encompassed everything from Dungeons & Dragons to heavy metal), and the late 90s uproar over guns in video games all centered around the fear that media was prepping young men for real-world deviancy and violence.
With the benefit of time, these moral panics seem not only reactionary, but a conservative and cop-like approach to blaming systemic problems on a constantly moving target. In A few words on violence, Roger Ebert noted that “You would think that the opponents of media violence would also be in the crusade for gun control. Curiously, the two causes seem to draw different sides of the political spectrum.”
But while the panics about young men consuming violent material argue it primes them for aggression, the panics about young women argue that media primes them to be the recipients of abuse. In It Ends With Us, after displaying increasingly controlling behavior, Ryle pushes Lily down the stairs. Ergo, young Colleen Hoover fans are more likely to be lulled into complacency, to have romanticized abusive behavior to the point that they see it as a sign of love, not violence, until it’s too late.
When I was in undergrad, my Gender Studies professor brought in an expert to speak about domestic violence. “Why do women stay in abusive relationships?” she asked us, a group of teenagers and twenty-somethings that thought we knew everything.
“Because they think it’s love.” my classmate answered confidently, an assertion that was methodically picked apart over the next forty-five minutes.
What I learned then, and what has been reaffirmed by studies, is that people largely don’t stay in abusive relationships because they think abusive behavior is romantic. The reasons vary but are largely systemic — without a social safety net, it’s easy to abuse someone not just physically, but financially, essentially trapping them. In a lesson that women of color absorbed much earlier, white women in the classroom also learned that the cops aren’t a shield from domestic violence— in fact, you’re pretty likely to encounter an abuser in blue by bringing the police into the equation.
The assertion about romanticizing abuse is even more aggravating considering that the act of leaving an abusive relationship — which is the universally approved way to respond to abuse — is when targets of abuse are subjected to the most violence by their abuser. Doing everything *the right way* comes with a substantial risk. With the announcement of Blake Lively’s casting in the It Ends With Us movie adaptation, The Mary Sue finally elaborated on why they think the book romanticizes abuse, including the fact that “the book also encourages women not to pursue legal action against their abusers, even if it’s to protect their children.” But they also note that Lily is “deterred or talked down” from legal action by friends and loved ones.
It seems like this could be read in two very different ways: one, which The Mary Sue takes, is that Lily doesn’t react to abuse in the appropriate way and the book endorses all of her choices. The other is an exercise in empathy; Hoover wrote an imperfect book on domestic violence, but if we require all of these narratives to be morally unimpeachable there’s no room to acknowledge that there is no such thing as a perfect victim.
While someone can showcase behaviors that signal their potential to be an abusive partner, it’s impossible to be sure. But even if it was obvious, if you could always be sure, if everyone had the resources to respond to abuse appropriately, this panic still puts the onus on the victim. Consume the right media, absorb the right ideas, and you will be safe from harm. Abusers work to isolate their victims, and here we carry the message for them: it’s not anyone else’s responsibility to protect you — it’s yours alone.
Welcome to the Dark Side
Hoover is by and large not a romance novelist, but she gets a lot of the same criticism by way of having an audience of young women. If It Ends With Us is both didactic and harmful, if leaving your abuser isn’t enough to escape accusations of “romanticizing abuse,” what do we do with the romance novels where the heroine ends up with her abuser? What do we do with romance novels that, through dual POV, give us the abuser’s perspective?
Dark romance is more of an umbrella term than a subgenre of romance, encapsulating everything from historical bodice rippers to mafia to motorcycle club romance novels. It’s been in use since at least the early 90s, in the romance anthology Dangerous Men and Adventurous Women, historical romance author Mary Jo Putney credits critic Kathe Robin from the Romantic Times for the moniker, saying, “Light romance evokes laughter and sweetness, while dark romance works with more intense emotions.”
A dark romance can involve rape by one of the main characters, physical abuse, childhood trauma, serial killers, or countless other types of bad behavior. A book is tagged as dark romance more as a content warning than as a mission statement, but the underlying idea is that this is a romance novel where you cannot expect clear-cut morality.
In the 2020s, the online defense of dark romance largely revolves around the personal. On the #darkromance side of TikTok they share recs and salacious screenshots, but you don’t have to scroll for long without coming across an indignant response to finger-wagging moralists, with dark romance TikTokers saying, “I’m a survivor. I’ve been abused. The safety net of a romance novel is how I process my trauma.” In a post-XO Jane world it’s so common to publicly unpack trauma, to rip yourself open for Internet critics—who never cared about you or your wellbeing in the first place— that it’s become the first line of defense for dark romance. Dark romance can be healing. See? I’m healing.
After a few years of seeing this, I’ve had enough. I don’t think this type of personal disclosure is necessary to express interest in a romance novel, and if It Ends With Us, which is not a romance novel and contains a character that leaves her abuser, is not didactic enough to escape the accusation of romanticizing abuse, where does that leave everyone else?
This is not, by any means, a new conversation. The idea that the primary goal of a romance novel is to be instructional, to set an example for young girls, is rooted in a patronizing and sexist belief that women, particularly young women, are incapable of distinguishing between fiction and reality. Second-wave feminists were critical of romance novels just because they focused on love — if a romance novel heroine desires romantic love above all else, surely the young reader will do the same. We’ve moved beyond that, but we seem to be stuck on the idea that a romance novel isn’t just a category of genre fiction, but that it needs to have moral justification to exist, that we can’t extract themes or feelings or ideas, but we need to be taught how to behave by a romance novel.
In the late 90s two historical romance novels came under fire for having a rape scene: Patricia Gaffney’s To Have and to Hold (which, full disclosure, is a novel I adore. My friend Emma has a wonderful piece on it here.) and Christina Dodd’s A Well Pleasured Lady. The latter sparked a conversation on the popular review site All About Romance, causing historical romance author Judith Ivory to chime in with her thoughts. [Emphasis my own.]
“As to good writing, you can talk about the quality of the prose, the structure, what makes the writing work or not – the writer’s ability to make her vision vital, real. But to discuss the subject matter as if it had something to do with the quality of the writing only ties an albatross around romance writer’s necks – an albatross no other genre is expected to wear. To accept that we carry a moral responsibility to society is to admit we have nothing to give society in terms of art itself. Art is about honesty. It’s about an individual’s expression of her own, unique vision.”
Like Ivory, I’m uninterested in viewing a romance novel through the lens of moral responsibility. I’d be pleased if the defense of romance novels had less to do with their moral and capitalist value ( “It’s a billion dollar industry!”), and focused more on the art of romance novels themselves. Romance novels by and large require a happily ever after, the “safety net,” as Mary Jo Putney calls it, but everything else is fair game.
It’s Not a Romance Novel
The primary betrayal of It Ends With Us is the marketing. Common wisdom in Romancelandia is that if a book pretends that it’s a romance novel but doesn’t deliver, romance readers will not forget. Hoover’s success is a cold bucket of water; you can masquerade your book as a romance novel and still be wildly successful.
This has not endeared Hoover to the romance community, myself included. I read It Ends With Us before I was on any type of bookish social media, before I had even heard of Hoover, and the Ryle reveal felt like a personal attack. I’ve been nursing my Hoover-related grudge for years, taking delight in every negative review I came across.
But as someone that loves romance novels, particularly the ones that overlap with elements of horror, I draw a hard line at the claims of romanticizing abuse by way of depicting it. If Hoover’s work, which does not bring the protagonists together, isn’t allowed to depict abuse, you can sure as hell believe detractors don’t think romance novels are allowed to do it either.
This is something I fully believe we should care about. We should be taking better care of each other, we should be leaning into empathy, we should not be forcing fans of romantic fiction to disclose personal trauma to justify their tastes. That, to me, is the real harm.
The Impressionables
When researching this piece, I spent a lot of time looking at Hoover’s praise and criticism online, and my conclusion is that we aren’t giving young women any credit. The Mary Sue asserts that there’s a plethora of Youtubers and TikTokers that disturbingly call themselves “Team Ryle,” but their linked evidence is to a YouTube account called Our Family Nest, which is dedicated to a Michigan family of 6 and their “online adventures.” The mother, Candi, is middle-aged, and it’s her review of It Ends With Us that is The Mary Sue’s evidence of impressionable minds being corrupted. In her review, Candi states, “To me, and obviously, I’ve not been involved in an abusive relationship, so cut me some slack here, I’m not speaking from experience… I felt like [Ryle’s] abuse was not the same as Lily’s dad’s abuse… I felt like [Lily’s dad’s] abuse was 100% intentional every time.”
This is not a good interpretation of the book, and the fault may lie with Hoover’s inability to portray nuance. (YouTuber Man Carrying Thing, linked earlier, criticized the portrayal of Ryle as being too“Jekyll and Hyde.”)
I’m not convinced of this. The sheer ubiquity of It Ends With Us is sure to garner more than its share of bad takes, and young Hoover fans online have been clear that they see Ryle as a villain, and the situation itself as complex.
From YouTuber polandbananasBOOKS in 2016: “So many times when a woman is being abused by her husband or her boyfriend, if you’re witnessing it from afar, it’s so easy to blame the victim for not leaving, but it’s more much complicated than that when you’re in that situation.”
From YouTuber the invisible life of sky’s review last year, “I feel like Colleen Hoover portrayed Ryle in such an interesting way, because he’s such a villain. He is so charismatic at the beginning of the book, and she wrote him to be very manipulative by using [his] tragic past and making excuses and his gaslighting.”
It Ends With Us, and Hoover herself, surely deserve criticism. Hoover’s best-selling status is more than enough of a reason to pick her work apart, and the ill-received coloring book is a clear indication that Hoover prioritized money above respecting her readers.
I would just ask that we leave “impressionable young girls” out of it. They’re smarter than you’re giving them credit for.
Love this! I feel like a lot of people who hate on Hoover feel like they have to have moral justification for not liking her books. You don’t need a moral reason to not like something lol, you can just think it’s bad.
Great piece.