5 Comments

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.

Expand full comment
Feb 21, 2023Liked by Chels

Great piece.

Expand full comment

Great, great piece. I'm so troubled by this backlash. If there isn't room in the world for *this* book, what's the future of the romance genre?

Expand full comment

This is a really thoughtful piece. Thank you for sharing it!

Expand full comment

I'll admit first and foremost I haven't read a single Colleen Hoover book in my life (and I have no intention to), but I've been following the drama from afar. Thinking about it, I feel like some of the pearl clutchers here have a very... condescending view of abuse victims? They probably don't realize it themselves (and there might be a fair chance some of them are also victims of abuse who process it by self-loathing), but there's this clear tendency to dictate how the victim should act, how the abuser should act, etc. And life doesn't really work that way. There are plenty of abusers who will be very charming to everyone while hiding their darker side at home, and throw a bone at their partner while still abusive. Plenty of victims will stay because there *have* been good moments in the relationship, despite how dysfunctional it is. Why did Katherine of Aragon write in her last letter to Henry VIII that "mine eyes desire you above all things", after he treated her so horribly? And she wasn't some impressionable young girl, she was well in her fifties, still considered herself Queen of England despite her marriage having been annulled, fought and won a battle against Scotland where the King of the latter country ended up dead, a princess of Spain whose parents were Ferdinand and Isabella of Spanish Inquisition fame, and her nephew was the Holy Roman Emperor. You'd think she wouldn't stand for this, but there was a time where their marriage was happy, and to her, that was enough to still love him. It's sad, but that's how things are for some people.

Would that reality influence people to stay in an abusive relationship? Maybe, but I think this has less to do with fiction and more about the society in which the reader is living. If we're talking about a very religious background where leaving your husband will ostracize you and doom you to hell, that's more likely to blame than a fiction novel. People can burn books all they want but that's not going to stop abusers from existing.

Expand full comment