At the end of the Book, in the Note from the Author, Hoover says she based Lily on her own mother, who left Hoover’s abusive father just before Hoover turned three. Hoover didn’t need to research this topic. Her mother lived it and, as Hoover is at pains to point out at the end of the book, “She wasn’t rescued by another man – a knight in shining armour. She took the initiative to leave my father on her own”.
Lily, as a teenager, watches her mother being abused by her father. Her mother is unable to walk away from the situation; the abuse stops only because the dad dies. As an adult, the empathetic but also insecure Lily finds herself drawn to the love-bombing, pent-up Ryle. Three months into their relationship, he is physically abusive to her, in a reworking of a scenario that had happened to Hoover’s mother. Soon, Lily finds herself thinking, “People spend so much time wondering why the women don’t leave. Where are all the people who wonder why the men are even abusive?” It’s crucial to the book’s effect that the self-deluded Ryle is a painfully human and, in many ways, sympathetic figure. You don’t want Lily to stay with Ryle; each abuse scene is more harrowing than the last. At the same time, you understand why it’s hard – emotionally and financially – for her to extricate herself from his life.
‘Text-book bad boys‘
So why is Hoover criticised for white-washing abuse? Maybe it’s because so many of the heroes in her other novels are text-book bad boys – sexily screwed-up loners who put the heroines through hell before offering the heaven of a Happily Ever After. In 2014’s Ugly Love, traumatised pilot, Miles, is sometimes sensitive but mostly “angry” and “intimidating”, a combination which heroine, Tate, finds irresistible. In Hoover’s 2015 novel November 9th, budding writer, Ben, sets fire to a car, stalks Fallon, (the victim of said fire) and fantasises about using physical force against her. In 2018’s Verity, we discover that handsome married hero, Jeremy, once tried to kill his wife. At the end of the book, he kills his wife.
True, in 2022, Hoover wrote a bonus epilogue chapter for Verity (published exclusively in the collector’s edition, but available on-line), that paints both Jeremy and the love-struck young narrator, Lowen, as unhinged. But that doesn’t cut any ice with feminist film critic, Linda Marric. “Colleen Hoover has made her name by fetishing toxic relationships,” Marric tells the . “Her very young readership are growing up thinking that unacceptable behaviour, by men, is normal.” (The approached Colleen Hoover’s representatives for comment.)
