Colleen Hoover: It Ends With Us
August 18, 2024
I always glance over the NY Times weekly best-seller list, and started noticing the name Colleen Hoover, new to me. But not only did she make the list — she had six of the ten fiction slots!
What was going on there, I wondered.
All her books’ brief descriptions sounded like pretty standard modern mass-market novels. Not my usual reading fare. But still, the outsized success made me curious. Just as an intellectual observer of human society. And as a writer myself (decidedly less successful). So, when a copy of her book It Ends With Us* crossed my path, I decided to read it. Analytically, of course.
It surprised me.
The male lead has just the sort of name you’d expect: Ryle Kincaid. He’s a neurosurgeon and (no surprise) a hunk (to use a technical literary term). The gal’s name, however, is somewhat goofy, Lily Blossom Bloom. Aptly enough, she opens a florist shop. The book did have some of that sort of engaging quirkiness.
Meeting Lily, Ryle desperately wants sex with her — but just once. That’s his thing. Whereas hers is seeking a holy grail of an enduring relationship. So she fends him off. Yet he’s really gotten under her skin, and when, after great effort, he reconnects with her, she reluctantly capitulates, agreeing to sleep with him.
But that proves to be merely literal. Returning to her bedroom after readying herself, she finds Ryle fallen soundly asleep (exhausted from his medical duties). So no hot sex scene.
At their next encounter I told myself, here it comes. Now, I do know that ravishment is a staple of romance fiction, playing to a certain kind of women’s erotic fantasizing (and some men’s). And this was starting to look a lot like outright rape. Prompting me to think ahead to how I’d tut-tut about it here. But yet again it turns into a sexless sleepover.
Well, teasing is also a staple in this literary genre. Like so much in life, anticipation beats experiencing.
Anyhow, “third time’s the charm.” Though I’m not expert at such writing, the verbiage there seemed pretty standard. It didn’t give me an erection. (And no, I’m not that elderly.)
Nevertheless, the emotive intensity depicted was pretty powerful. And not only in the sex scenes (which are few, actually), but throughout the story. Which gets complicated by the reappearance in Lily’s life of the only other man for whom she’d once had similarly intense feelings. What a remarkably innovative plot twist.
But though Lily and Ryle do marry, it’s not a “happily after,” and actually the book is not mainly a love story, nor a love triangle story. Its real theme is domestic violence.
Ryle is a pretty good guy, almost always, but with a jealous streak, stoking a temper. Twice it flares up violently. Seemingly so out of character, but not unbelievable. People do occasionally, momentarily, make big mistakes.
The reader might want Lily to see it that way. And I was actually expecting the couple to work things out and save their marriage. But, despite the intensity of her love for Ryle, she can’t do it. Because her father had blighted her childhood with physical abuse of her mother. Lily’s painful struggle over this, vis-a-vis Ryle, is the book’s emotional lynchpin. She will not expose her own newborn daughter to repeating the pattern. Hence the book’s title.
The author, in an afterword, explains that she too had a father violent toward his wife, which inspired her writing this. And I could personally relate to how such an emotional dynamic can destroy a relationship. Being reminded of a woman I was on track to marry — until not violence, but a joke letter I wrote, misfired and triggered some ancient trauma, irreparably blowing up our bond.
* Now it’s a major movie.