How Did Colleen Hoover Get Here?
Breaking down the romance author’s success and stagnation.
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“This may be either a new rock bottom for me or the best thing to ever come out of my brain,” Colleen Hoover began in an Instagram Story on March 18. What she presented was not a forthcoming romance novel — the genre upon which her best-seller fame is built — but the idea of freezing Diet Pepsi in an ice-cube tray so that she can cool her Diet Pepsi with, well, more Diet Pepsi. This isn’t an especially original idea, as “coffee ice cubes” are an old food hack, but Hoover’s Instagram Stories caught her fans’ attention in part because of her bizarre behavior in the videos. She speaks slowly and quietly, almost slurring her words as she explains a concept not especially complicated. The It Ends With Us author later mentioned that her boss (she has a boss?) put the merch on her site on sale against her knowledge, which would soon lead to her being “broke as shit.” Is this something to worry about, or is she fucking with us?
Public interest in Hoover spiked during the legal drama surrounding last year’s It Ends With Us, as though the author may have some kind of authority about which of the film’s stars, Justin Baldoni or Blake Lively, are in the wrong. Hoover spoke out in support of Blake at the end of last year, but then deactivated her Instagram in January and returned with photos of the cast of the film scrubbed from her account. An author is not always a celebrity in their own right, but Hoover, not unlike Taylor Swift, spent years cultivating online relationships with her fans. Those who bought her books often felt like they had her ear, be it on Facebook or Instagram. As her fame ballooned, Hoover navigated those treacherous waters by just being herself, going so far as to defend her son when he allegedly abused an ex.
When lawsuits piled up around the first film adaptation of her novel to hit theaters, however, she recused herself from the front lines of both posting and publishing. Now that she’s returned to Instagram, it’s not clear how we’re supposed to read her complaints about money or her Diet Pepsi cube invention: Is it shitposting, spiraling, or somewhere in between? How we — and she — got to this point remains a bit of a mystery, with Hoover’s fate in all this mess uncertain. Below, a look back at how Colleen Hoover went from a self-published phenomenon to whatever is happening now.
The self-publishing era
Hoover began writing in 2011 while working for child protective services and raising her children. She self-published her first novel, Slammed, on Amazon so that her mother would be able to download it onto her Kindle. Slammed is set in the world of high-school slam poetry, and the novel tells the story of a senior who moves to a new neighborhood only to fall her neighbor, a cute older boy. Lo and behold, when the school year starts up, the guy next door is actually … her English teacher. Drama, tears, laughter, and slam poetry all ensue. The twisty-turny forbidden nature of the book set the course for Hoover’s novels to come: romances where there is one big dark thing (a dead ex, an incest subplot, an age difference, abuse) standing in the way of what might be true love.
The best-seller era
It Ends With Us, Hoover’s biggest and most notable hit, came out in 2016, a few months after her Facebook group “Colleen Hoover’s CoHorts” launched. She struck publishing deals with a number of publishing houses, keen to look out for No. 1 rather than commit herself to one imprint. It Ends With Us was loosely based on Hoover’s mother’s experience with domestic violence, and the novel is far and away her most successful, having sold more than 10 million copies worldwide. Around this time, her books also start to become objects of fascination for people on BookTube and BookTok, for better and worse. Part of what emerges around Hoover’s bibliography is that plenty of her fans do not actually like her books that much, but they read them all the same.
Hollywood era
While It Ends With Us was optioned in 2019 by Justin Baldoni’s now–legally maligned company Wayfarer Studios, it was Blake Lively’s casting as the novel’s heroine, Lily Blossom Bloom, in January 2023 that launched Hoover’s recognizability to the stratosphere. Just as the actors in the film were front and center in the lead-up to the events, so too was Hoover — her name and work are now attached to a number of other adaptations. There’s Michael Showalter’s take on Verity, starring Anne Hathaway, Josh Hartnett, and Dakota Johnson, which was spotted filming in Manhattan earlier this month. We also have to be on the lookout for Allison Williams in Regretting You and Maika Monroe in Reminders of Him.
Part of what’s felt increasingly bizarre about Hoover’s presence in the Hollywoodification of her work is that she is, at the end of the day, mostly a civilian. How much she wants to catapult her success into being a public figure remains to be seen, but her dipping out in the midst of the Baldoni-Lively lawsuits suggests maybe fame and fortune is more than she bargained for. The author has faced a bit of backlash herself in the past few years, having to deny that she blocked a young woman for alleging that Hoover’s son assaulted had her in 2022, when she was underage. Hoover took to her Facebook group to deny, at the very least, the first part of all that: “AS SOON as I found out about this months ago, I reached out to her,” she wrote. “We discussed what happened, I apologized to her and thanked her for bringing this to my attention, and I offered to send her our home address and lawyer info should she want it.”
The “it never ends” era
Despite a number of adaptations of her preexisting books planned for the next few years, Hoover hasn’t published a new novel since 2022’s It Starts With Us (the sequel, despite its confusing verb choice, to It Ends With Us). “I write when I feel like writing. If I’m late on deadline, I’m late on deadline. I want to put out books that I don’t feel I have been forced to release, and I think that’s the key,” Hoover explained to People last year. It’s probably a nice reprieve after publishing several novels per year for a decade. There’s likely nothing amiss, exactly, with Hoover, but she seems to be much less keen for the spotlight after the past 18 months. That said, if times are so dire that she’s telling people on Instagram to buy her merch, maybe it’s time to crack open the laptop, Colleen.
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