A woman is crowned with a huge, curly red wig, strutting down the street, clad in competing patterns. Boxers are sitting above low-rise trousers, all partially hidden beneath a mustard yellow jacket and stripey button down, with flashy golden boots peeking out below frayed edges. This startling image is not a challenge that Tyra subjected exhausted competitors to in an early season of America’s Next Top Model, nor is it the moment a young Disney star (sans stylist) swaggered onto their first red carpet in the early 2000s. Instead, this woman is Blake Lively and this achievement in bizarre costuming is the first glimpse that people were granted of the onscreen adaptation of the hugely popular novel, It Ends with Us, from perennially online author Colleen Hoover.
Fans of the book responded immediately, and derisively, to these fractured snippets; “The wig, the outfit, none of this is reading a young girl in her 20s, starting life in the big city!” TikToker Talking to Tequila remarked. In some ways, this is the least compelling kind of internet “discourse”, people negotiating their idea of something, while the finished product lies buried beneath rumors and blurry set photos and TikTok accounts. Yet this discussion also functions as proof of Hoover’s hold on a subset of the culture, and gestures to something interesting in the prickly process of adapting.
Hoover’s books are strange and meandering epics, successfully elucidating and ignoring the state of modern womanhood. In their long sentences and romantic preoccupations, they read as fanfiction for women who have never read fanfiction. Like all of her writing, It Ends with Us unfolds in the first person, with abrasively flirtatious dialogue occasionally interrupting the stream-of-consciousness-style prose. In an Elle profile of Hoover, she expands on the logic behind her undisciplined style: “If I’m supposed to [sit] here talking about character descriptions or describing a room or anything that’s going to make me not interested, I just skip it [and] start writing dialogue. I write what I want to read.” Executing this story from an under-developed, purely subjective vantage point means that character and plot are thrust upon the reader in sudden, unpracticed spurts, erupting from a vague source.
It Ends with Us’ protagonist, Lily Blossom Bloom (Hoover’s bizarre naming strategy could be summarized by that viral “chalkboard baby naming” meme), is a better-defined main character than most of the ilk’s others. Hoover achieves this by placing Lily across various intersections in her own timeline. She lives her adult life, slowly falling in love with the elusive Ryle, while her teenage diary relays a past with Atlas (I warned you about the names). Hoover’s protagonists are empty vessels, in their lack of observance they function as blurry avatars, catching the different kinds of female readers who cross the book’s paths.
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