Losing Hope

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses suicide, sexual abuse of children and minors, and domestic abuse.

In 2011, Colleen Hoover was a social worker living in a trailer with her husband and son, writing a story about a slam poet during her son’s theatre rehearsals. She shared her book with her family, then self-published it on Amazon for the primary purpose of providing her grandmother an opportunity to read the book on her Kindle. Readers somehow found the book, entitled Slammed, and Hoover began to take self-promotion more seriously. BookTubers (a subcommunity on YouTube) and Bookstagram (a subcommunity on Instagram) influencers took notice and began reviewing the novel. It became a New York Times bestseller a few months later. Ten years after that first book, six of the bestselling books of 2022 were Hoover titles.

Hoover is not without her critics, however. Some readers and reviewers have decried her books as glorifying toxic masculinity and trauma experienced by women, including sexual assault and domestic violence. Some describe her narratives as “trauma plots” or “misery lit,” as her characters tend to experience extreme trauma (Swain, Marianka. “BookTok superstar Colleen Hoover has sold 20 million novels ­– but does she glamourise trauma?” The Telegraph, 2022).