Since March 2021, more than 1.7 million people have watched a TikTok of a 17-year-old white girl named Eloise Hampson alternately gnawing on her green hoodie, covering her mouth, sobbing with her head in her hands, and reading the final pages of Colleen Hoover’s 2016 romance, It Ends with Us. A computerized voiceover says, “I’ve never cried so long after a book.” Her post was part of a trend of BookTokers weeping over Hoover’s melodramas. Thanks to videos like these, It Ends with Us has sold more than 10 million copies, catapulting Hoover — a 44-year-old former social worker from Saltillo, Texas, who started out self-publishing — to mainstream fame. It Ends with Us recently made the leap to the big screen in an adaptation starring Blake Lively that grossed more than $348 million worldwide. For Hoover’s devotees, her appeal is simple — they read to rubberneck the turmoil she inflicts on her characters. As a 23-year-old BookToker told the Washington Post, “She puts her characters through the most insane situations. But their emotion is so real and so relatable and just open and raw and honest.”
That turmoil drives It Ends with Us, a novel whose pancake-flat characters and clunky prose left me depressed about the world’s literary tastes. Our narrator is Lily Blossom Bloom, 23, who dreams of being a florist (get it?). Lily seeks peace on a Boston rooftop after the funeral of her father, the “prodigious” mayor of her Maine hometown and batterer of her mother. A man swiftly breaks that peace by kicking the shit out of a “marine-grade polymer” chair. His name is Ryle (get it?), and he’s a relationship-phobic neurosurgery resident. Lily and Ryle share “naked truths” — she tells him about witnessing her father’s abuse; he tells her he wants to fuck her, a disclosure that “makes [her] feel a multitude of things all at once.” Sex keeps the couple googly-eyed until Ryle burns his hand on a casserole and pushes Lily, naked but for an apron, to the floor. Their mutual downplaying of Ryle’s escalating abuse propels them through a Vegas wedding.
This all unfolds in dialogue and overwritten physical description — eyes can “scrape,” “crawl,” and “scroll” in Hoover’s world. The closest we get to Lily’s interior life is via a diary she wrote at age 15, which is addressed to her favorite talk show host, Ellen DeGeneres. The diary tracks how Lily fell for Atlas, a boy squatting in the abandoned house abutting hers. His family is similarly riven by violence; they dream of life in Boston (astonishingly described as “where everything is better”), if only they can “just keep swimming” à la DeGeneres’ Dory in Finding Nemo. Of course, eight years later, Lily runs into Atlas in Boston; of course, Ryle’s jealousy of Atlas fuels his violence; of course, Atlas helps Lily escape. In the end, Lily draws on her mother’s wisdom and asks for a divorce after she births a daughter. (Get it? It Ends with Us.)
It all makes for “the trauma story retrofitted for the Hallmark channel,” as critic Lauren Mechling put it, a reading that explains why Hoover’s passé cultural references pass muster for readers who are not white Gen X women from small-town Texas — the novel’s sappiness and familiarity outweigh its dated feel. The depth of emotional insight is kindergarten level; here’s adult Lily reflecting on her diary: “Reading about the things my dad used to do to my mom puts me in a bad mood. Reading about Atlas kind of puts me in a sad mood. I try to fall asleep and think about Ryle, but the whole situation with him kind of makes me mad and sad.”
I wouldn’t be remarking on the vapidity of Hoover’s prose were it not for the fact that much of the commentariat refuses to acknowledge it. It Ends with Us has been lauded for representing the emotional complexity of leaving an abuser. Kirkus, a trade magazine known for withering reviews, declared that the novel “powerfully illustrates the devastation of abuse — and the strength of the survivors.” For the Washington Post, the film adaptation doesn’t match the “complexity” of the book, where “Hoover writes with painful intimacy about Lily’s struggle to claw free from her past.”
Much of this generous reception can be chalked up to deference to Hoover’s lived experience. In an author’s note, she writes that in her earliest memory, her father threw a television at her mother. Her mother divorced him soon after, before Hoover turned three. She writes that this novel was meant to be informative and “realistic” to her mother’s situation — though unlike her mother, who struggled to house and feed her daughters after fleeing, Lily encounters no financial stress.
The idea that Hoover executes her goal with power or complexity is laughable. In the back third of It Ends with Us, she shifts to didacticism. In a new, shoehorned diary entry (still addressed to Ellen), adult Lily suddenly understands that the “85 percent of women [who] return to abusive situations” are not “stupid” or “weak,” as she believed her mother to be — either they “didn’t have the resources to leave” or were, like her, “in love.” Twice in 10 pages, Lily rues that people question why women don’t leave rather than pondering why men abuse. But Hoover doesn’t engage with the factors that are widely understood to motivate domestic abusers — namely, a desire for power and control. Instead, she gives Ryle an absurdly traumatic backstory as an out: He accidentally shot his brother in the head at age five and has experienced rage blackouts since! And Lily never gains the emotional distance to interrogate whether the abuse-ridden relationship she shared with Ryle could truly be one of “love.”
Though the misconception that women can simply walk away from abuse remains, the myriad reasons why they stay are well-documented. A woman might stay because she is financially dependent on her abuser, or because her partner has guilted her into staying together for their children’s sake, or because she has a well-founded fear that an attempt to leave will trigger an escalation in violence. Popular culture has illustrated many of these factors (and how women manage to escape them) with varying degrees of realism. In 2017, we got the money-is-no-object version from the book-to-TV mega-hit Big Little Lies, with a finely detailed rendering of a charming, manipulative husband. Delia Owens’s 2018 blockbuster Where the Crawdads Sing gave us the clichéd rural poverty version, while Kristin Hannah’s 2017 massive bestseller The Great Alone features Alaskan homesteaders; both address the women’s isolation and lack of resources. In the 1980s and 1990s, a string of crowd-pleasing, acclaimed novels-turned-films revolved around domestic abuse — think The Color Purple, Fried Green Tomatoes, Sleeping with the Enemy, The Burning Bed — all correctly illustrating how domestic violence is fundamentally about control while also endowing survivors with superhuman resilience.
These stories depend on the tension of whether or not a woman can leave her abuser and crest with the triumph of her escape.
These extremely popular stories all depend on the tension of whether or not a woman can leave her abuser and crest with the triumph of her escape. Rarely have our fictions convincingly addressed what happens next. In a country where the CDC estimates that nearly half of all women have experienced stalking or physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner, we need more nuanced narratives to reach the masses instead of applauding books like It Ends with Us for their thick Crayola sketches of abuse. Chelsea Bieker’s latest novel, Madwoman — an examination of the far-reaching aftermath of one man’s violence tucked into the package of a page-turning thriller — more than fits the bill.
On the surface, Madwoman shares similarities with It Ends with Us. Both follow women who grew up witnessing their fathers beat their mothers; both are written by women who share that history with their protagonists. In both, those protagonists vow to protect their children from the tumult that scarred their childhoods.
Thankfully, the parallels end there. Since her 2020 debut Godshot, Bieker has plumbed the wound of what she terms “motherloss” — a state of grief for a mother who is alive but unavailable. In Godshot, a delightfully strange novel set in a drought-ridden raisin town in California’s Central Valley, a teenager fights to find her disappeared mother — a woman who keeps falling for alcohol and bad men — and herself. Bieker’s 2022 story collection, Heartbroke, stayed with Central Valley Gothic, with narrators circling the drains of mothers who cannot or will not devote themselves to their children.
In Madwoman, Bieker shifts gears: A mother is indeed lost, but it’s her daughter who is hiding — both from her and from their past. Thirty-three-year-old Clove is caught up in perfecting the safe life she has built for herself in the Portland, Oregon, milieu of crystals, supplements, and Montessori tools. Her PNW hippie-turned-finance-bro husband would never raise a hand to her and says nothing about her reckless spending at the local organic grocery, where she self-soothes by purchasing foods like “chia pudding made with blue spirulina.”
Clove decided long ago that she was not allowed any “ordinary parental outbursts,” believing that if she yelled at her two young children, she would find herself in “the place where violence lived.” Her dead father would be waiting for her there, his fury ready to emerge in her. After all, he was himself the product of an abusive marriage and recalled his childhood with the same kindergarten-level descriptions that Lily falls back on in It Ends with Us: “His childhood was bad. His mother was sad. And his father was mad.” For Clove, the adaptogens and meditation, the wooden toys and gentle, intensive parenting are all part of a project to “annihilate” any traces of the hell in which she was forged.
Clove’s father, a charming miner with a bottomless desire for control, began beating her mother, Alma, when she was 19, and made the mistake of mentioning the boy who took her to senior prom. Into this brutality, Clove was born — though Alma named her Calla Lily, chosen from a Katharine Hepburn film she watched in community college before her husband made her drop out. For the next 17 years, Alma was a “manager of death,” fighting to keep them all safe from her husband’s “dark traveler,” his name for the version of himself that could beat his wife so viciously as to carve a hole in her back. Alma failed when, amid yet another fight, her husband tumbled from their lanai on the thirty-third floor of a Waikiki high-rise. Alma rushed down to the sidewalk to wail over her husband’s body before being held accountable for his death; Calla Lily ran away to start a new life with a new identity, hiding her childhood from her husband and most everyone else.
At the outset of Madwoman, it’s Clove’s mother — not her dead father — who has come for her at last. In a letter from prison, Alma asks her daughter to tell the truth about what happened that night on the lanai, to capitalize on the momentum of other survivors telling their stories to a more understanding country. Clove must make a choice between helping free her mother or continuing to protect herself and her new family.
The effects of violence linger long after survivors have reached safe shores.
The fear Clove faces is all internal, from the maternal anxieties that have her spinning out over the remote possibility that her children might pry open the battery cover in a Polly Pocket and swallow the button cell inside (“fatal within two hours”) to the paranoia that her husband will leave her and take away their children if he learns that the woman he married is not who she has always represented herself to be. That fear is borne of the terror her father inflicted upon his household, the hypervigilance Clove needed to cultivate as a child to keep herself and her mother safe — vigilance she learned from her mother: “When I was little you taped signs all over our apartment in my toddler sight line — red pen: call 911 — and coached me to dial that number if things got really bad.” Long after her father’s death, every choice Clove has made has been shaped by his violence: partnering with a man her “same height, so he would never glower down at me”; hiding from her mother, who struggled to protect her daughter because she was a waitress at Marie Callender’s with little money, education, and support, but also because she saw love in her husband’s jealousy and control. Unlike Lily in It Ends With Us, Clove sees her father’s suffocating grip on their lives clearly — “that isn’t love,” she tells her mother.
Madwoman is Bieker’s first book from a Big Five imprint, and it takes a more conventional arc than her previous outings, which were released by indie darling Catapult. The novel is wedged into the frame of a psychological thriller, with the plot driven by Clove’s fight to maintain her sanity and the peaceful family life she has fought so hard for and the story of her father’s death meted out in flashbacks. The book hit the USA Today bestseller list and garnered praise in the New York Times Book Review and the Washington Post. Oprah Daily named it a best book of fall, and Scary Mommy picked it for their October book club.
In focusing on the perspective of a secondary victim and in beginning from a point of relative safety for the main survivor but resisting the easy redemption of her actual freedom, Bieker tells the kind of story about domestic violence that rarely breaks through to a popular audience — one that is not afraid of nuance, that holds all of its characters accountable, and that examines how the effects of violence linger long after survivors have reached safe shores. Rather than a trauma narrative for the Hallmark Channel, easily digested and forgotten in the span of an afternoon, Madwoman demands that we reckon with what men’s terrorism has wrought.
Bieker dedicates Madwoman to her mother, “who lives in every line.” She, too, was a waitress who really did tape up red-inked “911” signs all over their apartment, who left Bieker’s father when she was six but replaced him with more abusive men, abandoning Bieker for one when she was nine. Unlike Hoover, Bieker displays immense capacity in translating her experiences into compelling and complicated fiction. I hope some BookTokers start dropping tears over it.
Kristen Martin is a writer and critic based in Philadelphia. Her first book, The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood, is out now from Bold Type Books.
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