It Ends With Us - Florence Jaques

It ends with us by Collen Hoover was released in 2016 and became the #1 New York times bestseller in 2021 due to a huge surge in popularity via social media platform TikTok. It follows Lily Bloom as the protagonist and takes us through how domestic abuse affected her as a child and ultimately as an adult. This

IT

ENDS ENDS WITH WITH US

by Florence Jaques

novel’s popularity was due to its effect on the reader as it makes us understand and sympathise with Lily instead of making us ask the question “ Why doesn’t she just leave?”. As much as I admire this book, Hoover received a lot of criticism from readers who believe she didn’t represent the abuser correctly.

Throughout the incidents of abuse in the novel Lily’s husband Ryle is shown to be “blinded by rage” and eventually he snaps out of it and expresses remorse. This frustrating cycle is repeated until Lily finally leaves him after she discovers she is pregnant. So why on earth do people like the book so much? It is not only because Collen Hoover makes us as the reader see Ryle’s good and loving side first, but it is also the hope that she creates that he can redeem himself and his and Lily’s previous relationship can be restored. Hoover offers a compelling perspective on how blurring boundaries over time creates a dynamic in which victims lose the ability to see their situations clearly. As well as this, Ryle is victimized further on in the novel after it is revealed that when Ryle was 6 years old, he accidentally shot and killed his beloved older brother with a gun that should never have been accessible to him.

However, this novel received a lot of backlash due to its false advertisement on TikTok. Many believed that it was about Lily’s romance with her teenage sweetheart Atlas, when romance played a small part in the bigger picture of the story. The main reason many people didn’t like the novel was because it can be perceived as celebrating toxic masculinity, romanticizing red flags and glorifying a charismatic-but-dangerous man. For the young people reading this novel it can influence their perception of what love truly is and what they should look for in a partner. Furthermore, throughout the novel Ryle is described as a “good person who does bad things”; this mixed with his victimisation reinforces that people like him constantly get excuses made for them and Hoover justifying them could cause a lot of damage to a reader.

Despite this, the ending seems to make up for it as Lily ultimately decides to leave him for the sake of her daughter. She expresses that she is breaking the cycle as her mother and her went through, and she refuses to let her daughter suffer the same fate. This moment creates a sense of releasing the shackles she has been bound by from a young age and seems as though she has finally made the right decision. Yet in the final chapter that flashforwards a year, we see that Lily is co-parenting with Ryle. Her decision was not seen as redemptive and powerful, but as ignoring the basic rules of parenthood- the responsibility of protecting her child.

In my opinion this book is an incredible piece of work that showcases how easily a person can become trapped in domestic abuse and that although the decisions she made at the end weren’t right for everyone, they were right for her. It takes away the stereotype of a weak person becoming a victim to abuse and instead Hoover presents Lily as strong willed and independent. I believe it had this effect on not just me, but many people who read the novel.