If there are people she’s seeing apart from colleagues and these two men, we’re granted no access to them.

“It’s been two weeks since I’ve seen Miles but only two seconds since the last time I’ve thought about him,” Tate tells us, information I would never want to hear from a nurse. She does nothing but hang around her brother’s apartment. The protagonist of Ugly Love, a young nursing student named Tate who falls in love with her brother’s moody coworker Miles, is rarely ever at or interested in her school or work. Her women are detached from the news, detached from politics, mostly detached from friends and their jobs, in a passive and uninteresting sort of way. That’s often a man, but can, at times, extend to family (as is the case with Slammed’s dying parent subplot). The women at the center of Hoover’s books are laser-focused on their immediate worlds: who they love and why. But her work spans several genres: She writes young adult novels, thrillers, mysteries, and straight-up romances. It is certainly easy to slot Hoover’s work into the supposedly lesser subcategory of fiction known as “women’s fiction,” if only because Hoover’s work centers on female characters. Concerned tweets don’t often go further than identifying her stories’ troublesome relationship dynamics or lazily labeling one of her books “the worst piece of English literature.” I read approximately 4.8 of Hoover’s novels, about 20% of her oeuvre. She does not need anyone - a business, a publisher - to advocate for her writing she has done it all on her own terms.Īmidst the headlines and TikToks, a conversation about the nature of Hoover’s work has been lost. Even after Atria, a branch of Simon & Schuster, published a few of her books, Hoover opted to self-publish another, 2013’s young adult novel This Girl (the third book in the Slammed saga). Within a few months of Slammed’s publication, she had earned $50,000 in royalties. (Many of Hoover’s novels focus on women - young or otherwise - in semi-forbidden relationships with men.) It was self-published and, though it took seven months, eventually reached #8 on the New York Times’s paperback fiction bestseller list 10 more of her books have reached the list since. Her first novel, 2012’s Slammed, was a young adult romance book, more adult than young, about a high school senior navigating a romance with her English teacher. Hoover, a self-made author, navigated the cutthroat, tricky publishing world on her lonesome. The woman behind them is just as much of a phenomenon as her work.

According to the New York Times, Hoover’s books have outsold John Grisham’s and James Patterson’s combined.

It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover