Who in the World Is Colleen Hoover? Meet the Author Dominating the Bestseller List

The author’s biggest current hit is It Ends With Us, which tells the story of Lily Bloom, a florist (yes, Lily Bloom is a florist) in Boston who has fallen for Ryle, a sexy, enigmatic neurosurgeon with a temper. His behavior contrasts with her long-ago first love and soulmate, Atlas, who suddenly reappears in her life just as Lily’s new relationship founders due to Ryle’s violence, which stirs memories of the abuse she saw between her parents as a child. 

This plot point is loosely based on Hoover’s experience seeing her mother grappling with domestic violence and, she tells AARP in an email, helps make It Ends With Us the book she’s most proud of. “It means the most to me,” she notes, “because it brought my mother and me closer together, and it made me understand her in a way that I hadn’t before.”

Relatability (and steaminess)  

With apologies to Hoover, who seems almost impossible not to like from her funny social media videos, her books don’t seem wildly different than many of the thousands of emotional romances and thrillers already out there. So how did she become such a big deal?

“I don’t know,” McGuire says, candidly, but “I think her characters are relatable. These are people that just seem, for the most part, like regular people. They’re in situations that are extreme but not wildly extreme. You can relate to someone being in an abusive relationship or being abandoned by a parent.” 

“I think her writing is just so genuine,” says Lawson. “She is just so real. She doesn’t try to use big words, she just writes from her heart and I could feel that when I read [her first book].”

Jennifer Scott, a 33-year-old mother of two in upstate New York, has devoured six Hoover novels so far and says the author “makes you understand how we rationalize behaviors of others because we love them. … Also, who doesn't love a little (or a lot) of romance in a book? Hers are steamy!”

CoHo’s books certainly don’t shy away from hot bedroom scenes. That’s been a turnoff for some readers, such as the member of AARP’s The Girlfriend Book Club Facebook group who noted that she found the “sexy stuff” in Verity “creepy and uncomfortable.” But another wrote, “I was all about the sex!”

Hoover also has an uncanny ability to connect with her readers on what feels like a personal level, thanks in large part to her and her fans’ social media presence. Scott is one of the countless readers who discovered the author on Instagram: “Everywhere I looked people were obsessing over CoHo,” she says.

Indeed, the author has more than 1.8 million followers on Instagram, while a private Facebook group, Colleen Hoover’s CoHorts, has nearly 150,000 members. She also has 1.1 million followers on TikTok, where the #ColleenHoover hashtag has had more than 2.4 billion — yes, that’s a “b” — views.  

She posts goofy little videos of herself, often with no makeup and her hair in a messy bun, and makes appealingly self-deprecating comments like, “I lead such a boring life,” as she noted in a Q&A on Goodreads. “I’ve been married to my high school boyfriend for 22 years. I live in the same town I grew up in. We live in the middle of nowhere. Like so far in the middle of nowhere that we can’t get pizza delivered to our house.”   

Meanwhile, readers (generally younger women) offer up their own videos, some of them bawling real tears while praising or bemoaning the emotional ending of one or another of Hoover’s novels.

Enter the world of CoHo

Interested in giving Hoover’s books a try but don’t know where to begin? We asked the author for suggestions, and she responded through her publicist, “I think I’d start them with Reminders of Him because the characters feel relatable and it embodies what I think is pretty typical of my romances — it’s emotional and full of heartache, but also leaves readers satisfied. I hope.”

A few other Hoover books mentioned frequently as favorites in the CoHorts Facebook group:

• Verity: A thriller about a writer who’s hired by a man to finish a book series his injured wife, Verity, is unable to complete. The writer finds the start of Verity’s autobiography and learns some horrifying truths. (Some readers who loved this one are less enthused about the author’s romances, and vice versa.)
• Ugly Love: A woman starts a sex-only relationship with an airline pilot with two rules: no talk of the past, no expectations about the future. Turns out both are easier said than done.
• November 9: A couple meets once a year on the same day; the man, a novelist, says she’s his muse. No spoilers here, but there may or may not be a shocking plot twist.​​