It Ends with Us

I picked up It Ends with Us expecting the kind of romance I had been seeing in bookstores for years, and the first thing it does is put a woman on a rooftop after her father's funeral, thinking about how she gave the eulogy and then stood in silence for two minutes because she could not think of anything true and kind at the same time. That is the opening. Colleen Hoover published the novel with Atria Books in 2016, and by the end of it you understand why she has called it the hardest book she has ever written.

The rooftop and the flower shop

Lily Bloom is twenty-three, from Plethora, Maine, with a graduate degree in business and a marketing job she does not want. Her father, Andrew, has just been buried. He was charming in public and a violent man at home, and her mother, Jenny, stayed with him for years. On the roof of the building, trying to smoke away the anger, Lily meets a man kicking a patio chair in frustration: Ryle Kincaid, a thirty-year-old neurosurgeon who lost a child patient that night, a boy shot by his own brother. They play a game he calls naked truths, in which each person has to say something they would rather not. She tells him about the silent eulogy and about the boy she lost her virginity to. He tells her he only has one-night stands and never wants a wife or children. She says that is fine, and she means it.

Six months pass. Lily uses her inheritance to buy a storefront and start the flower shop she has always wanted. A woman named Allysa shows up, talks her way into a job, and becomes her best friend. When Lily falls off a step and sprains her ankle, Allysa calls her husband Marshall and her brother for help. The brother who walks in is Ryle, who pretends not to know her and then, in the same breath, asks her to sleep with him. Lily says no to the arrangement he wants and yes to dinner, and the terms they settle on are hers: no sex, no pressure, a real relationship or nothing.

While she recovers, she pulls her teenage journals out of the closet and starts reading. They are written as letters to Ellen DeGeneres, addressed to a talk show host who has no idea Lily exists, and they are where the second half of the novel lives.

The letters to Ellen

The past is not a flashback chapter here. It arrives as diary entries, and those entries tell the story of a girl growing up in a house where her father hits her mother and everyone in town thinks he is a wonderful man. Lily's resentment is aimed in two directions at once: at her father for what he did, and at her mother for staying. That double resentment is the emotional engine of the whole book, and Hoover plants it early enough that every choice Lily makes later is measured against it.

Into that house comes Atlas Corrigan, a boy squatting in the abandoned building behind Lily's. He is her age, thin, and on his own, living on what he can find and sleeping where he can. Lily starts leaving him food, then gives him her father's old clothes, then lets him shower at her house. They become friends, then something more. He watches Ellen with her. They watch Finding Nemo and take turns saying just keep swimming to each other, and that line becomes the private motto of both their lives. Atlas is the one person who sees what is happening in her house and does not look away.

A relative finally offers Atlas a place in Boston, and he leaves, promising to come back for her. He keeps the promise in the one way that counts and the one way that ruins everything: he shows up at her window on her sixteenth birthday with a magnet that says everything is better in Boston, they spend the night together, and her father walks in. Andrew beats the boy with a baseball bat. Atlas goes to an ambulance, and Lily does not see him again for nine years.

Ryle, on his terms and then on hers

Back in the present, Ryle keeps showing up, and Hoover writes the attraction between them with real heat. He is handsome, funny, brilliant at his job, and relentlessly direct. Lily holds the line she set, and eventually he gives up the arrangement he wanted and asks to date her properly. They fall into a relationship that is easy and funny, which is precisely the problem, because the reader already knows from the rooftop scene that Ryle has no patience and Lily has a history.

The first time he hurts her is small and absurd. He burns his hand on a casserole dish, she laughs, and he shoves her. She hits her head and bleeds. He is horrified, apologetic, and panicked in a way that looks exactly like love. Lily tells him that if it happens again she is gone. She is also already doing the arithmetic her mother taught her: this was an accident, he did not mean it, we are not my parents.

Then Atlas walks into their lives. Lily takes her mother and Ryle to dinner at a new restaurant called Bib's, and the chef who comes to their table is Atlas, nine years older, running the place he always said he would run. He sees the bruise on her face and the bandage on Ryle's hand in the bathroom and tells her plainly to leave the man she is with. She refuses. Ryle sees them together, learns who Atlas is, and the two men come to blows. Atlas later shows up at the flower shop and leaves his number in case of emergency, which is the match that lights the next section on fire.

The cycle, step by step

Ryle finds the number and pushes Lily down the stairs. She is badly hurt, and for the first time she does not cover for him. When Allysa finds out, she supports Lily and simultaneously begs her to hear the one thing Ryle has never told anyone: as a boy he accidentally shot and killed his brother Emerson, and the rage he cannot control comes from that night. Lily forgives him almost on impact, which Hoover presents without judgement, because forgiveness in this book is not weakness. It is what the pattern looks like from the inside.

They agree on a rule: when Ryle feels himself going somewhere dark, he walks away and comes back calmer. It works for a while. Then Allysa and Marshall have a baby, name her after Ryle, and on that same night Ryle finds Lily's journals. He reads about Atlas. He puts together the magnet on the refrigerator, the carved heart that matches the tattoo on her shoulder, and the number in her phone. What follows is the worst night in the book, and Hoover handles it in plain language: no gore, no lingering on the blows, just the facts of what a man does to a woman when he has decided she has betrayed him, and the fact that she waits until he falls asleep before she leaves.

She calls Atlas. He takes her to the hospital, where she learns she is pregnant with Ryle's child. The next day Ryle leaves for a fellowship in England, and Lily spends the following months doing something much harder than leaving: she stays in the same city, keeps the pregnancy, and lets the man who hurt her be close to her without letting him back in.

What Lily does with the pregnancy

Atlas takes her in for a few days, and the lie he has been carrying comes apart. Lily meets his friends and finds out the girlfriend he mentioned does not exist, and he admits why he disappeared: he came back for her during college, saw her with someone else, and decided not to be the reason she was unhappy. That rewrites nine years of silence into something aching and stupid rather than cruel.

Lily goes back to her own apartment and starts telling people the truth. She tells Allysa about the abuse and the baby. She tells her mother, who does not beg her to go back. Jenny says that if Ryle really loved her the way he claims, he would not let Lily take him back, and that line lands because Jenny spent her whole marriage waiting for a version of her husband who never arrived.

The last third of the novel is a long, careful truce. Ryle returns and finds out about the pregnancy. He is not allowed to move back in. He sleeps on the couch while Lily is on bedrest, he assembles the baby's crib, he stands in the nursery looking at a mural she painted of a garden and says nothing he is allowed to act on. Lily asks him for naked truths again and tells him the honest one: she is scared of his temper, and she is scared of what it would do to a child. He says he understands. Nobody pretends this is a reconciliation. It is two people building a boundary around a baby.

The ending, and the title

The baby comes fast. Ryle is at Lily's side the whole time, and they name her Emerson, called Emmy, after the brother Ryle lost. The moment Lily holds her daughter she knows the choice she has been circling for the whole novel, and she makes it while Ryle is still in the room: she wants a divorce. She asks him what he would tell their daughter if she came to him one day and said the person who loved her was hitting her. He answers that he would tell her she deserves more, and that she should leave. They both understand what he has just agreed to, and they cry.

That is where the title comes from. The cycle ran from Lily's father to Lily's mother to Lily's own marriage, and Lily ends it by refusing to hand it to her daughter. Shared custody follows without a fight, and Ryle stays in Emmy's life as the father Lily never had, which asks more of Lily than simply walking away did.

The epilogue happens eleven months later. Lily is pushing Emmy down the street when she nearly collides with Atlas, who is opening a new restaurant. They are both late, they part ways, and then Lily runs after him to tell him the one thing he will understand: her daughter's middle name is Dory, after the fish in Finding Nemo, the character who keeps going when going is all there is. Atlas says his life is finally good enough to include her, and he tells her she can stop swimming now. The book closes on the two teenagers who were never allowed to have a first chance, older and standing on solid ground.

Why Hoover calls it the hardest book she wrote

In the author's note at the end of the novel, Hoover says she fashioned Ryle after her father and Lily's story after her mother's, and that she did not intend the book to define domestic abuse for everyone, only to tell one specific version of it. She has said publicly that it is the hardest book she has ever written, and the reason is visible on the page: she had to make a man the reader falls for, then have that same man do unforgivable things, then keep him human enough that Lily's love for him reads as understandable rather than foolish.

The alternating structure is what makes that possible. If the book opened with the violence, Ryle would be a monster and the story would be simple. Instead the teenage letters to Ellen run in parallel with the present, and both timelines are about the same question: what do you owe a person you love when loving them costs you something. Atlas in the empty house and Ryle on the couch are opposite answers. The letters also give the novel its warmth, because sixteen-year-old Lily writing to a stranger is funny and hopeful in a way the present-day chapters rarely are.

What the book is not

Fair criticism starts with the marketing. It Ends with Us was sold as a romance, and the publisher's own description leaned on a woman with a too-good-to-be-true romance who cannot stop thinking about her first love. Readers who bought it for a love triangle got a novel about domestic abuse in the second half, and a significant number of them felt tricked. That gap between shelf placement and content is worth naming, because it is the reason the book became controversial at the exact moment it became huge.

The prose is the other complaint. It is blunt, choppy, and heavily dialogued, with short sentences that read fast and rarely stop to describe a room. Readers who want lyrical fiction will find nothing here. There are also coincidences that a tighter novel would trim: Atlas working at the one restaurant Lily happens to pick for a family dinner, Atlas living a few streets from her shop a decade later. And because the novel stays inside Lily's head, Ryle never gets to explain himself in his own voice, which some readers experience as unfair and others experience as exactly the point.

It is also a first book that ends by opening a door. The sequel, It Starts with Us, came out in October 2022 and picks up with Atlas's perspective, which answers the complaint that this novel leaves him waiting offstage. As a standalone, though, it is doing something more interesting than a love story: it is a portrait of how a good man and a violent man can be the same person, and of how long it takes a woman raised on that particular lie to stop believing it. If you read it, read it for the ending, where the title stops being a slogan and becomes a decision made in a hospital room while a newborn is still crying.