Colleen Hoover has to be the Cinderella of the books. She came from nothing, and has conquered one kingdom after another. She was the poor social worker who lived in a trailer with her husband and three children, before she became one of the world’s best-selling authors. Since she made her debut in 2011, she has published a total of 24 novels. And in the triumphant year of 2022, she at one point claimed six of the top ten places on the New York Times’ bestseller list. In the same year, it was estimated that she had sold approximately 20 million books. Now “It Ends With Us”, the film based on Hoover’s best-selling novel of the same name, is in Norwegian cinemas. And sure enough, it didn’t slip up to the top spot on the cinema top in this country after the premiere last weekend. CINDERELLA STORY: Colleen Hoover was a wealthy mother of three when she published her first book. Now she is one of the world’s best-selling authors. Photo: Reuters Hoover’s books have made readers around the world sob – and the book industry tremble. What exactly is it about them? Sometimes I think that at any given time there is a craving in the culture for a certain kind of stories. There are stories about women’s lives, about love and suffering. They often have a female protagonist who is easy for readers of all backgrounds to identify with. This helps to give these stories a kind of purity. There is little that is specific, that makes the reader feel distanced from the main character or that gives them the feeling that they are arriving in a foreign place. The language offers no resistance. DREAM: The main character Lily dreams of opening a flower shop, but is otherwise a fairly general main character that many different readers have identified with. Photo: NTB In any case, this agrees to a point with “It Ends With Us”. The novel is set in Boston, but could have been set in any city. Here, love, desire and suffering are at the center. The main character Lily meets the tall, handsome and seductive Ryle, who also happens to be a neurosurgeon. It will be the start of a love story that feels like an adventure until Ryle’s hot temper and jealousy get worse and worse. The novel mixes the general and the deeply personal. It is similar to other books that reach a large, primarily female audience, but has roots in the author’s own biography. Hoover’s own father was abusive. She has said that she once saw him throw a TV at his mother. “It Ends With Us” thus stands in a long tradition of women’s stories that are based on identification and empathy. But Hoover’s success has come about in a very modern way. She self-published her first novel via Amazon, without any publisher or editor having had their hands on it. She was picked up by BookToks on TikTok, where recommendations of Hoover books spread like wildfire. BESTSELLERS ALSO IN NORWAY: Colleen Hoover’s novels also topped the bookshop chain Ark’s bestseller list in the successful year 2022. Photo: Christine Rehn Jensen / news The writer Chels Upton, who has written in Slate about how her writing was discussed on BookTok, experienced the Hoover fans as the books’ Swifties. They simply loved Colleen Hoover and reacted with fury when someone was critical of what she wrote. Book reviewer Laura Miller, also in Slate, has pointed out how Hoover’s novels are almost tailor-made for TikTok, because TikTok cultivates the display of big, raw emotions. This is how it differs from the careful and curated exhibition of one’s own life, which more often happens on Instagram. Like another BookTok sensation, Madeline Miller and her “Song of Achilles,” Hoover writes big, emotional confrontations and turning points that trigger the floods of tears in those readers who are more than happy to cry over a book. With such a starting point, it is no wonder that the film “It Ends With Us”, and everything to do with it, also arouses intense interest and strong emotions. Recently, the internet has been deeply engaged in what many believe is a feud between lead actors Blake Lively, who plays Lily, and Justin Baldoni, who plays Ryle. IN FEUD: Rumors are circulating that there must have been a bad atmosphere between director and actor Justin Baldoni and the other actors during the recording of “It Ends With Us”. Photo: AFP Baldoni has also directed the film. And now, as he and the other actors travel around promoting it, fans have noticed that he and Lively never perform together. The actors also no longer follow Baldoni on social media. The stories swirl about what has happened. Some believe Baldoni made Lively feel uncomfortable, that he didn’t listen to her input about the female perspective in the film and that he made her feel self-conscious about her body. The recording of “It Ends With Us” began shortly after she had given birth to her fourth child. Others again claim that Lively, who is also the film’s producer, was involved in the final result and the editing. She also has her share of critics. Lively has given what some perceive as facile and flippant answers to questions about the story’s serious themes. And not everyone thought it was entirely musical that she used the launch of a film about intimate partner violence as a springboard to launch her own brand of hair products. STAR: Blake Lively stars in “It Ends With Us” and is also among the film’s producers. But it caused reactions that she launched her own hair product line at the same time as she was promoting the film. Photo: AP This is the kind of commitment that can arise when the audience is already strongly connected to the story being told. Anyone who does not act in a manner worthy of the narrative, as seen by the core audience, will feel their wrath. This commitment should really please all the industries that try to sell movies and books, and that complain that the public is lazy and indifferent. But it is not that simple. For the book industry, success stories like Colleen Hoover are both good and bad news. It is good news because such sensations make people read and sell books. “It Ends With Us” has been released in lavish collector’s editions. It is startling enough at a time when sales of physical books are declining. BE CONFIDENT: Blake Lively is married to film star Ryan Reynolds, and just before the filming of “It Ends With Us”, the couple’s fourth child was born. Photo: AFP It is bad news for other reasons. The job of editors and publishing houses is to help writers shape and file a script until it is as good as it can be. They lose their meaning in the face of a phenomenon which, to some extent, arises in the direct encounter between author and audience. What seems to worry the book industry the most, however, is something else. The reading communities created and run by BookTok are mostly English-language. Fans sharing interpretations and quotes are expected to do so in English. Lisanne Mathijssen at HarperCollins Netherlands sounded the alarm after seeing that one in four books sold in the Netherlands in 2023 were in English, compared to one in five just the year before. According to Mathijssen, it often makes no sense to translate international books into Dutch. Publishers in smaller language areas suffer, while the English-language giants rejoice. Now, it should be said that self-published successes like Colleen Hoover are rare. Most writers who try to do what she does, who send their own book out into the world without any professional apparatus, never reach a larger audience. When Cinderella stories feel magical and engrossing, it’s partly because they’re so far apart, and they often lead more to daydreaming than to actual careers. But then, once in a while, the day comes when the glass shoe actually fits. Published 20.08.2024, at 20.29
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Making millions of fans cry and rage. – Speech
