The dust has finally settled. On 4 May 2026, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni announced a settlement of their bitter legal dispute – two weeks before a Manhattan jury was due to hear what promised to be one of the most excruciating celebrity trials in recent memory. Both sides declared victory. Neither convincingly. What remains is the strange, lingering residue of a cultural phenomenon that said less about domestic abuse than it did about Hollywood’s appetite for self-destruction. Colleen Hoover, meanwhile, is pressing on: Reminders of Him reached cinemas in March, Verity arrives in October, and her newly formed production company, HeartBones Entertainment, signals a writer who has no intention of ceding control of her narrative again. The question that haunts this moment is not whether Hoover’s stories matter – they manifestly do – but whether the literary conversation about domestic abuse has finally outgrown the framework she built.
The Scale of What Fiction Cannot Contain
Any serious discussion of domestic abuse in literature must begin with the facts it cannot capture. The Office for National Statistics reported in November 2025 that approximately 3.8 million people in England and Wales experienced domestic abuse in the year ending March 2025 – a prevalence rate of 7.8 per cent among those aged sixteen and over. One in four adults has experienced abuse since the age of sixteen. The police recorded 816,493 domestic abuse-related crimes in the same period. Coercive control offences, criminalised in England and Wales only since 2015, reached 49,557 – a rise of over 9 per cent on the previous year, reflecting both improved reporting and the slow, uneven work of institutional change.
These numbers are not abstractions. They are the backdrop against which every novel, every film, every BookTok recommendation must be measured. When a work of fiction enters this terrain, it takes on a weight that purely imaginative writing does not. This is precisely why the debate around It Ends With Us has been so fierce: not because Hoover wrote about domestic abuse – the world needs such writing – but because of how, and to whom, the story was sold.
The Hoover Machine and Its Discontents
Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel sold upward of four million copies, turbocharged by BookTok into a phenomenon that transcended ordinary bestsellerdom. The 2024 film adaptation, starring Blake Lively as florist Lily Bloom, grossed $351 million worldwide against a production budget of $25 million. Commercially, it was a triumph. Culturally, it was a collision.
The criticism has been voluminous and, in its most rigorous forms, devastating. Jennie Young, writing in Ms Magazine, argued that the novel “feeds into the very structures of toxic masculinity that it purports to combat” by romanticising Ryle Kincaid – the abusive neurosurgeon presented as a “complicated” love interest whose violence is softened by a tragic backstory. Linda Marric, the feminist film critic, told the BBC that “Colleen Hoover has made her name by fetishing toxic relationships” and that “her very young readership are growing up thinking that unacceptable behaviour, by men, is normal.” Women’s Aid warned that the film could be “dangerous and retraumatising for survivors, especially if they are not expecting these themes.”
The marketing compounded the problem. Hoover’s own website described It Ends With Us as “an unforgettable love story,” with no mention that the story’s engine is domestic violence. Blake Lively promoted the film with florals and fun, prompting a viral backlash. A planned It Ends With Us colouring book was swiftly pulled. As the domestic violence charity Refuge has consistently maintained, the framing of abuse as romance – particularly to an audience that skews young and female – carries responsibilities that cannot be brushed aside with the defence that it is merely fiction.
The Law Catches Up With Literature
What makes this moment distinct is that the legal and institutional landscape has shifted beneath the fiction. The UK government’s Victims and Prisoners Act 2024, signed into law in early 2025, places controlling or coercive behaviour on a par with offences such as threats to kill and attempted strangulation for multi-agency public protection. Offenders sentenced to twelve months or more are now automatically managed under MAPPA – the Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangement – meaning agencies are legally required to share information indicating risk to former partners or the public.
This is not abstract policy. It is a recognition that coercive control – the pattern of isolation, financial abuse, technological surveillance, and psychological domination that Women’s Aid describes as “invisible chains” – constitutes harm as serious as physical violence. In the year ending December 2024, 853 offenders were convicted of controlling or coercive behaviour in England and Wales; almost all were male. The fiction that engages with this terrain is no longer operating in a cultural vacuum. Readers arrive armed with frameworks, vocabularies, and legal precedents that did not exist a decade ago.
A New Generation Tells Different Stories
If Hoover opened the door, a wave of recent and forthcoming novels is walking through it with considerably more precision. Ulrikka S. Gernes’s A Girl Left the Room (Pushkin Press, June 2026), a fictionalised account of the Danish poet’s own adolescence, has been called “Lolita’s story rewritten by Lolita” – a searing account of grooming and coercive control that strips away the romantic framing entirely. Where Hoover’s Ryle is a “hot neurosurgeon” whose violence is tempered by charm, Gernes’s Eg is a family friend who weaponises language itself, sending letters that draw a fourteen-year-old into a “fated love” from which there is no return. The novel does not ask its reader to sympathise with the abuser. It asks them to witness.
Annakeara Stinson’s Nerve Damage (Scribner UK, July 2026) takes a different tack: a darkly comic inversion of the survivor narrative in which the protagonist stalks her stalker. The New York Times praised its “chameleon-like ability to shift without warning between quippy text-speak and breathtaking, lyrical passages,” noting that beneath the humour lies “a sobering narrative about the emotional cost of surviving abuse.” Melissa Febos described it as “a psychological thriller embedded with virtuosic reflections about psychological inheritance, obsession, and the morbid erotic.”
Araminta Hall’s Unreliable Narrator (Pan Macmillan, March 2026) interrogates the politics of narrative itself – who controls the story of abuse, and who is believed. Set among literary elites, it asks what happens when a woman’s private account of trauma is rewritten by the man who caused it, published as bestselling fiction. The resonance with the Hoover phenomenon is hard to miss.
In the UK, Shazia Azhar’s Ketchup (2026), written by an MBE-winning headteacher with thirty years of experience in education, confronts grooming and domestic abuse “without softening the details,” as The Table Read described it, exploring the insidious tactics – gaslighting, emotional manipulation – that leave victims trapped. Siân Hughes’s No Such Thing as Monday and Rachaele Hambleton’s A Letter to Keep You Safe (Hachette, March 2026) likewise centre survivor voices with an authenticity that marketing departments cannot manufacture.
What Responsible Storytelling Actually Looks Like
None of these writers suggest that domestic abuse should be absent from fiction. The University of York’s “Coercive Control: From Literature into Law” project, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, has demonstrated through workshops with women in refuges that reading and writing about coercive control can be genuinely therapeutic – helping survivors access parts of trauma that “felt stuck.” Dr Hannah Roche at York noted that participants were “surprised by how closely their own experiences reflect those of certain characters – Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, for example.” The women chose to write in free verse, “where lines may break out and refuse to be contained.” Literature, in this context, is not a luxury. It is a tool for recognition and recovery.
The distinction that matters is between fiction that uses abuse as set dressing for a romance arc and fiction that takes the interiority of the survivor as its primary subject. Hoover’s novels, for all their commercial potency, tend toward the former. The new generation – Gernes, Stinson, Hall, Azhar, Hughes – leans decisively toward the latter. They understand that the most radical act in domestic abuse fiction is not depicting violence but refusing to make it beautiful. The difference is visible even on screen: where the Hoover adaptation packages trauma as a glossy romance, films like Maïwenn’s Mon Roi – reviewed here – have long demonstrated that cinematic depictions of abusive relationships can be unflinching without being exploitative.
The Conversation That Remains
The Lively–Baldoni settlement closes one chapter. Hoover’s expanding screen empire opens another. But the more significant shift is happening in the pages of novels that will never gross $351 million – books that trust their readers to sit with discomfort rather than smoothing it into a love triangle. Domestic abuse in contemporary literature is not a single conversation. It is a growing, increasingly honest argument about power, voice, and the stories we owe to the people who live through what fiction can only approximate.
The best of these new writers understand something Hoover’s commercial framework obscures: that the point of telling such stories is not to entertain but to illuminate – and that illumination requires a willingness to leave the reader unsettled rather than satisfied. In a culture still reckoning with 3.8 million annual victims and a criminal justice system that prosecutes fewer than seven per cent of reported offences, this is not a debate about taste. It is a debate about responsibility.
If you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this article, contact the National Domestic Abuse Helpline on 0808 2000 247 or visit women’said.org.uk.
This article is part of Creativity’s UK coverage of contemporary culture and social issues.
