In 2016, romance author Colleen Hoover published "It Ends With Us," now a blockbuster movie starring Black Lively. I honestly didn't care to know anything about this book when it struck big on BookTok because - God bless those BookTok girlies but you can tell they skipped some formative reading stages by being popular in middle school and are wayyyy too easily impressed by writing that any true Scholastic, hooked-on-phonics, library dork fanfic girlie mastered at 12 - so I assumed the movie adaptation of the book would be bad - simply because those same BookTok girlies got so enraged by the casting announcement. But then I saw a trailer in theatres, and wouldn't you know it, they somehow managed to land a Taylor Swift song (My Tears Richocet to be specific). Do you KNOW how hard and expensive it is to get the rights to a Taylor Swift song??! I'm sure it mostly has to do with the friendship between Taylor and Blake, but to have her music connected to the movie is a mainstream stamp of approval that speaks volumes. So it begs the question - is this a story that should be accepted in the mainstream?
I'm absorbed every week day in the world of domestic violence (DV) as a lawyer and advocate at an emergency shelter and outreach non-profit for survivors of intimate partner violence , and yet, I find DV creeping into my non-working hours all the time, in a way I'm much more cognizant of now. I cringe at the gaslighting or verbal abuse on shows I always considered easy viewing, like Married at First Sight or Love Island. I sing "Goodbye, Earl" at karoake with my friends before I balk, horrified that it's a wildly inappropriate pick for me now. I worry constantly about Ballerina Farms and The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives and the rise of tradwives and the cult of domesticity. You don't have to be an expert in DV to spot and see it in our culture. So It Ends With Us is immediately impossible to read with an unbias perspective because we're all in some way touched by DV- some much, much more intimately than others. Colleen Hoover herself wanted to write the book as a way to grapple with growing up in an abusive home. But when books like this grow so much bigger than its intention, *in my Carrie Bradshaw voice* I have to wonder how our culture shaped the book and how this book shapes our culture.
So here's the basic story (spoilers, duh):
It's important to get out of the way that you know immediately, first page, that the book is completely untethered to reality. Right off the bat, not a single character has a real-person name. Lily Bloom. Ryle Kincaid. Atlas Corrigan. These are the names of a teen virgin's Wattpad writings that should never see the light of day. It is downright shocking to me that a book that sold a million copies and has been translated into 20 languages has main characters named Flower McFlorist and Not-Kyle SexyBadBoy.
We meet Lily, who is 23, and is spectacularly GORGEOUS (but doesn't know it) and HAS DREAMS (because she's different) AND IS EDGY (without doing anything edgy). Like every bad romcom book, she has one female acquaintance, who is barely a friend, and one gay acquaintance, who is so tertiary, he's in exactly one scene. She's supposed to be grieving the loss of her father, who spent her upbringing brutalizing her mother, but he was also a mayor of their idyllic small town, called...Plethora. While she contemplates how unsad she is that her father's funeral occurred earlier that same day, she meets Ryle, who right off the bat, is having a menty B and assaulting public use furniture on a luxury apartment roof. He's obviously going through a capital-T Trauma, which we find out is from his work as a neurosurgeon. He's still supposed to be sexy and cool, which any woman knows who has ever seen a man absolutely lose his shit, is neither sexy nor cool. Ryle is violently kicking a terrace chair, which Colleen Hoover mentions AT MINIMUM FOUR TIMES is made out of "marine-grade polymer." I can't stress how enough how many times Hoover stresses this fact. It is bizarre.
Ryle makes it clear that he is a misogynist who uses multiple women to satiate his sex drive because he doesn't believe in commitment because his career is so important. He propositions Lily but it goes nowhere so instead they play a game of Truth. "Truth" is the infamously bad move men use to create a false sense of unearned intimacy and if I can save one girlie from this fate by letting them know that the game Truth is a LIE, having read this book will have been worth it.
Their brief encounter on the rooftop inspires a now-24-year-old Lily to use her dead father's inheritance (of $40,000) to BUY REAL ESTATE IN BOSTON. I REPEAT, REAL ESTATE IN BOSTON. She makes it extremely clear that she wants to start a flower shop but has no business plan. So we're made to believe that this bitch got a commercial real estate loan at 24 without a business plan in BOSTON and we just skip the heck right past it. Like, okay, sure, Jan. She opens the shop and in walks Alyssa, who is a quirky millionaire's wife who is bored and wants to work for this flower shop for essentially no money. The two stand in the empty business front and dream up Lily's whole business plan, which is going to be DIFFERENT, and "anti-pretty", and EDGY, and they come up with - I shit you not- STEAMPUNK. STEAM. PUNK. Remember, this book came out in 2016. Steampunk was wildly outdated even then. But we are supposed to believe that the two of them just make this steampunk flower shop that a few months later is so wildly popular and successful that it is featured in magazines and winning awards....sure. ((I did clock in the movie trailer that the film takes some much-needed creative departures there)).
ANYWAY, Lily finds out that Alyssa is actually Ryle's sister, so they meet again, become infatuated with each other, and immediately begin dating, after a few failed attempts from Ryle trying to proposition Lily again. He begs for non-commital sex and she's like, yup, you seem like a great life partner. Their love story begins with your classic lovebombing of all-consuming lust and feelings, but it's also clear that neither of them are connected to...well, anything. It's easy for Lily to replace the nothing in her life with him because she is so one-dimensional to begin with.
We learn through flashbacks in her teen diary that she is the way she is as a kind of shield, stunting her own development as she grieved the trauma-bonded relationship she had as a 15-year-old girl with Atlas, who was a neglected neighbor boy. Neighbor is the wrong word to use as he was kicked out of his home and squatting in the abandoned, decrepit house behind Lily's, and boy is the probably the wrong word too because he was actually 18 and Hoover makes it VERY specific that they waited to have sex until he was 19 and Lily was 16, because...I guess that made it better???
Anyway, on a date as a new couple, Ryle and Lily go out to a restaurant where Atlas is now THE HEAD CHEF AND OWNER OF A RESPECTED UPSCALE RESTAURANT after being a CHEF IN THE MILITARY. If you do the math, he accomplished this in less than a decade, which makes perfect sense. Ryle gets jealous and lovebombs Lily even more, leading to a whole montage of lots of graphic sex scenes and lavish gifts. After a few stilted scenes where we're supposed to believe that Ryle, Alyssa & husband, and Lily are all having so much fun and everything is so perfect, before you know it, six months later, Ryle and Lily elope in Vegas.
Before the couple wed, there are two incidences of physical violence. First, Ryle burns his hand reaching into an OVEN to take out a GLASS PAN. The neurosurgeon, whose hand is his entire career, decided just to reach in a hot oven bare-handed. He burns himself, shatters the glass on the floor, and blames Lily. When he hears her nervously laugh as she walks over to comfort him, he knocks her violently onto the floor and she hits her head. He fervently apologizes to her, even cutting his own hand even more in the process, and she decides that she can forgive just once. She surely won't forgive two after a childhood of watching her own mother constantly forgive her father. She runs into Atlas again, who sees the injury and suspects that Ryle is abusive so he gives her his number just in case.
It doesn't take long for Ryle to push her down a flight of stairs after finding Atlas's number in Lily's phonecase, which he immediately tells Lily never happened as she got confused and tripped. She covers for him to Alyssa, who convinces Ryle to tell Lily HIS SECRET. This big, bad secret that explains everything, why Ryle gets so irrationally mad and flips at the drop of a hat. He has a childhood trauma from accidentally shooting and killing his older brother with a gun when he was six-years-old. We are meant to believe that this PTSD causes him to commit unintentional phsycial violence because "he can't help it" and doesn't even know it's happening. So Lily commits herself to helping him with his anger and that's when they get married.
Once they get married, it's almost immediate that Ryle thinks Lily is having an affair, hits her, tries to *grape* her, and knocks her unconscious in their bed. She escapes while he sleeps, not knowing where to go with her injuries, and calls Atlas to take her to the hospital. She finds out she's pregnant and doesn't tell Ryle, who has left the country for a conviently-time three-month fellowship in England. She dazes her way through her pregnancy with Alyssa's help (who also recently had a baby and in a bizarre move as weird as Renesmé, named the baby girl Rylie, despite knowing about her brother's abuse).
Ryle comes back from England, having decided to do the right thing and divorce Lily "because that's what she deserves" but then with the baby, decides to stay. They stay separated and she is unsure what she wants to do, until the baby arrives. She has a little girl and in another bizarre and weird Renesmé move, names the baby after Ryle's dead brother. As Ryle holds their baby, she makes this long plea for him to look at their daughter and think about how he would feel if one day their little girl were to ever be with a man like him. He is tearful and vows to do better, and Lily tells him she is divorcing him. And she tells her baby that the cycle of abuse "ends with us."
The End.
WHEW. Okay, any red flags, reader? Oh it looks like a Tibetan mountain top??? Yup, yup, yup. Here's where, in my professional opinion, the story is a poor, if not dangerous, representation of abuse.
Ryle is only abusive because he had childhood trauma.
The book has two different characters insist that Ryle only lashes out in anger due to PTSD from a childhood trauma, one that it is never clear how much therapy he got for it. Having the sister character co-opt the violence, even when she pleads with Lily to never take him back after the most severe incident of violence, does at least do an accurate job of having family members excuse or justify violence that they know about. However, in all incidents of violence, the abuse is knowingly perpetrated whenever Lily shows any amount of enjoyment or autonomy. The violence is intentional. When Ryle feels humiliated, he humiliates. Blind flashes of rage may be symptomatic of some disorders, but not DV. DV is a knowing act by the perpetrator that can never be justified or excused by childhood anything.
2. Having a baby will change a man.
When I read the whole monologue by Lily watching Ryle cry over his child, so touched and moved and ready to do the right thing by his daughter, I verbally gagged. I can't tell you how many survivors had to have the hospital staff kick out their abusers for being violent, verbally agressive, or threatening harm IN THE ACTUAL DELIVERY ROOM. Sure, there maybe some abusers who are best behavior to appear a certain way, especially in front of others in the hospital, but all it is is the start of a very ugly cycle, of using the baby and the appearance of being a loving father as a tool of manipulation and power over their victim. Especially ESPECIALLY survivors who are undocumented, whose innocent baby who just came into this world, will be held over their heads by their abusers who tell them "you'll never see your child again when I deport you." Fathers steal their children, hold them captive, tell them lies, hurt them, manipulate them, and use them to hurt and control their victims. Having a baby by an abuser is a dangerous, dangerous thing to do. If Colleen Hoover was telling the truth, Ryle would've said something along the lines of "I'm going to sue you in court, I'll have you paying me custody, I'll get the best lawyer money can afford and you'll have nothing, I'll be putting you through 18 years of abusive litigation, I'll withhold her at every drop-off, I'll falsely call DCS and the cops on you, I will put you in poverty trying to pay off court fees and make you lose jobs because of all the court you have to attend, and I will feel nothing at all knowing the effect it will have on this baby." Let's be real.
3. Lily ultimately saved herself.
I will say, the best, most realistic parts of the book are 1) the perspective from her teen diary as she tries to grapple with witnessing violence in the home, 2) Lily's back-and-forth in the beginning justifying violence with the insistence that he is ultimately loving to her and it won't happen again, and 3) her decision not to call the cops in fear it jeopardizes his career. However, the reality of Lily's situation is that without therapy, without a supportive community, and without needing a massive amount of resources, she was able to "save" herself. Leaving is a process, resilience is a process. It is an every day choice and a rollercoaster of ups and downs. It does not happen in a day. Especially, the day you leave, which is single-handedly the most dangerous day with the highest liklihood of life-threatening injuries. It takes support and resources, and a wealthy woman still getting a full highrise apartment at the end of it is wildly unrealistic. The population of women who have the hardest time leaving are actually those in higher income with children; they are stuck in places that are priced out of affordable homes, transportation, and jobs for mothers who haven't had careers in decades, unable to be able to keep their children in their schools if they go, and are tethered to husbands who control all of the finances and social capital. Lily's ending rang hollow that she made one choice in her mind and everything easily clicked into place. It would be a much better world if it was as simple as that.
There was so much surrounding this movie, with the personal lives and drama of the cast overshadowing the social justice intent of the movie, that I think the whole thing was a wash in the end. But if reading the book or seeing the movie helped a single person either leave a relationship or spot the signs in a friend's situation who needs support, all the better, I guess, but I know that we as a society can do better and be more honest.
If you're wanting to understand a more honest portrayal of DV, barriers to leaving, an unfair family law system, and a story of a survivor who was motivated by providing a better life for their child, may I suggest you skip this film altogether and watch Netflix's very excellent Maid or the movie Alice Darling.
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