Romance or Red Flags? The Troubling Themes in It Ends With Us
It Ends With Us failed to morally condemn domestic abusers and missed the opportunity of offering a nuanced look at the difficulties their victims face.
This is not a review. See why.
Context
Lily Bloom is an ordinary young woman with a marketing job and a dream of opening a flower shop. Unfortunately, she also carries emotional baggage from her father being physically abusive to her mother and, occasionally, to her as a child. The only person she’d trusted with that secret was her high-school boyfriend, who’d suffered similar trauma—the only person, that is, until she meets Ryle Kincaid. On the surface, Ryle seems like the whole package: He’s attractive, successful, intelligent, and honest about what he wants. Though he previously shied away from serious romantic relationships, he and Lily get together.
At first, it’s perfect. She opens her flower shop as he completes his neuroscience residency. Both work long hours, but are proud of each other’s success and understanding of what that success requires. But things quickly devolve. Ryle is jealous and repeatedly physically harms Lily. After the third instance, she leaves—only to discover that she’s carrying his child. With few friends to lean on, Lily must decide how to raise their child and what to do about her marriage.
I have given the book the best description I can, but as you will see if you read on, I strongly disliked it and had many issues with the way it handled this delicate subject matter. I also disagree with two of the three ideas, as explained below.
Key Ideas/Problems
Love can be causeless
Moral worth has no connection to one’s actions
Victims of domestic abuse face nearly impossible decisions
Love can be causeless
Ryle has the kind of qualities that could entice a reasonable person to go on a first date with him. He’s physically attractive, ambitious, smart, and charming. But very quickly, we learn that he also has a lot of issues. When Lily first meets him, he’s kicking chairs out of anger. During that first brief conversation, he tells her that he’s not interested in relationships, but is interested in sleeping with her; she tells him she’s not interested in casual sex. As their acquaintance progresses, he continues to outright ask her for sex, even at one point knocking on twenty-nine of her neighbors’ doors to find hers in order to beg her to sleep with him. Being honest and clear about what you want is a good thing; stalking someone to get it and ignoring her stated rejection of the idea is not.
Lily and Ryle also seem to have little in common; they don’t discuss shared interests or bond over any activities. Much of their interaction once they’re together is affection without much substance. We don’t get any sense of why Ryle is the right person for Lily, or vice-versa. In other words, there’s no reason for the two of them to be in love. Yet they act as though they are, and the book is sold as a romance novel. It’s not only unbelievable, it’s unhealthy, even without accounting for the abuse.
Moral worth has no connection to one’s actions
Perhaps the most irredeemable part of this book is that Lily never morally condemns Ryle. Early on, he claims that “There is no such thing as bad people. We’re all just people who sometimes do bad things” (17). Hoover seems to agree with this sentiment; not only does she thank the person who introduced her to this idea, she also explains in an author’s note that she wrote the book in order to compassionately show the dilemma that a victim of domestic abuse goes through in deciding to leave the person she loves, emphasizing that such abusers also have many good qualities (368–373; 376). She based the main characters loosely on her own parents; her father was physically abusive to her mother, who left him when Hoover was a toddler. Nevertheless, she states that she had a “very close” relationship with him (370).
The issue is that not even the most evil people in the world are only evil all of the time—but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re bad people. A person who repeatedly physically hurts another person is a bad person; a perpetrator of domestic violence is a morally bad person, whatever his other qualities. In Hoover’s eagerness to portray the nuance and the difficulty of the victim’s decision, she refuses to morally condemn people whose actions make them decidedly evil. It is possible to recognize nuance, acknowledge different perspectives, and regard those who have conflicting experiences with a person with compassion—while still morally condemning violent, abusive individuals. Not only is this possible—justice demands it because refusing to do so is implicitly accepting what they have done. As philosopher Ayn Rand put it, when “neither the good nor the evil may expect anything from you—whom do you betray and whom do you encourage?”1
Victims of domestic abuse face nearly impossible decisions
Hoover’s main stated purpose in writing the book—compassionately answering the common question posed about domestic abuse victims: “Why didn’t she just leave?”—is a valid one. Through literature we can explore another person’s perspective, see another life we will never live, and fully put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. Unfortunately, It Ends With Us largely failed to make Lily’s decision to leave Ryle the deep, emotional conflict it could have been (and is for many people in similar situations).
The first problem is that we don’t really understand why she loves Ryle to begin with, as described above. Further, she has no financial pressure (her flower shop is thriving), her wealthy best friend and mother support her decision to do leave him, and she has a promising romantic prospect when she’s ready to date again (her old high school boyfriend has reappeared in her life, now the owner of a successful restaurant). Further, Ryle doesn’t threaten, as some abusers do, that she must not leave or he will hurt her, but instead gives her space to make her decision, leaving the country for three months after the worst instance of abuse. So in sum, she has only a shallow relationship to lose if she leaves. Why struggle with the decision?
The Vibe
The book felt as though it were written by a high-schooler, with truly awful word choice and sentence structure. For example, before speaking to her mother, who adores Ryle, about the facts that Ryle has been abusive and that she is planning to leave him, Lily thinks, “I hate it when she’s sad, and telling her I married a man who might be like my father is going to make her really sad” (332). That should have been a deeply emotional moment full of inner turmoil; instead, it’s just “sad.” Further, Hoover uses a strange device to give us glimpses of Lily’s past and her relationship with her high-school sweetheart; she used to write diary entries as though she was writing to the celebrity talk show host Ellen Degeneres, and we get these diary entries in full. This structure was not only totally unnecessary, the fact that the style of the letters and Lily’s current manner of speaking and thinking are exactly the same shows a lack of maturity that does not contribute to sympathy for the character. In short, I found it hard to read, but not because of the heaviness of the material, but because of the lightness with which such heavy material was treated.
Adaptation
Last year, a movie adaptation was released starring Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni as Lily and Ryle. Lively and Baldoni have since sued each other (Lively claims he sexually harassed her; Baldoni’s team supposedly have set out to ruin her reputation in response). The lawsuit is ongoing, and only some of the evidence is publicly available, but the controversy has harmed sales of the movie itself. The film, which I reviewed, takes out a few of the worst parts of the book, such as Ryle’s stalker-like behavior and the line about there not being bad people. As a result, the movie is slightly better than the book, but it is still not a fantastic treatment of the subject.
Conclusion
I do not recommend It Ends With Us unless you are deeply interested in media portrayals of domestic violence or terrible examples of modern fiction writing. It failed to morally condemn domestic abusers and missed the opportunity of offering a nuanced look at the difficulties their victims face. Added to Hoover’s childish writing style, it makes for an unenjoyable read.
Ayn Rand, “How Does One Lead a Rational Life in an Irrational Society?” in The Virtue of Selfishness, (Signet 50th Anniversary edition), 82.