Colleen Hoover

Colleen Hoover's Backstory

Early life

Colleen Hoover was born Margaret Colleen Fennell on December 11, 1979, in Sulphur Springs, Texas, and grew up in nearby Saltillo.¹ She studied social work at Texas A&M University–Commerce and worked in social work and teaching jobs before she began writing.¹ She lives in Texas with her husband and their three sons.⁷

Self-publishing

Hoover’s first novel, Slammed, appeared in 2012, followed by two sequels, Point of Retreat and This Girl.² According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, she wrote it as a Christmas gift for her mother and published it herself, and she went on to self-publish many of her books.⁶ Over the following years she wrote both series and standalone novels, among them the Hopeless and Maybe Someday books, Ugly Love, Confess and November 9.¹ With the novelist Tarryn Fisher she wrote Never Never, released digitally in three parts in 2015.¹ In 2015 she and her family founded the Bookworm Box, a nonprofit bookstore and monthly book subscription service.⁷

It Ends with Us and TikTok

It Ends with Us, published in 2016, sold well at first and became a major hit in 2021 after readers on TikTok embraced it; Kirkus Reviews reports that TikTok users also turned several of her earlier books into best-sellers.² It won the Goodreads Choice Award for Romance in 2016, as Confess had the year before.¹ Its sequel, It Starts with Us, followed in 2022.¹ Other books from these years include the thriller Verity (2018), Regretting You (2019) and Reminders of Him (2022).¹

Films

Hoover’s books have become a run of films. It Ends with Us, directed by Justin Baldoni and starring Baldoni and Blake Lively, was released in August 2024 and earned more than $350 million worldwide, according to Wikipedia.¹ A legal dispute between its two stars followed, which Kirkus reported; asked about it in 2026, Hoover said, “I feel for everyone,” and that she remains proud of the film.²⁵ Regretting You followed in 2025, and in March 2026 Universal released Reminders of Him, which Hoover adapted with Lauren Levine and co-produced.¹ Amazon MGM Studios set its film of Verity, with Anne Hathaway, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, for release on October 2, 2026.³

Woman Down

Montlake, an Amazon imprint, published Woman Down on January 13, 2026.² It follows a novelist who retreats to a cabin after online anger over a film of one of her books, and a detective who arrives with bad news; Hoover called it “probably one of the darkest books” she has written.²