Colleen Hoover Readers Have Been Arguing About Verity’s Ending Since 2018. The Author Already Took A Side.

Verity’s plot hinges on two documents the character wrote: a manuscript that paints her as a monster, and a letter claiming the manuscript was fiction. Hoover has named her side: “I’m team manuscript.” The letter was her cover.

The book itself preserves the ambiguity. Some readers have stayed in the letter camp even after Hoover named her pick.

The manuscript camp points to evidence outside the page. The floor-to-ceiling windows in Verity’s office, installed to watch her husband Jeremy, exist exactly as the manuscript describes them. The bite marks on the headboard exist.

The plate-throwing fight and the “one with the scar” line at the twins’ birth are events Jeremy personally witnessed. The boat incident turns on a single line: Verity tells only one of her children to hold his breath.

If the manuscript were a writing exercise built from twisted versions of real events, Jeremy would have spotted the inaccuracies. He didn’t.

The letter camp points to Verity’s actual job. She wrote horror from the villain’s perspective for a living, and her editor Amanda suggested “antagonistic journaling,” a writing exercise that takes real events and pushes them darker, as a way to access that headspace.

The letter also answers the questions the manuscript leaves open: how Jeremy already knew about the document when Lowen found it, why he reacted the way he did, and why Verity would fake the coma. The bonus chapter, in which Jeremy kills a woman to protect their secret life, doesn’t help his case.

Amazon MGM Studios is adapting Hoover’s 2018 psychological thriller, the novel that turned her into a household name during BookTok’s peak between 2020 and 2022, into a film. It releases on October 2.

Michael Showalter is directing, reuniting with Anne Hathaway after The Idea of You in 2024. Nick Antosca, who created The Act, wrote the screenplay.

Josh Hartnett plays Jeremy, the one who hires Lowen and brings her into the house. Filming wrapped in New York in spring 2025.

Dakota Johnson stars as Lowen and is also producing. The teaser that played at CinemaCon last month leaned harder into horror than the It Ends With Us marketing did in 2024.

The poster released this week shows an embrace under a blood-red sky, with the tagline “There is no light where we’re going.”

This is the test of whether the darker, more ambiguous corner of Colleen Hoover’s catalog can hold a theatrical audience.