Colleen Hoover "Almost Embarrassed" to Say She Wrote 'It Ends With Us' Actorsvaultpro

It Ends With Us novel (2016)

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Alex is an entertainment and celebrity news journalist with experience as a writer and editor at In Touch Weekly, Life & Style, OK! Magazine, and Screen Rant. She earned her B.A. in Theatre, Film, and Digital Production from the University of California, Riverside, and has been writing about entertainment and celebrity news since 2020. When she isn’t reporting, Alex is developing her own creative projects, including short films and TV pilots.

It’s a dream for many authors to pen a novel that’s made into a movie featuring major Hollywood stars — but for Colleen Hoover, the legal drama surrounding It Ends With Us has made her hesitant to tell people that she even wrote it. Months after the film’s premiere in August 2024, Blake Lively filed a complaint against director and costar Justin Baldoni that alleged he’d created a “hostile work environment” and sexually harassed her throughout production. This quickly sparked a tense legal back-and-forth as both of them accused each other of behaving poorly and spearheading a smear campaign against the other to destroy their reputations.

“When there are real people involved, with real feelings and emotions…this actually truly has impacted some of the actors’ careers in huge ways. And I just find it all around sad,” Hoover explained in an interview with Elle. “I’m just trying to stay removed from the negativity. I have my own story I could tell … but I don’t want to bring attention to it, and I don’t want to have to put someone else down to lift myself up. So I’d rather just ignore it and let people think and say what they’re going to say.”

Hoover said that she felt especially upset because the book was inspired by her mother’s personal story, and as the court drama continues, she doesn’t even want to “recommend it” to anyone to read anymore.

“I feel awful because I almost feel like she’s gone through more with the aftermath of this film, more pain than she went through with my dad, just seeing the ugliness of it … I feel like [the lawsuit] has overshadowed it. I’m almost embarrassed to say I wrote it. When people ask what I do, I’m just like, ‘I’m a writer. Please don’t ask me what I wrote.’”