Colleen Hoover: Past Posts on her bestsellers “It Ends with Us” and “Verity,” highlighting multiple personality

Marital Abuse: Why doesn’t she just leave him?

In the past, when I read the above, cliché question, I often wondered if the abused wife had multiple personality: Maybe she had memory gaps for the episodes of abuse. Maybe she had an alternate personality that was originally, defensively, designed in childhood to appease abusers.

But since reading the novel It Ends with Us by Colleen Hoover (1), I realize that it may be the husband who has multiple personality: He may know that he abuses his wife, if he sees her injuries, but he may not actually remember assaulting her if he has multiple personality’s memory gaps. Meanwhile, the wife may never think in terms of multiple personality, per se, because she sees her husband’s regular, loving personality as her true husband, whom she married, but his assaultive, alternate personality as only a temporary aberration triggered by alcohol or stress.

In the novel (1), the husband has multiple personality’s memory gaps, but does not get a correct diagnosis, because, apparently, the author did not know the diagnosis, and was not intentionally writing about multiple personality, per se.

Comment: Many works discussed in this blog—including classics and those written by winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature—have unintended or unacknowledged symptoms of multiple personality, probably reflecting the multiple personality trait of most fiction writers.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016. 

“It Ends with Us”  by Colleen Hoover: Lily’s husband assaults her while he has a memory gap

Lily, the protagonist, has recently opened a flower shop and married Ryle, a neurosurgeon.  She has promised herself never to become a physically abused wife like her mother.  But after the second time he assaults her, Ryle confesses that when he was six years old, he accidentally shot his brother to death and “since that happened, there are things I can’t control.  I get angry.  I black out.  I’ve been in therapy since I was six years old.  But it is not my excuse.  It is my reality…I don’t remember the moment I pushed you [down the stairs]…You are my wife.  I’m supposed to be the one who protects you from the monsters.  I’m not supposed to be one” (1, p. 241).

Search “memory gap” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us”  by Colleen Hoover: Lily’s husband assaults her while he has a memory gap

Lily, the protagonist, has recently opened a flower shop and married Ryle, a neurosurgeon.  She has promised herself never to become a physically abused wife like her mother.  But after the second time he assaults her, Ryle confesses that when he was six years old, he accidentally shot his brother to death and “since that happened, there are things I can’t control.  I get angry.  I black out.  I’ve been in therapy since I was six years old.  But it is not my excuse.  It is my reality…I don’t remember the moment I pushed you [down the stairs]…You are my wife.  I’m supposed to be the one who protects you from the monsters.  I’m not supposed to be one” (1, p. 241).

Search “memory gap” for past posts on this cardinal symptom of multiple personality.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover: Author recalls her traumatic early childhood as partial basis for this novel

Note from the Author

“My earliest memory in life was from the age of two and a half years old…my father picked up our television and threw it at my mother, knocking her down.  She divorced him before I turned three…He was an alcoholic…In fact, he told me he had two knuckles replaced in his hand because he had hit her so hard, they broke against her skull.  My father regretted the way he treated my mother his entire life…and he said he would grow old and die still madly in love with her” (1, pp. 368-369).

As noted in my introduction to this blog, most adults with multiple personality have had childhood trauma, either as a victim or witness.  Search “childhood trauma” for past posts.

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover: Author misunderstands her novel and possibly herself

“He knows what he’s done.  He’s [the nice] Ryle again” (1, p. 266).

Lily, the protagonist, recognizes that there are two Ryles, one that is angry and assaults her, and the other, a nice Ryle, whom she loves. But the author has forgotten that the angry Ryle blacks out (post 3), leaving the nice Ryle with a memory gap. That is, the nice Ryle knows what he’s done only indirectly, through circumstantial evidence (Lily’s injuries, etc.).

Thus, the author does not recognize that she has written a multiple personality scenario, with two Ryle personalities.

Search “unacknowledged multiple personality,” which is a multiple personality scenario that is unlabeled, and is probably a reflection of the author’s own psychology (search “multiple personality trait”).

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“It Ends with Us” by Colleen Hoover: Dissociative (multiple personality) talk

“…too many pieces of me are invested in you now…” (1, p. 89).

“You make me want to be a different person…” (1, p. 93).

“I walked straight to the kitchen and I opened a drawer.  I grabbed the biggest knife I could find and…I don’t know how to explain it.  It was like I wasn’t even in my own body.  I could see myself walking across the kitchen with the knife in my hand…” (1, p. 154).

1. Colleen Hoover. It Ends with Us. New York, Atria, 2016.

“Verity” by Colleen Hoover: New York Times bestseller’s characters are writers with dissociative symptoms (multiple personality is a dissociative disorder)

Lowen and Verity are two female fiction writers.  Verity may or may not be a murderer, since she writes both a confession and a retraction.  It is also unclear whether Verity’s muteness after a car accident is brain damage, faking, or a posttraumatic, dissociative symptom (multiple personality is a dissociative disorder).

Lowen, the narrator, also has dissociative states of mind.  She has a history of sleepwalking since childhood.  One morning, she awoke “with a broken wrist and covered in blood” (1, p. 119).

The author has a sense of humor: "I was good at spewing bullshit.  It's why I became a writer" (1, p. 206).

1. Colleen Hoover. Verity. New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2018.