Ugly Love
Ugly Love
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Colleen Hoover on Ugly Love
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A band she couldn’t write toThe starting point for ‘Ugly Love’ had nothing to do with plot. Before Hoover had a heroine, a structure, or a premise, she had an album on repeat. The music gave her Miles first, and everything else grew around him. What the band never knew was that she embedded them inside the novel’s DNA: their acronym became the protagonist’s name, and their lead singer’s name became Miles’s middle name.
Ugly Love is actually inspired by a band called the Airborne Toxic Event. Listening to their music, I kind of got an idea for Miles’s character and went with that. And actually their acronym for their band is TATE, which is why I named [the main character] Tate... Miles’s middle name is Mikel, and that’s the singer’s name in the Airborne Toxic Event. What’s funny, though, is that I can’t listen to music at all when I write. I have to have complete silence.
The Airborne Toxic Event never appears in the novel by name. Their entire influence lived beneath the surface, hidden in the characters’ identities.
Having Miles’s character before she had anything else meant the book’s tragic backstory was never a calculated artistic addition. When a Goodreads interviewer framed Miles’s past as a deliberate structural choice and asked why she’d felt it was necessary, she pushed back on the premise entirely.
I don’t know that I felt it was a necessary addition. It was just his story, so I had to tell it. I think you would be surprised at what part made me cry; it might not be the part you think... Rachel’s house. When they went in and looked at her daughter—that was really hard to write.
How she wrote it
Miles first, Tate second, Cap last of allHoover’s usual process is nonlinear in feel but linear in construction. ‘Ugly Love’ broke from that entirely. She wrote the book in two distinct passes rather than weaving the timelines together as she went, finishing one character’s complete arc before touching the other’s.
With Ugly Love, I wrote most of Miles’ chapters and then went back in and added Tate’s chapters.
Writing a dual timeline, where the present-day chapters alternate with chapters set six years earlier, was a structural risk she nearly talked herself out of. Her solution was mechanical rather than intuitive: she managed reader disorientation through chapter length rather than exposition.
I’m thrown off a lot when I read from different timelines, and I go back and forth, so I was afraid when I went into that one—if I could pull it off. I think keeping Miles’s chapters a little bit shorter helped keep the flow of the story and didn’t confuse you too much.
The dual timeline also required the same character to register as two different people. Miles at nineteen and Miles at twenty-six had to feel discontinuous without becoming incomprehensible, and she was aware that readers would spend the early chapters struggling to warm to the present-day version. She had written that difficulty deliberately, measuring it against the men she’d built before him.
You look at Will and Holder and Daniel, and they’re not alpha males. They’re very sweet and would do anything for the girl in the book, but [Miles is] kind of different. You don’t know what he’s thinking, where he’s going, why he treats her the way he does. It’s harder to like him at first than the other characters.
Cap, the elderly elevator operator who becomes Tate’s closest confidant in her apartment building, did not exist in any version of the manuscript Hoover finished. He was added only after she read the completed draft and noticed something missing. The addition required rewriting large portions of a book she had already considered done.
I actually finished the entire book before going back and adding in Cap’s character. I wrote a rough draft and got everything out that I wanted to get out, and then I realized—Tate needs a best friend! I don’t know why I thought an 80-year-old man would be the perfect best friend for her, but it worked. I went in and rewrote a lot of the story to add him in there. I don’t know how I wrote the book without him to begin with.
Writing emotionally devastating material without carrying it home at the end of the day is a practical problem Hoover solved with a structural habit. She applied this across all her books, but it is especially visible in ‘Ugly Love’, where comedic and tender beats interrupt sequences of real damage.
I do tend to take on the mood of my characters, so I always try to end my writing day on a funny or happy scene. It’s why, even in the saddest scenes, I tend to insert comedy when I can because I like to go home without the character’s feelings weighing me down.
The personal thread
A decade in social work, a lifetime of pushingHoover spent years in social work, including time at child protective services, before writing full time. That career showed her what emotional damage looks like when it is lived rather than narrated, and she has said it shaped not just her subject matter but the emotional threshold she writes toward.
I think being in social work for many years definitely contributed to where I pull my inspiration from. But mostly, I think my lack of emotion is what makes my books so dramatic to a lot of readers. I just keep pushing and pushing until I feel something.
The escalating darkness in her catalog is not a brand decision. She describes it as a personal requirement: the books have to cost her something or the writing doesn’t feel finished. ‘Ugly Love’ was the first novel she ever cried writing, which by her own account is a high bar to clear.
I’m just a very dark person. I feel like I have to kind of continue to make [my books] darker and more emotional so that I feel it.
What she wants us to sit with
Seeing someone the person who loves them cannotHoover’s interviews offer no single declaration of what ‘Ugly Love’ is for, but the structural choice she describes repeatedly makes the intent clear. Tate never has access to the past-tense chapters the reader holds. The reader watches Miles become someone Tate cannot explain, and that gap is the book’s argument. The theme she returns to across her work is the same one the dual timeline enacts.
I love playing Devil’s Advocate. I love putting the readers in the shoes of people that they wouldn’t normally agree with or, you know, trying to see something from a different perspective. So I plan to continue with that. It’s my favorite theme. [paraphrased from audio]
In ‘Ugly Love’, the perspective she hands the reader is Miles’s buried history. The novel’s formal structure is its moral instruction: you cannot judge what you cannot see, and Tate never gets to see.