Verity
Verity
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Colleen Hoover on Verity
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Angry at a movie, up until four in the morningThe book that became her first psychological thriller began on a car ride home from a film she mostly loved. The ending frustrated her: it hadn’t delivered what she wanted from the genre, something frightening that could plausibly happen to real people. She worked through an alternative plot with her mother on the drive, landed on the idea of a husband mistaking his wife’s manuscript for a real confession, and her mother told her to go write it. She got home and outlined the entire novel before dawn.
That’s how Verity started, because I was angry at a movie. [paraphrased from audio]
Before she’d written a single page of the book, Amazon had already pointed her toward it. She’d spent years being miscategorized on the platform as a thriller author despite having no thriller to her name, and in a 2018 interview she noted the absurdity while describing a new idea she couldn’t shake.
Amazon always categorizes my books as psychological thrillers, but I’ve never even written one. This one would fall in that category, though. So maybe the incorrect categorization on Amazon helped spur the idea.
That interview was about All Your Perfects, published in 2018. Verity appeared six months later.
The final push came from a publisher drawing a genre boundary she wasn’t willing to accept. She’d been asked to stay in women’s fiction, and she understood the commercial logic. But the book forming in her head didn’t fit that category, so she self-published Verity instead of negotiating.
I can’t stick to one thing. Even if it does help brand me and sell my books better, it’s not what’s going to make me happy.
How she wrote it
Confused alongside her own narratorThe structural decision that shaped every other element of the book was committing to a single point of view: Lowen Ashby, the struggling writer hired to complete the series of a famous author named Verity Crawford. Hoover never entered Jeremy Crawford’s perspective, and Verity herself existed on the page only through a manuscript Lowen discovers in the house. That constraint had an unintended consequence that Hoover describes as genuine disorientation.
I wrote Verity from Lowen’s perspective. I was never in Jeremy’s perspective. And the only perspective I was in with Verity was her manuscript. And so at the end, you know, when Lowen was confused, I was confused. [paraphrased from audio]
She anticipated that readers would be skeptical of her claim to not know the answer while she was writing it. In the same interview she pushed back on that skepticism, explaining that staying locked inside one character’s experience kept the question genuinely open for her throughout the drafting process.
I know people don’t believe that, but I really was. When I was writing that, I was like, oh my gosh, what is real? What is not? Because that book is just from that one character’s perspective. [paraphrased from audio]
She went into the project because writing characters unlike herself appealed to her after years of romance. The finished manuscript confirmed just how far she’d traveled from her usual territory, and the confirmation came from the people who knew her best.
My mom and my sisters, when I wrote Verity and they read it, they were all like, ‘There you are. We don’t know where the romance comes from, that doesn’t seem like you, but the psychotic part of your writing seems more like you.’ [paraphrased from audio]
Inside a manuscript she describes as relentlessly dark, one scene stood apart. It comes early in the timeline: Verity and Jeremy’s first meeting at a party, before any of the violence the novel builds toward. For Hoover, working through that scene felt different from the rest of the book.
My favorite scene to write in Verity, shockingly, was when Verity and Jeremy met at the party. I just really enjoyed that. I think it was the only part of the book that wasn’t, you know, like too dark, and so it was just a lot of fun to write. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Where the darkness actually came fromHoover had spent most of her career writing romance, and the genre felt external to her family in a way the thriller did not. When her mother and sisters read Verity, their reaction reframed what she’d assumed was a departure into unfamiliar territory as something closer to the opposite.
I enjoyed Verity because it was so much fun to try something new and get into the head of characters who are nothing like myself.
After the book found a wide audience, readers began mapping Lowen’s experience onto Hoover’s own life: Lowen is a writer in financial trouble who moves into another author’s home, and the identification felt obvious to many readers. Hoover drew a clear line, and she drew it publicly.
Just because I’m writing about someone who does what I do for a living, it’s not, you know, me. It’s not a reflection of who I am and my morals. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Team manuscript, and why the question has to stay openVerity is structured around two competing accounts of the same events: the manuscript Lowen finds, written in Verity’s voice and confessing to terrible acts, and a letter Verity leaves for Jeremy that offers a different explanation entirely. Hoover wrote the whole book without settling the question for herself, but since publication she has picked a side.
I’m team manuscript. [paraphrased from audio]
She’s also willing to go further than ‘the manuscript is real,’ moving all the way to a character verdict. The question the book leaves open is whether Verity Crawford is a killer or a victim of her own darkest imagination. When pressed to choose, Hoover doesn’t hedge.
If I had to pick, I think Verity is evil. I really do. [paraphrased from audio]
Her willingness to hold that verdict while having written a book that makes the opposite reading equally possible points to something she describes as a core instinct across her fiction. The goal is not to deliver a clear moral position but to put the reader somewhere uncomfortable and make them feel it from the inside.
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. [paraphrased from audio]
For a book whose entire architecture rests on two narrators, neither of them provably reliable, that instinct is not just a preference. It is the plot.
Verity has so far remained a standalone, and the reason is not indifference to the genre. After spending most of her career in romance, she found something in the thriller form that she hadn’t expected to want this much.
I think I enjoyed writing thriller the most. I just haven’t come up with another idea that could match Verity, so I’m being very picky about when I write another thriller.