The book is raising questions, but that’s not the problem with it.

We’re not supposed to read too much IRL significance into the story of Petra, the author who’s the heroine of bestselling novelist Colleen Hoover’s new thriller Woman Down. This, even though Petra, like Hoover, is an author of novels in a range of genres, who starts writing as a hobby, gets popular and famous from it, earns more money than she ever expected, then has a brush with online controversy around a film adaptation of one of her novels and suffers a tremendous, emotionally debilitating, income-drying-up case of writer’s block. “This is in no way a replica of my journey or my morals, nor is it a reflection of how I feel about my peers and/or this industry,” Hoover warns in an author’s note opening Woman Down—a remark surely intended to deter exactly the kind of reading I’m about to perform.

Hoover, a former social worker, is such a publishing phenomenon that she has been named one of Time’s 100 most influential people in the world. Two of her novels have been adapted into movies, and two more are coming this year. The author has been around long enough to have gone through multiple cycles of being embraced and rejected online. And although she has held herself carefully apart from Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively’s high-profile legal mess surrounding the 2024 film adaptation of her 2016 book It Ends With Us—telling Elle in November of last year that she found the situation “sad” and was “trying to stay removed from the negativity”—after the book found a wider audience due to the movie’s popularity, long-standing critiques of the story’s treatment of the dynamics around domestic violence also received new oxygen.

Despite the similarities between Petra’s and Hoover’s experiences, I buy that, as Hoover insists, most of the events of Woman Down don’t reflect things that have happened to her along her “journey.” That’s because I don’t think that any given woman, including Colleen Hoover, could ever have experienced any of the truly wild things that Petra does. This book is, after all, by the same author who wrote Verity, a novel famously containing plot twists that have boggled 1 million brains, for better or for worse. Petra, we learn, finally breaks her writer’s block thanks to a steamy extramarital affair with a handsome police detective, Saint, who has many uncanny similarities to the hero of the book she’s trying to write, and whose real reason for appearing at the lake house she has rented in a desperate attempt to find her flow turns out to be very, very different from the one he offers her when he knocks on the door. Like many Hoover hunks, Saint is oddly controlling and omnipresent—or is it just that he’s protective? He’s also exactly what the doctor ordered, somehow saying and doing all the right things, continually abetting the story Petra tells herself, that this affair is purely for research. And pretty soon, after enough doses of Saint, Petra is writing and writing.

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Although some vocal readers online won’t consume any book that includes cheating in it (in fact, you can find people on Goodreads who say they refuse to read Woman Down for that very reason), I certainly don’t think that an author who writes about an extramarital affair (even a very hot one) has to be someone who approves of extramarital affairs. I will note that in this tale, Petra’s husband, Shepherd, doesn’t acquit himself well—he has been pressing her to get past her block so she can start making money again, he’s routine and predictable in the bedroom, and, worst of all, he brings her young kids to her solo writers retreat to “surprise her.” It’s little wonder Petra dives headfirst into her affair so speedily—on the brink of her first sexual encounter with Saint, she expresses satisfaction at the fact that she is finally getting to experience sex with a guy with a big penis like the ones she writes into her books. “Every man I’ve ever been with has been average size,” Petra says, “so I’ve always had to imagine what it would be like to be fucked by a man who is so big, it actually hurts.” Mild sympathies to Shepherd, who definitely deserves some kind of karmic punishment for ruining his wife’s writing time and generally being a pill!

But the idea that none of Petra’s bad feelings about her profession, which make up the inciting “trauma” that sets off the action in Woman Down, have emerged from Hoover’s experience is preposterous. Even if the controversies Hoover has been part of don’t exactly mirror the one that unfolds in Petra’s life before the action of Woman Down begins, when leaked text messages show that Petra OK’d a change in the film adaptation of her book that the fans hate, it’s clear that Hoover is writing what she knows about the Bookternet’s effects on an author’s psyche. According to a profile in Texas Monthly in 2024, Hoover—who recently revealed that she has been battling cancer—suffered her own stretch of writer’s block. “Before, release days were kind of fun because I felt like I was writing for the people that love my books, but now it’s almost like I’m writing for the people who are just waiting to put out that negative video of my books, because it gets views,” she told the writer, Lauren Larson. “It’s just the popular thing, to hate, right now, and I wish I didn’t let that get in my head, but I do.” This is a sentiment that’s almost exactly echoed by Petra in Woman Down: “The idea of finishing a book and writing The End doesn’t feel like it’ll be an accomplishment,” she says, at the beginning, while in a Facebook Live with a private fan group. “It actually fills me with fear that I’ll have to enter that next phase of publicity.”

Hoover’s prose is typically uneven, jumping back and forth from the general to the specific and the vague to the lurid in a way that you may find either charming or unprofessional, and that has often been ripe for online cherry-picking. It Ends With Us, for example, contains a bunch of random mentions of items made of marine-grade polymer, which a reader once screenshotted, posted online, and made go viral. Clearly, CoHo has noticed this and adjusted accordingly, and to my eye, Woman Down is slightly less odd than some of her previous books. To me, this is a shame. These moments of character detail Hoover sticks in her books, like making the teenage hero of Regretting You into a Letterboxd guy with Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies on his nightstand, are the best parts. In Woman Down, we hear that a prior resident of the rental house where Petra is having her writing time was Michael Showalter, a name that feels polymer-grade random until you realize that Showalter directed the film adaptation of Verity (starring Dakota Johnson, Anne Hathaway, and Josh Hartnett) that’s slated to come out later this year—making the mention less of an Easter egg and more of a wry shout-out.

But the larger problem is the inciting issue in Woman Down. What Hoover has done in this latest novel—taken this stressful real-life situation she’s experienced and used the feelings it produced as the backdrop for a truly bonkers plot about deception and betrayal—is understandable but, despite the universality of people’s negativity about Online, feels a bit out of touch with the human experience. Usually, people in Hoover’s books have abusive dads, neglectful moms, or terrible, traumatic car accidents marring their past, and these histories make them act in ways they regret, until they eventually straighten things out—or don’t. Getting torn apart by BookTok, YouTube, and Twitter sounds awful, and having a parasocial relationship with an author can certainly make a person do strange things, as we see in Woman Down’s biggest twist, which I will not reveal here. But as a result of the book’s deep interest in online shenanigans, Woman Down lacks the full Gothic savor of Hoover’s back catalog, and is worse for it. Hopefully we can get back to classic CoHo, and more interesting secrets, the next time around.