Who is Colleen Hoover, the author behind It Ends with Us? Inside her rags-to-riches story, from dairy farming to social work – and she just deleted Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni from her Instagram

Like Bloom, Hoover’s father physically abused her mother. While their similarities end there – Bloom’s mother stayed, while Hoover’s parents divorced and her mother later remarried – the impact of domestic abuse left a lasting imprint on both their lives, albeit in different ways.

Amid the ongoing drama between Baldoni and Lively, Hoover, who had previously deactivated her Instagram, returned to the platform and deleted all posts featuring the two actors.

Here’s what you need to know about the controversial author.

Colleen Hoover never imagined writing could be a career

Born on December 11, 1979, in Sulphur Springs, Texas, Hoover yearned to write before she could even pick up a pencil. In a 2022 Zoom call with Elle magazine, she recalled her four-year-old self feeling envious of her older sister, who could scribble words on paper. “I remember feeling back then like I had stories to tell,” she explained.

She wrote her first story, “Mystery Bob”, a year later, which is about a man searching for five rings. Between managing schoolwork and helping out at her parents’ dairy farm, she continued to write, telling those around her that she wanted to be a writer when she grew up. In reality though, she never truly believed she could pursue it as a career, she said in an interview with Bloomsbury’s Writers’ & Artists’ Yearbook.

Instead, she attended Texas A&M University, graduating with a degree in social work in 2004 and going on to work in social services. It wasn’t until 2011, while living in a single-wide trailer with her husband – who was a long-distance truck driver at the time – and their three sons, that she began writing again, per The New York Times.

Her first book was meant as a Christmas gift for her mum