Dear Colleen Hoover,

​Dear Colleen,
I just read your book, It Ends with Us, and I read Verity last month. I read a lot. I’m a grade 11 and 12 English teacher. I love books. But when this thing started, my ability to read evaporated. I’m working online. I’m parenting a 14 mo and a 4 yo, who aren’t used to me working from home at all hours, and I’m worried about their dad who’s an essential worker. It’s been hard. But I’m also so grateful. Still, I couldn’t read.

I started small, a few Lisa Gardner books here and there. And then my daughter, 4, picked up your novel. My aunt had gifted me a bag of books and two of yours were in the bag. My daughter said that your book was so beautiful that I had to read it.

I tucked into It Ends with Us and fell in love with your characters. I cried. I was reminded of my own heartbreaks. I thought a lot about my own children.

Beyond loving the story, I started to think about my own writing. I’m a 38 yo English teacher with two English Lit degrees—no surprise about those writer aspirations! But, I’ve had starts and stalls for a decade. Small children definitely stall those starts. Exhaustion comes a close second. But a couple of years ago I started writing a story I was passionate about. I fell in love with my protagonist and I wrote her from my heart not from what I’ve learned about stories and publishing.

I’ve put her story on pause this past year—premature newborn, motherhood, back to work, pandemic! I love so much what your book did for me. I’ve been revived not just for reading but I am going back to my own writing. Because ultimately I want to write so that I can do for readers what your books do.

So, thank you. Thank you for firing up a part of me I’d buried under all this anxiety of working and parenting and living in this pandemic. Your writing dug out a little bit of me that I worried I’d lost.