Colleen Hoover Reveals She Was Also Confused by the “Verity” Ending (Exclusive)
Colleen Hoover Reveals She Was Also Confused by the “Verity” Ending (Exclusive)
Desiree AnelloMon, October 19, 2026 at 5:00 PM UTC
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Colleen Hoover; Anne Hathaway in ‘Verity’Credit: TheStewartofNY/Getty; Alisha Wetherill -
Colleen Hoover revealed that she was “just as confused” about the Verity ending as everyone else
“Having been the one to write it, it is very confusing to me,” she told Olivia Ponton on her Booked, Blonde and Busy podcast
The movie, which is based on Hoover’s novel of the same name, brings the complicated dynamic between Dakota Johnson and Anne Hathaway’s characters to life
Colleen Hoover is “just as confused” as everyone else about the ending of Verity.
While speaking to Olivia Ponton on the latest episode of her Booked, Blonde and Busy podcast, the author admitted that, when it comes to “team letter” versus “team manuscript” in the psychological thriller’s ultimate game of whodunit, she is neither. Booked & Busy is a monthly podcast hosted by Ponton that spotlights a new book, including interviews with their, authors each week.
“I wrote Verity from Lowen’s perspective and, when I finished that book, I was just as confused as Lowen,” Hoover said. “If you asked me then, it was always like, ‘Oh, the manuscript is real.’”
“The letter, I think, she was trying to cover her ass,” she continued. “I then had to annotate Verity for Kindle this week — I haven’t revisited the book since I wrote it — and the whole time I was annotating it, I felt bad for Verity. And then I got to that letter and I was like, ‘This poor woman.’ ”
In both the thriller novel and the recent film adaptation, in which Anne Hathaway stars as Verity Crawford and Dakota Johnson stars as Lowen Ashleigh, Lowen discovers a manuscript that appears to be Verity’s disturbing autobiography.
As Lowen seemingly gains a deeper understanding of Verity and falls for her husband Jeremy (Josh Hartnett), she discovers a letter that ultimately makes audiences question who the real villain is.
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“I’ve been on both sides of it,” Hoover said of the discourse surrounding whether the letter or the manuscript told the true story. “Having been the one to write it is very confusing to me, so part of me was like, now I want to dive into it from everyone’s perspective and write everyone’s.”
“But then I was like, that’s going to take away what I love most about this book,” she added, “and that’s the discussions it creates afterward.”
Ultimately deciding that all the characters are simply “crazy and deserve each other,” Hoover went on to admit that giving her novel such an open-ended ending wasn’t always the goal.
“I do remember not really knowing how it was going to end,” she said. “Two weeks before I was due to turn it into the editor, I was still writing it and I thought it was going to be one ending. And then I was laying in bed one night, and then I got the idea to end it how I ended it, and immediately got out of bed and went and wrote the ending.”
“I really didn’t know how people would take it,” she continued. “I didn’t write it with an intention of creating a team letter versus team manuscript. I love that it became that, but it was never my intention.”
on People
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
