Book Review: Verity

Spoilers!

That Colleen Hoover, she’s quite good. I absolutely devoured 2018’s Verity essentially — feeding myself, my dog and cat, and walking the dog aside — in one sitting. So much so, I largely put wrestling tonight on the background, muted, in order to find out if Verity really was the psychopath she was being portrayed as, or if another shoe was going to drop.

Lowen epitomizes the starving artist characterization as an author; she saw her mother through end-of-life-care while nearing eviction from her apartment, and gosh darnit, nobody reads her books. She’s also a loner and a self-proclaimed introvert, which doesn’t much factor in later. Then, a chance encounter — which is to say, witnessing someone get killed in a traffic crash and being splashed by said person’s blood — with Jeremy Crawford leads to the opportunity of a lifetime. She is picked to write the three follow-up books in Verity’s hit series after Verity suffers a vague injury of some kind, unable to continue the series, and for doing so, Lowen receives $250,000 (probably closer to $100,000 after her ex-boyfriend-agent receives his cut and the government theirs).

But in order to do the job justice, she takes Jeremy up on his offer to come to their house and go through Verity’s outlines and notes for the series. What’s weird is that Lowen hadn’t previously read Verity’s work, and prior to going to the house, still didn’t. How do you even know what to look for, like what constitutes an outline and/or a continuation of the series, if you haven’t read any of the series?! That weirdness aside, she learns that Verity has unresponsive wakefulness syndrome (UWS) after experiencing a car crash. That’s why Jeremy said they call themselves the Chronics (which actually makes for a great title, too!) because prior to the car crash, their twin daughters also died young, and they still have 5-year-old Crew to take care of.

That doesn’t stop two things from occurring over the course of the novel, though: a.) Lowen and Jeremy developing feelings for each other; and the main thrust of the novel (heh), b.) Lowen discovering and reading Verity’s ostensible autobiographical manuscript. Interspersed with the present-day at Jeremy’s house, where Lowen has creepy moments of thinking she sees Verity looking at her and watching her when that would be a medical impossibility — and Hoover smartly added in that Lowen is a sleepwalker and takes Xanax for anxiety to make you think perhaps Lowen is seeing things or even making it up — are the “chapters” from Verity’s autobiography. And it’s demented, as Verity warns us from the get-go with the Author’s Note.

From the autobiography, we learn that Verity is whatever the word is for more than just co-dependent on Jeremy, but psychopathically obsessed, to the point she becomes jealous of and antagonistic toward the twins she’s pregnant with for stealing Jeremy’s love and attention. She tries to give herself an abortion in myriad ways, including the vintage coat hanger option. Then, upon birth, she dotes more on one of the girls versus the other with Asperger’s Syndrome. Later, after the former dies due to her peanut allergy, Verity gets it in her mind that the latter killed her. In turn, Verity hatches a scheme to murder the remaining twin in a twisted bid to reclaim more of Jeremy’s love.

All of it’s twisted and depraved, particularly how obsessed Verity was with sex and used sex to get her way. But, almost from the get-go — like with Verity’s warning in the Author’s Note — it almost seemed too demented to the point of making me suspect it was a red herring. That was my first suspicion, which naturally led to the second suspicion later confirmed: Verity was faking her UWS condition (I found that strained believability, but let’s go with it). What I didn’t know with either suspicion of mine was the why and to what end. To try to close those two hanging threads, my third suspicion was that Jeremy faked the manuscript and they were playing a cat-and-mouse game … again, for some undetermined reason. Then, I thought, maybe Lowen really is paranoid and such, and she’s writing from Verity’s perspective in a bid to fulfill the contract and write the next great book in the series. After all, we’re told Verity’s series is written from the antagonist’s perspective. Which is also why I was suspicious that Verity’s autobiography was a true accounting of her feelings and events.

No, the twins really did die, and the autobiography was an extension of Verity writing from the antagonist point-of-view and in so doing, processing her unfathomable grief. Unfortunately for her, Jeremy found the manuscript and believed it was true and tried to kill her twice, including the fateful “car accident.” She then faked her condition to eventually get Crew away from him. But her plans went, well, belly up, when Lowen and Jeremy fell in love, Lowen also believed the manuscript (admittedly making her pretty gullible, I’d say; even psychopaths don’t tend to bluntly advertise their culpability for their crimes!), and then when she convinces Jeremy that Verity is faking her condition, Jeremy successfully kills her.

Later, now pregnant with Jeremy’s baby, Lowen finds a letter from Verity, written to Jeremy, where she tries to explain how the autobiography wasn’t true, that she loved the girls and him. Lowen convinces herself that the letter was yet another way for Verity to manipulate them, and she swallows pieces of the letter and also flushes it down the toilet.

In other words, what’s truth and what’s fiction? What’s the writer pulling from the real world, and when’s the real world mirroring fiction? These are the fun gray questions that always arise with fiction-writing and the authors behind it. If an author writes a nasty character, is that them? An extension of them? Is Stephen King just that sick in the head? Is Colleen Hoover obsessed with sex? Is she playing out a fantasy of wanting to kill her own kids? Of course not to all of the above (well, she could be obsessed with sex, for all I know); it’s unrealistic and uncharitable to assume that every character in a book and the plotting is a reflection of the person writing it rather than a reflection of their imaginative prowess and talents. Write what you know and all that, but there still has to be imagination to it! Even so, discourse often revolves around, “Well, the author must really be a misogynist for writing such a character,” or whatever the case, and even Hoover’s faced such charges before. I found Verity to be a nice, if twisted (to use that word again), commentary on these issues and gray lines.

To put it more simply and to bookend it with how I started this review, I devoured Hoover’s book because of that one burning question: I needed to know. So, where do I come down on Verity? She was a good mother, a good author, and a woman unjustly maligned and murdered. And now, as it happens, Lowen’s waking life, if she has a conscience, will be worse than the sleepwalking she experienced as a child.