BookTok, a corner of TikTok largely dominated by young women that is dedicated to reviewing, recommending, and reacting to a wide range of texts, is a driving force for book publishing and marketing. BookTok has become one of the “commanding forces in adult fiction,” helping “authors sell 20 million printed books in 2021” and increasing sales an additional 50 percent in 2022.”[1] BookTokers define not only what books should be read, but how they might be properly experienced and valued, and invite questions both literary and sociological: what forms and language do BookToks rely on? What do BookTok creators value in novel reading? How do BookTokers perform the experience of reading?
Michael Warner has influentially theorized “uncritical reading,” which often looks like what we might tell students not to do in the classroom (or what some might disparage young people on BookTok for).[2] Such investment in the “uncritical” may be traced to work such as Janice Radway’s foundational Reading the Romance, which meticulously documents womens’ reading of romance as a social function: a means to fulfilling unmet desires in their day-to-day lives. To follow in the tradition of Radway’s scholarship means taking seriously the ways in which readers outside of the classroom experience texts, and take as legitimate what they say they value in reading. Radway explains that “because the typical romance reader is untrained in the techniques of literary analysis, it is thought unlikely that she will be able to identify all the relevant features or to describe their effects upon her.”[3] Of course, both the women of Radway’s study and BookTok readers are quite capable of communicating and making sense of their own reading experience, although sometimes in forms not immediately recognized as legitimate by literary scholars. BookTok too is a complex social event of reading, and it is therefore necessary to evaluate what actual readers say about their reading experience to draw conclusions about how novel reading works for them. I argue that the example of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us allows for women and girls to encounter male brutality safely, not unlike Radway’s romance readers; not, as is sometimes suspected, to celebrate or revel in its sensationalism, but rather “in an attempt to understand the meaning of an event that has become almost unavoidable in the real world.”[4] BookTok then allows for young women to perform, and thereby rehash, reexperience, and communicate affective responses to such an event among other readers.
Now one does not need to travel into women’s homes and sit at their kitchen tables to figure out how they are reading; instead, a search of even just one hashtag provides a trove of reader responses to a range of materials.[5] These TikToks can be read themselves as performances, staging an engagement in a collective reading experience that reflects and encourages the formation of a certain kind of affective reader; what matters is whether or not a book can make a reader invested in its characters, swoon for it heroes, cry at its plot twists. My project is necessarily exploratory and limited in its conclusions: I selected Colleen Hoover’s widely popular 2016 novel It Ends With Us as a case study for this project not only because of how often it was recommended, but also because it provided a window into the largest subset of BookTok creators: romance readers. The novel follows Lily, who had a troubled upbringing but is now a flower shop owner, and her relationship with both Ryle, a surgeon she has a whirlwind romance with and marries halfway through the novel, and Atlas, a boy she knew as a teenager. Hoover’s novel works well to capture what may be considered mainstream BookTok practices of large, popular accounts and highly viewed videos.
On Booktok, It Ends With Us has been described by readers as devastating, “a book that broke my heart and put it back together again” and “soul shattering.” [6] Its prequel, It Starts With Us, was released in October 2023, to comparable commercial success and stirring interest in It Ends With Us. It seems, from the content of BookTok readers, that what makes this novel so absolutely heartbreaking are incredibly common representations of generational domestic abuse. The twist of the novel is that Ryle is not the romantic hero after all; he beats and threatens to rape Lily just as she witnessed her father do to her mother. The most upsetting parts of the text, and those that BookTokers have most fervently performed and re-lived in their videos, while shocking, are also mundane—it is actual violence and mistreatment young women may well be afraid of. By the close of the novel, Lily has given birth to a daughter, divorced from Ryle, and entered a new relationship with her high school boyfriend, Atlas. The fear at the center of It Ends With Us that makes it just so moving for readers—and thereby such rich material for TikTok creation—is that you love and marry a man, like Lily marries Ryle, relatively young and relatively quickly, who then alternately beats you and begs for forgiveness.
Image Description: Screenshot showing a file of four books on a white sheet and the quote “books that broke my heart and put it back together.”
Many of the TikToks referencing It Ends With Us take the form of some kind of dramatization of the experience of reading the novel’s domestic abuse scenes. One ten-second video from BookToker account lauryns_library re-enacts the moment where Ryle assaults Lily for the first time. The TikTok shows a young woman holding the novel in front of her face, as if she is reading. A snippet of Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” plays in the background and a quote from the novel, “I’m still laughing as I lean over to get a look at his hand…” appears above her head; halfway through a look of realization, and then shock comes over her face as the song crescendos and enters the chorus. The caption reads “can’t describe what this scene did to me.”[7] On the one hand, this kind of TikTok seems to perform a similar function to other common habits of romance reading: marking the novel like the creased pages of erotic or emotionally intimate scenes, or perhaps more fully analogous, the practice of rereading and discussing such passages in book clubs. However, this TikTok and others like it go beyond communicating or reviewing plot details (the quote cuts off right before Ryle shoves Lily across the room hard enough for her to slam her head into a cabinet) or even simply marking a particularly emotional scene. Rather, the TikTok performs an embodied experience of reading, which is then staged, styled, and made multimedial.
Image description: A young person reading a book and the quote “I’m still laughing as I lean over to get a look at his hand…” Screenshot from lauryns_library, posted on TikTok Nov. 11, 2021.
To take such BookTok performances seriously reveals reconstructing these moments of visceral affective response to be re-experienced and shared with others is crucial to reading experience. These TikToks allow readers to experience the anxieties and emotionality provoked by the novel again; it is clearly important for BookTok readers not only to experience strong emotion from a novel and then recommend that novel to others to experience, but to stage that experience itself for other readers. If reading of male brutality allows for young women to encounter and come to terms with it safely, performing the hurt and grief of that abuse may indicate another dimension of integrating that experience into their own.
A final key moment of emotional intensity for Hoover’s BookTok readers is near its close, where, minutes after giving birth, Lily decides to divorce Ryle and invokes the book’s title. She tells her newborn daughter: “My mother went through it. I went through it. I’ll be damned if I allow my daughter to go through it…it stops here. With me and you. It ends with us” (361).[8] In one TikTok by user kimberlee_oo, this quote floats above her while, like in the examples above, she appears to be reading the book, and then clamps her hand over her mouth as if overcome by emotion (Adele once again plays in the background).[9] Here again, the embodied experience of reading the novel is restaged and performed for an online audience, and a desirable kind of romance reader is reinforced— i.e. one that reads alone, intimately, as this reader does in her bed, and yet experiences the intense, visible emotional reactions that others have also felt to the novel. It is not difficult to see how this moment would be affectively moving for readers; Lily finally breaks away from the man who she both loves and fears, and seems to make a broader statement about a new standard of protection for her daughter. Top liked comments on this video include: “I was so proud of Lily 🥺🥺,” “I just finished this and I’ve never cried so much in my fricking life,” and “BALLED MY EYES OUT [sic].”[10]
Image description: A young person sitting in bed reading a book, their hand covering their mouth in shock. A quote above them says “My mother went through it. I went through it. I’ll be damned if I allow my daughter to go though [sic] it.” It stops here. With me and you. It ends with us.” Screenshot from kimberlee_oo, posted on TikTok Sept. 14, 2021.
Beyond the decision to divorce, however, the novel does not really see fit to do much else to protect Lily’s daughter or other women from Ryle’s violence. After all we witness of Ryle’s abuse, he does not suffer any tangible consequences beyond his divorce from Lily. It is, after all, not quite an unspeakable social condemnation to be tidily divorced from one’s wife in 21st century America. He keeps his job, his friends and family, and perhaps most importantly, gets to maintain joint custody of his daughter (Lily seems to maintain that he has a “legal right” to be her father and is bizarrely unconcerned with the fact that custody can of course often be limited in such cases of abuse) and a clearly amicable co-parenting situation with his ex-wife. Ryle’s unquestioned fitness as a father (and surgeon, brother, friend, member of society, etc.) is rationalized thinly by the explanation that his violence has only ever been directed towards the women he dates. On the one hand, then, one may ask if are BookTokers are just simply narrow, unsophisticated readers to be so moved by Lily’s melodramatic claim that domestic abuse “ends with us,” while being placated by (or at least ignoring) the novel’s fundamentally conservative treatment of the issue that leaves Ryle and thereby men like him fundamentally unchanged, unchallenged, and fully integrated in their social world. However, one can also understand the repeated performance of this moment of the text on TikTok as a form of engagement in a fantasy that the mere act of declaring male violence to be over can in fact end it. Hoover does not, therefore, posit a satisfyingly realistic contention to the many structures— emotional, cultural, and legal— that uphold masculine violence. But It Ends With Us does offer up the alluring, if false, possibility that maybe the men causing harm in readers’ own lives will simply stop behaving the way they are behaving without the need to irreparably and painfully implode families, friendships, livelihoods, and social institutions.
This fantasy is related to consistent BookTok attention to the work’s “happy” ending— essential to the form of the romance novel— in which Lily, a year after her separation from Ryle, reunites with her kind and loving high school boyfriend, Atlas. It seems that, looking across my compilation of It Ends With Us TikToks, that on the whole usersare inclined to balance performance centering on the novel’s intensely emotional and often quite upsetting scenes of domestic violence with a focus on the ultimate safety of the novel’s ending. Interestingly, though, the actual content of these BookTok performances do not vary all that much even when discussing these opposing affective ends of the novel, as both invoke displays of tears and some kind of emotional distress. One TikTok by user bookreads displays a novel held open, with the text “POV: you’re minding your own business reading a new book until you remember that one quote.” The video then cuts to the cover of It Ends With Us, and the text “If by some miracle you ever find yourself in the position to fall in love again… fall in love with me. You’re still my favorite person, Lily. Always will be.”[11] Another shows a young woman with the text “I’m not kidding I don’t think I’ve ever cried over a book quote” above her head before cutting to her, in tears, with the final line of the book on screen: “You can stop swimming now, Lily. We finally reached the shore.”[12] The sense of safety, characteristic of the romance ending, is thematized in the language itself here, and Lily’s feelings of security and protection, as well as romantic love, seem crucial for readers to re-experience, linger over, and perform for others just as intensely as scenes of intense violence.[13] It appears just as important for BookTokers to stage situations of male abuse as it is to imagine a fantasy of male protection.
Image description: a young person crying as they look down. Above them, a quote reads: “You can stop swimming now, Lily. We finally reached the shore.” Screenshot from kassandra.read, posted on TikTok July 22, 2021.
This rich archive of BookTok material sits alongside a mountain of other, largely unexamined social media content that grapples with reading and reading experiences. Such material, like the BookToks of It Ends With Us, can reveal how readers understand the texts they enjoy and how they understand the act of reading itself. Scholars of pedagogy, sociology, and literary studies may all profit by taking seriously the ways in which these Gen-Z readers engage in reading practices that often privilege intense emotion and are oriented toward shared performance. Future studies of BookTok material might employ more expansive and quantitative methods to form a broader and more precise map of user activity— measuring, for example, exactly which books are being circulating, how BookTok communities and counter-communities are formed, how some users are influencing others, and more precise user demographics. Literary sociologists may then use this information to ask questions of, say, how BookTokers don’t just practice affective reading common of romance readers but through their online performances, promote and consecrate that kind of reading as well as generate value for books that encourage such strong emotion. In this way, BookTok content would also lend itself well to further theorization of its role in social performance and specifically the ways in which performing reading may contribute to one’s sense of self within a community. BookTok is well worthwhile to study as a complex space of performance that allows users to stage otherwise brutal realities and thereby fantasize of new selves and new realities.
Vianna Iorio
[1] Elizabeth A. Harris, “How TikTok Became a Best-Seller Machine,” The New York Times, July 1, 2022, sec. Books, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/01/books/tiktok-books-booktok.html.
[2] Warner, “Uncritical Reading,” 33.
[3] Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. 7.
[4] Ibid., 72.,
[5] Readers on BookTok do tend to overlap on creating content about “popular” novels, which are often texts that BookTok influences tend to recommend. However, many creators often also purposefully discuss and recommend books outside of this canon (sometimes with lists titled “unpopular BookTok books I would recommend”). A more extensive study would be needed to chart a fuller range of titles in circulation, the density of their overlap among readers, and any patterns of novel selection BookTok may encourage.
[6] itsashtaylor, “These are my favorite kind of books,” posted Nov. 9 2021. Online resource. https://www.tiktok.com/@itsashtaylor/video/7028713508107865349?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id7037593798155470341
[7] lauryns_library, “can’t describe what this scene did to me,” posted Nov. 11, 2021. Online resource. https://www.tiktok.com/@lauryns_library/video/7036185198437960966?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id7037593798155470341. Similarly, user lupitareads also begins her It Ends With Us TikTok by pretending to flip through the novel, looking troubled, as the text “when I first read that one scene in It Ends With Us” appears above her head. When the music shifts, she too closes the book with a look of distress, and next to her appears the quote “you fell Lily,” pulled from the moment in which Ryle tries to cover up that he had pushed Lily down the stairs as she awakes from a blackout https://www.tiktok.com/@lupitareads/video/7017964601765580038?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id7037593798155470341
[8] Colleen Hoover, It Ends With Us. New York: Atria Paperback, 2016. 316.
[9] kimberlee_oo, “this scene better be in the movie,” posted Sept. 14, 2021. Tiktok. https://www.tiktok.com/@kimberlee_oo/video/7007688243600706822?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id7037593798155470341.
[10] Comments by users lorena_mcsteamy5, hellowestview, and isabelpetrou, on kimberlee_oo’s tiktok, “this scene better be in the movie.”
[11] bookreads, “This scene better be in the movie 😤,” posted Nov. 5, 2021. Tiktok. https://www.tiktok.com/@bookreads_/video/7026997996676025601?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id7037593798155470341.
[12] kassandra.reads, “I came to the conclusion that I’m an ugly crier😃,” posted July 22, 2021. Tiktok. https://www.tiktok.com/@kassandra.reads/video/6987841526801943813?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id7037593798155470341.
[13] Across all the It Ends With Us TikToks I reviewed, those referencing scenes of Lily’s abuse and scenes of her reunification with Atlas were by far the most popular. Similarly emotional moments of the text (like Lily’s memories of her father’s abuse, her conversation with her mother when she chooses to leave Ryle, etc) are much less commonly performed.
