I've Ignored Every Rule

HOW THE ROMANCE AUTHOR, WHOSE 2016 BESTSELLER IT ENDS WITH US HAS BEEN ADAPTED INTO A NEW MOV IE STARRING BLAKE LIVELY, TURNED SELF-PUBLISHING INTO A SUPERNOVA CAREER

- LIZZ SCHUMER

• IT ENDS WITH US AUTHOR COLLEEN

Colleen Hoover gives excellent hugs. Before sitting down for an interview with People during the fifth and final year of Book Bonanza, her annual romance book festival, she offers a warm embrace before introducing herself. It's immediately clear that the author of such smash hits as Verity, Heart Bones and It Ends With Us— the 2016 novel about generational domestic violence that has been made into a new movie (out Aug. 9)— hasn't let massive success change her.

Hoover, 44, who co-executive-produced the film with stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni (who also directed it), is still an introvert who'd rather wear press-on nails than sit through a salon appointment.

She drives an unassuming black SUV so she can remain under the radar while going about her day-to-day business in her small Texas town (her previous car, a purple electric Porsche, made her feel too “self-conscious”), and she finds big events like her always-mobbed book signings equally invigorating and exhausting.

“Yesterday I was on a panel with Blake Lively, and I was like, ‘What?!’” she says.

But you’d never peg her as a reluctant literary celebrity from watching her command the room in Grapevine, Texas. When Lively and Hoover announce to a packed ballroom that they’ll be screening It Ends With Us at Book Bonanza, the crowd erupts into a Beatlemania level of frenzy. And there’s Hoover, smiling down at hundreds of people absolutely electrified over a movie she produced, based on a book she wrote that was inspired by her mother’s life. Hoover later confesses the whole thing feels like “a fever dream”— but then, so has her entire career.