so i read verity by colleen hoover around the same time i was reading the other books, unfortunately. and well, i’ll say that it felt better than some of her other stuff, but that’s not saying much. or maybe it wasn’t better. maybe it just tricked me for a second. because looking back, this book is basically a cheap rip off of rebecca by daphne du maurier. like, not even subtly inspired. the premise, the structure, the woman entering another woman’s life through a man, all of it felt like someone read rebecca and tried to write a fan fiction with correct grammar. first of all, the characters, i loathe them all.
lowen, jeremy, verity, i hate every single one of them and i swear, why can’t a single character in colleen hoover’s books have a normal name? is there a generator somewhere for awkward white american names?
anyway, lowen is as bland as you’d expect. absolutely no spine, no personality, no moral compass, just in love with the guy. which is the only real defining trait colleen gives her female characters. and jeremy is just suspicious and weird, and honestly, i still don’t know what we were supposed to think about him. and verity is creepy and horrifying too sometimes. the horror element does work in certain scenes. like, i remember feeling a little creeped out in the sense that if i were in a huge house with a woman in a coma upstairs, i’d also be terrified. but those moments are brief because again, colleen hoover starts with interesting premises, this mysterious manuscript, the unreliable narration, the ethical tension, and then just never commits. she drops all the threads that could make a book really good. like she starts 10 different ideas and runs with the most predictable one. and let’s talk about that manuscript. like, again, just like in rebecca, the story gets shaped through the dead (or supposedly dead) woman’s perspective. except, this time, it’s gross. it’s just violent mommy trauma and sexual obsession, and at the end you’re left thinking, okay, but what was real? also, a pattern i’ve noticed, every female character in her books is either defined by her trauma or her ability to get pregnant (usually without consent, and it’s treated like a romantic twist). why does every hoover book feature surprise pregnancies, and why are none of them talked about in any serious way? the amount of bodily autonomy issues that get swept under the rug in her books is actually alarming. and one last thing, she really does not know how to write sex scenes. they are either painfully awkward or deeply unrealistic, and always described in the most bizarre ways. like, genuinely, who let this woman publish so many books with zero editorial pushback? so yeah verity was just another bad colleen hoover book. if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all.

i love north eastern people 😭🙏

what my mother doesn’t realise is that she and i are basically the same person. we have the same habits. even the ones that irritate her, i got those from her. she gets annoyed when i read too much, but that’s something i picked up from her. she’s the biggest book lover i know. actually, the only one i’ve seen who reads like that, apart from me. we both don’t like phone calls. we forget to call people. we even forget to call each other. and when we do talk on the phone, it barely lasts five minutes. it’s usually just, hi, how are you, what did you eat, what are you doing right now and then silence, then we hang up. some days we go without talking at all. and that’s the part that feels a little sad. because we don’t really share things with each other the way we probably should. maybe we just don’t know how to. or maybe we’re too similar in that way too.

i think most of us weren’t born hating our faces but we learned how to while growing up. and most of the time, it starts from home. like when your mother says, "put some haldi, it’ll brighten your skin." or when an aunt comments, "you were fairer as a child." or when someone fleetingly asks, "what happened to your face?" because of a breakout and all of a sudden, your body becomes a thing to fix and you didn't even know it was broken.
it’s strange how this obsession with beauty seeps into us before we even understand what beauty really is. there’s always some standard that skin should be clear teeth aligned hair silky body soft but not too soft. waist small but not too small nose straight scars invisible and if you fall short on any of these, someone always lets you know. but what if we didn’t fall short? what if the problem isn’t with our faces or our bodies, but with the very idea that they need to be corrected? why are we so scared of flaws? why do we flinch at our scars, even though they are proof that we’ve survived things? why does beauty have to be about perfection? maybe because it’s generational. our mothers were taught the same things, made to feel ashamed of the same things so now they pass it on, trying to protect us by making us more acceptable to a world that rejects anything outside the norm and we mistake that for care. we grow up believing that beauty is love but it isn’t. it’s just another cage. and i don’t want to live like that anymore. i don’t want to keep negotiating with my body like it owes the world something prettier. i don’t want to keep apologising for not being the kind of girl people expect to see. i want to sit with my flaws. i want to learn how to love the scar without trying to erase it. i want to be okay with being seen exactly as i am, not after i’ve "fixed"myself. we were never meant to look perfect, we were meant to live.

okay so i'm done with coho now. never touching a book written by her again in my life. i hope no one else does either.

piracy is the best policy in this economy.

days have become very monotonous and mundane

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