At the beginning there is a justification. She needed a breather, writes Colleen Hoover in the foreword to her 26th novel, which was published a full three years after her last book. Her workload was previously much higher: according to the publisher, the “most successful author in the world” wrote an average of two novels per year. “Woman Down” also landed straight at number one Spiegel-Bestseller list.
According to fans, justification was also required, albeit for a different offense. The film adaptation of Hoover’s “Just One More Time” caused a scandal. Blake Lively accused fellow actor Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment Internet users accused Lively of making light of the film’s theme of abuse, and Hoover, fans judged, did not respond appropriately or sufficiently to the decision.
Although by his own admission any resemblance to living people etc. is ruled out, Hoover creates a similar scenario in “Woman Down”. The romance author Petra is faced with a shitstorm over the film adaptation of her novel. Your productive power (there were already two bestsellers per year) has dried up and there are consequences (the loan for the house cannot be covered). In order to finally write her next novel, Petra retreats to a lonely hut.
Colleen Hoover: “Woman Down.” Translated from English by Katarina Ganslandt and Anja Galić. dtv, Munich 2026. 416 pages, 23 euros
Playing with autofiction is not something that normally belongs to the trick repertoire of romance authors. Actually, that’s exactly the deal between magician and audience: realism is forgone in favor of maximum sexiness. The characters in the novels are usually too beautiful, too smart, too hot to be true. In addition to the female protagonist Petra, her male counterpart soon appears in “Woman Down”: a well-trained small-town cop with dangerously sparkling eyes. He suddenly appears at the door after there was supposedly a fatal chase nearby. A man with a criminal record had violated his probation and shot himself while trying to escape – perhaps to get ahead of the cop.
Petra doesn’t think about the dead man (after all, he was just “some ex-convict”); instead, she feels irresistibly drawn to Officer Saint. It is a different America that Hoover is designing here, in which neither George Floyd nor the ICE play a role and the sexy officer merely deviates from the cliché of the goofy donut cop.
Sense and nonsense of criticism
But the present also shines into Petra’s hut. She has long conversations with her friend Nora about the sense and nonsense of criticism. “Sometimes the very people who claim to be against book bans make their money by publicly tearing down books,” says Nora indignantly, convinced that she has opened up a contradiction.
The two women stick to banalities in order to navigate oversimplified discourses about identity politics. Is it even okay to write about a dangerous small-town cop making you orgasm on the hood of his car if you’ve never experienced anything like that? Yes, say Nora and Petra, but at the same time they dream of experiencing everything for themselves that they describe in their romance stories; although they sometimes make their characters “go through hell”.
No sooner said than done: When a few nights later someone actually breaks into her hut and brutally ties her to a chair, Petra is very afraid, but ultimately the desire is greater. Although she is shocked when the nighttime burglar turns out to be Officer Saint, after the tears have dried up, sex happens anyway. After all, Saint just wanted to help her overcome her writer’s block, which works. The two get involved in a dangerous game and anticipate the plot of Petra’s new novel even as she is writing it.
The best-selling author Hoover clearly aims at the meta level and tries to take small steps out of the romance genre with “Woman Down”. The novel was “the most profound thing I have ever written,” said Hoover. And it is indeed unfathomable. The reader learns here that men repeatedly cross the line into abuse and are rewarded for it; also that the longing for dominance and authority burns even hotter outside the bedroom. But the fantasy of the man in uniform has finally lost its innocence these days.