What makes a potentially "unreal" story worth the journey of reading or watching?

Verity by Colleen Hoover -- and I should warn you, there are spoilers ahead.

Last summer, this book was all over my Instagram feed as a gripping, page-turning, thriller. When my sister and I were discussing books we read in 2022, I asked her what she had thought of it and I remember her saying it was good, but what I really walked away from our brief touch on it was that she recommended I don’t read it. I can’t exactly remember why, but I think it was something along the lines of me sharing that I wasn’t quite through the postpartum hormones that make it hard for me to watch horror films (which I typically enjoy), so I think she suggested I don’t read Verity because it was pretty dark.

Well. For the last week, that’s what I’ve been listening to as I rock our baby to sleep for her naps and bedtime 😂. Gripping? Yes. Page-turning - yeah, I guess so. I did want to keep listening, but it was in the way of “I’m so disturbed, but I need to keep going to see how this turns out”... sort of way, which was also what was happening with the protagonist of the story, Lowen, too.

If it weren’t for the last couple of chapters, which really make clear that we’re working with an untrustworthy narrator situation, I was about to dismiss the book altogether as voyeuristic trauma porn that I wasn’t sure was an accurate or honorable representation of postpartum psychosis, but the clear drop of “whose narration do you trust here” towards the end gave me pause because it made me ask myself:

• Do I want to hate this because I don’t like the subject matter? (A woman who is so sex obsessed and obsessed with her husband that her children play second fiddle to him and she’s willing to off them to make sure she comes first in his life).
• Do I want to hate this because I’m tired of the woman pining over sex with a guy archetype? Is this not the genre for me anymore? (And… has it not been since high school/college?)
• Well, shit, did Lowen just encourage the murder of a woman so that she could have her life and her husband?
• Is this the point of good writing and a good story? To make us want to root for a character? To want a certain ending?

A context building tangent:

A few years ago, during the Tokyo Summer Olympics, my dad and my step brother were visiting, and we were all watching the skateboarding prelims. Do any of us skateboard? Nope – only my husband… as a teenager. Could any of us skateboard at all? Nope. Let alone even attempt to pull off any of the tricks we were watching? Nope. Yet, there I was amusing my toddler in my living room as my dad and my 12 year old step brother made fun of every athlete for trying to look cool (and don’t get me started on the number of feet my stepbrother jumped so that my toddler didn’t splash any water on his yeezy’s one summer!). Their comments kept coming, mocking every move every skateboarder would make. And with each of their comments, at first I lightly pushed: “maybe they get style points? Maybe skating with music helps them with timing their tricks? Maybe they’re doing things here that we can’t appreciate”. Eventually, they stopped their comments, but I mention this little tangent because I can’t stand bringing something down that I couldn’t pull off, or that I don’t understand well, and to be honest romantic heart throb psychological thrillers are a genre I haven’t really dabbled in since my Twilight and Fifty Shades days more than a decade ago, and I don’t think those really count as thrillers at all, but from a story and content perspective - I have questions!

Birthing babies and attempting to raise them into functioning humans has changed me (eventually, I’ll write about The Babadook… my understanding of that monster completely elevated and transformed after the birth of my first), it’s definitely made me way more sensitive to reading or watching things about harming babies and children in a much more visceral way than it ever did before - so, reading the thoughts of a woman who goes so far as to bypass one crying infant to love on her peacefully sleeping twin sister, and then to ultimately attempt to murder that infant, and for years imagine that child ultimately killing the other - it pretty much couldn’t sit right with me. At the same time though, as a person who suffers from postpartum anxiety and depression, and highly suspects that their own mother suffered from all that and probably more that went untreated and led to one hell of a confusing child/teenagerhood… I can understand intrusive thoughts, and being at your limit, and just wanting space from your baby, just wanting your body back, just wanting time with your partner.

This book is also overflowing with sex scenes. Pretty much every time I tuned in to listen, there would be a sexual interaction.

As a watcher of horror films, I understand the juxtaposition of sex and gore. Nudity has us at our most vulnerable and intimate. When we’re safe, we’re safe. When we’re in danger, it takes the discomfort and suspense and anxiety of anticipation and ratchets it up quite a few levels. Something about it just didn’t feel like the right juxtaposition for me though. I’m not sure if that would be the case in a book in general though, or if it’s just the case for this book. In this book, it sat with me as a woman is so sex obsessed and obsessed with her husband that that is her justification for not connecting with and hating her children? And I just found that so unlikable and unrelatable that to me it felt like glorifying this idea of a sex god of a man that makes a woman weak and willing to do anything for him - a man that can do no wrong (when people, and the best characters, have faults and are imperfect). It felt like leading women to desire this kind of sex life and intimacy in the same way it felt like Edward Cullen epitomized a controlling stalker of a lover, which was also the same archetype Christian Gray satisfied for me. Do I want a man in control? Sometimes. Do I want women who will do anything to have sex with a guy? Nope, sorry.

Maybe my brand of postpartum psychosis is more grief driven with the absence of my own mother as I’ve become a mother, so I can’t fathom a psychosis where the logic is my children are the antagonists of my relationship with my partner (well, I mean, in reality they are and I accept that every day - cue every movie scene of parents getting frisky and a child jump scaring them at the edge of their bed), but I think a lot of this just wasn’t the right mix of variables for me and it really makes me wonder how many of the readers that raved about this book have children themselves?

And that’s when genre comes in for me - am I not understanding that “this is the type of book” I was reading? Is it supposed to be a romance? About the sex? Is it romantic to have the perfect husband of a bedridden author falling for you as his wife is in the other room? Is it romantic to conspire a murder together? Is it supposed to just be enjoyed for the sex scenes? Used as a fluffer?

This is where I don’t know. Is this me being a little bit snobby and pretentious about story and “literature” and wanting a “responsible” set of representation worthy variables put together? Or is the reveal at the end of the untrustworthy narration not good enough to make the story take me as a whole? I can accept something like Ginny and Georgia as an all over the place teen drama that dabbles in a lot of places and attempts to hit on some important topics, and I love that The Bear just goes for all kinds of wacky, unconventional storytelling, style, and genre moments. I love me a mess, but I guess the mess has to make sense to me.

In the end, I think Verity is missing the mess and true darkness that would make the story work for me:

• Where are Jeremy’s faults?
• Where are Lo’s? Her sleepwalking ain’t it.
• If Verity is an actual psycho/sociopath - let’s make her one.
• If she’s that good of a writer - is she that much of an idiot? Doesn’t make sense.

I was swept along for a ride that, in the end, may not be real at all - so then I’m left wondering, “was this entire journey a waste of time?” the way my screenwriting TA stormed in to class the morning after the Lost finale aired and he couldn’t not spoil it in order to teach us the lesson that audiences don’t appreciate the “it was all a dream!” cop out. I guess the fact that I was being swept along either a fictional sex life that glorified a faultless man or the real sex life of a delusional woman whose existence and worth seemed to be based on sexually pleasing a man just didn’t make me wondering who to believe worth it. If I really want to get into it, I can’t get over how ridiculously irresponsible it would be for a writer to write an “antagonistic journal” as a craft practice and not be way more careful with something that could wreak the havoc that it did. Dark and messy, but not dark and messy enough in a real way that unseats my sanity for an entire evening or disrupts my sleep 😼.

Has anyone here read Verity? What were your thoughts? Are my expectations way off?

❤️‍🔥 Cara