How do we face a generic crisis, a sense—a dread—that a subject exceeds the bounds of the genre that seeks to contain it?
In retrospect, the generic crisis of the film It Ends With Us (2024) was easy to predict. Like its source text, Colleen Hoover’s 2016 novel of the same name, the film has been lambasted for being promoted as a romance and for its use of “rom-com aesthetics,” These branding and genre decisions, some critics say, undermine the sensitive nature of the story’s topic: domestic violence. Both the novel and the film tell the story of an abusive marriage, feature scenes of intimate partner violence, and explicate how cycles of abuse can affect men and women alike, and both ostensibly seek to share the message that women in abusive relationships owe it to themselves and to their children to get out. The concerns at the heart of It Ends With Us are deadly serious. The problem is, serious subject matter does not automatically produce serious art. To wit: the protagonist of It Ends With Us, the improbably named Lily Blossom Bloom, works as—you guessed it—a florist. There is simply no amount of violence on page or screen that can render this story artistically serious.
What happens when style does not seem to match substance, when genre and content are perceived as misaligned? How do we face a generic crisis, a sense—a dread—that a subject exceeds the bounds of the genre that seeks to contain it? Sometimes an attempt is made to wrangle the genre into alignment with the subject by appending the word “dark” to the category (dark comedy, dark romance, dark fantasy). Sometimes people simply pretend that a work is both more grave and more sophisticated than it really is.
In the case of It Ends With Us, where such pretending is next to impossible, many at least hoped the promotional tour could be generically appropriate. Critics seemed to expect the film’s cast to treat It Ends With Us with the same solemnity and feminist earnestness that Anne Hathaway brought to her Les Mis Oscar campaign. Whether the film was good or not seemed beside the point; It Ends With Us was about something important, and so it was deemed unacceptable when, for example, the film’s star, Blake Lively, seemed more interested in promoting her haircare line than in answering questions about domestic violence. Ultimately, the “tonal incongruity” between content and marketing left film critics, TikTok feminists, fans, and haters of the book alike confused and frustrated. As one Redditer asked: “Why is this movie being promoted like it’s a happy romcom and all florals. Am I going crazy?”
Personally, I’m not convinced it is all that obvious how one ought to market a “blockbuster” story about domestic violence, an account of abuse that is meant to be watchable, enjoyable, and ultimately, profitable. According to Lively, she was instructed by the film’s distributor, Sony Pictures, to “focus more on Lily’s strength and resilience as opposed to describing the film as a story about domestic violence.” This perhaps explains a much-maligned TikTok in which she encouraged viewers—without any warning about the film’s content—to “grab your friends, wear your florals, and head out to see it!” The outrage generated by the attempt to market It Ends With Us as a romantic popcorn flick makes one thing clear: for many, It Ends With Us is not and should not be treated as a rom-com, because the story’s content forecloses that generic possibility. At first glance, this seems reasonable enough. Domestic violence is no laughing matter. Certainly, it is nothing to romanticize. Why would a rom-com ever be about domestic violence?
And yet—doesn’t 1998’s Practical Magic pair comedy, romance, and a plot about a man who beats his girlfriend? What about Waitress, the 2007 film later adapted into a Broadway musical, about a pregnant woman in an abusive marriage? For that matter, when you come right down to it, isn’t The Chicks’ feminist hit and karaoke staple “Goodbye Earl” a rom-com? Sure, there are some dark moments, and Marianne and Wanda’s friends-to-lovers arc gets majorly interrupted by the awful Earl, but they come back together in time to commit murder and crack jokes (“those black-eyed peas, they tasted alright to me, Earl!”), before settling down together, selling jam, living happily and guiltlessly ever after. What I am saying is: maybe It Ends With Us is not a rom-com not because it includes domestic violence as its subject matter, but because it is not a rom-com generically. Similarly, if it’s a bad movie, maybe that is not because it takes the wrong tone to discuss domestic violence, or because it lets Lily Blossom Bloom the florist have a romance-novel happy ending with her non-abusive childhood sweetheart. Maybe it’s just a bad movie, based on a bad book, poorly written, kind of embarrassing, and likely to be remembered primarily for a contentious legal battle about what happened behind the scenes.
That It Ends With Us was a failure says far more about It Ends With Us than it does about the limitations of storytelling, even when it comes to stories about domestic violence. What if we reject the idea that content necessarily forecloses generic possibilities? What if, in skilled hands, what feels like a generic crisis in fact allows for more interesting stories to be told? This is precisely what Jennifer Crusie achieves in her 1999 contemporary romance novel, Crazy for You. Written with the author’s signature wit, Crazy for You is about a woman who takes charge of her life, falls in love with someone she shouldn’t, and, oh yeah, also deals with her “nice guy” ex-boyfriend stalking, intimidating, and eventually nearly killing her. Crazy for You is, in other words, a romantic comedy that is, to a large degree, about domestic violence.
The novel begins when Quinn, a high school art teacher in a small town, realizes that she isn’t happy with her life and decides to shake things up: she adopts a dog, breaks up with her long-term boyfriend, moves out of her apartment, buys a house, cuts her hair short, and inspires the women around her to begin questioning their own lives. Along the way, she encourages her best friend to rekindle the spark in her marriage (and if she can’t do that, to leave her husband), discovers that her mother has been having a decades-long lesbian affair (and that her father has known all along), and decides she wants to sleep with one of her best friends, Nick. Unfortunately, Nick is both her sister’s ex-husband and an unrepentant playboy.
As a novelist, Crusie is one of the luminaries of 1990s and early 2000s contemporary romance, the author of more than a dozen books that are sharp, sexy, funny, and populated by memorable casts of characters who get embroiled in unexpected and messy hijinks. Like many of Crusie’s books, Crazy for You is preoccupied with self-deception: the lies we tell ourselves and what happens when we finally face the truth. Quinn can only begin to live a life she actually finds meaningful when she acknowledges what she really wants, and that means no longer dating the locally-beloved football coach Bill, just because he is “unfailingly clean, generous, considerate, protective, understanding, and successful…the perfect man.” (That “clean” comes first in this list feels very much damning with faint praise.)
Mirroring this preoccupation with self-deception, Crusie’s prose has an almost facetious veneer, a surface of mile-a-minute jokes and fast-paced dialogue that can obscure the depths of characters’ emotions, thoughts, and motives. For instance, when Nick tells Quinn he made the mistake of kissing her because he’s having a bad day, Quinn snaps at him: “You’re having a bad day?…The bank turns down my loan, my dog gets kidnapped, my mother comes out of the closet, my father moves in with me…and my ex-brother-in-law refuses to sleep with me, but you’re having a bad day?” The lines make for an easy laugh, highlighting the situation’s absurdity, but their disagreement is fundamentally about what they mean to each other. As Nick tries to explain, “I like my life the way it is, and I like you in it, but you stay a friend because that way I can keep you around forever.” It’s the same conflict that animates When Harry Met Sally: will sex ruin the friendship? But like Harry and Sally, it is too late, they are already in love—even if they don’t know it yet.
In another scene of self-deception, Nick attempts to convince himself that his feelings for Quinn are still platonic, even after they have had sex: “He loved Quinn like a sister, so of course he wanted to be with her. It wasn’t her body he loved—lush and tight and slippery under him, never mind that sister thing, bad analogy, forget that, don’t go there—no, it was her mind he loved, who she was, Quinn, the person, not Quinn the body.” Yet the hilarity of “bad analogy, forget that” reveals that Nick is not really fooling himself. Indeed, his ultimate resolution to love Quinn the person and sleep with Quinn the body, and to somehow keep the two things separate, is such obviously contorted logic that the reader can only smile, knowing that very soon, he will come to his senses. It is a generic guarantee: happy endings require self-knowledge.
Part of what makes Crazy for You such a compelling read, however, is that every so often, the reader encounters a passage from the perspective of Bill, the “unfailingly clean” ex-boyfriend, who refuses to accept that Quinn has moved on. As opposed to the quick volleys of banter and absurd comedic interludes that Crusie is known for, Bill’s sections feature long and disturbing paragraphs free of dialogue, in which he obsesses over Quinn and plots how to win her back. He very calmly convinces himself to attempt to get her dog put to sleep (it is for her own good), and just as calmly convinces himself to make a copy of her keys and regularly let himself into her house.
A few short pages before Nick tries to tell himself that he loves Quinn like a sister, Bill also tells himself that his feelings for Quinn aren’t particularly sexual. After sneaking into her house, he goes through her underwear drawer, disapproving of “all those weird, bright colors” because “his Quinn was clean, white, plain, good—he clenched his fists around the vile stuff—his, she should know she was his.” Yet, even as he tells himself this, that his feelings for Quinn are pure, noble, and unsexual, he cannot help but imagine her in lace panties, “open[ing] her arms to him, open[ing] herself to him in the dark–” before he cuts himself short.
Unlike Nick, who seems in on the joke of his own self-deception, Bill takes himself entirely seriously. Though both men attempt to persuade themselves that they are not sexually interested in Quinn, the tone is very different. Bill’s repression of his sexual possessiveness of Quinn is part of a story he tells himself about how he is her protector, her caretaker, even as he frays electrical wires and loosens the gas lines in her house, endangering her life. His lack of self-knowledge isn’t funny, it is frightening. And there is no assurance for readers that he will ever come to his senses.
When I first read Crazy for You, I experienced it as a generic crisis: even as I enjoyed the hell out of the novel, I kept feeling as if something was wrong, some strange jarring mistake had been made—there’s a wild swing, a “tonal dissonance,” between Quinn’s romantic romp and the eerie, looming threat of Bill. When the story comes to a head, the seemingly disparate parts of the narrative converge, and Quinn realizes that Bill is not only possessive, he is truly dangerous—something that few who know him as the blond, affable football coach are willing to believe. Even on her way to happily ever after, Quinn must fight for her survival.
Although Crazy for You’s tone may not be serious, and it participates in a genre that encourages frothiness and funniness, the story is structured to bring readers into a serious encounter with the insidiousness of domestic violence. What Crazy for You makes clear is that abuse does not come in a single, obvious form, and nor do the stories about that abuse. We may complain when our fictional romantic fantasy is interrupted by the reality of misogynistic violence, and we may think that domestic violence only belongs in obviously dark narratives, but in life, abuse does not stay neatly within recognizable generic boundaries. Sometimes life itself is a generic crisis.
In the latter half of the 1990s, three romance novelists were murdered by their husbands: Ann Wassall in 1996, Pamela Macaluso in 1997, and Nancy Richards-Akers in 1999. An article in The Washington Post about Richards-Akers cast the novelist as a heroine betrayed by her hero: “Romance novels never end this way.” Undeniably, part of what made these horrific events newsworthy was the irreconcilability of the romantic ideal and the abusive real in Richard-Akers’ life, the investment in a genre that one’s own experiences renders foolish.
I do not know if Crusie was inspired by these events within the romance writing community. I do know that over the span of about six years, she wrote a number of books concerned with dangerous exes, controlling husbands, and the large and small betrayals of men against the women who’ve loved and trusted them. And those books are funny, and they are sexy, and they end happily. Crusie imagines how one can survive abuse, and still go on to, well, live, laugh, love.
In a tribute to Pamela Macaluso, written by her friend Cecile Page Vargo, Vargo reflected that Macaluso had “found herself through romance novels,” something that must have enraged her domineering husband. Macaluso’s life was unfairly and cruelly ended by a man who decided that her life was in his hands. But it is this idea of her holding tight to romances like talismans that I keep returning to: a woman who lived in an abusive marriage—caught in one of the gravest and most dangerous situations a woman can face—but who knew herself, and was known, through her love of a genre still seen by so many as unserious.
Molly Keran has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Michigan, and is interested in the intersections of genre, gender, and popular culture. In her free time, you can find her hanging out with her cat, reading fanfiction about TV firefighters, or spending too much money on craft cocktails.
Article photo: Paulus Kal, Cgm 1507, f. 50r, 1470 via Public Domain Review.