THEORY: Verity Colleen Hoover

I have a theory about Verity I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere that is absolutely outlandish and I almost have an answer for all the questions that it will arise but I’m going to just through my idea out and go from there. In the references to page numbers, I’m referencing the paper back Verizon. SPOILERS AHEAD:

!spoiler here!<

Some things to note: -Verity and Low have the same age gap from Jeremy. They’re the same age.

-lots of parallels are drawn to them being similar having similar writing styles etc.

-I think Corey is Jeremy but she doesn’t recognize him as Jeremy when she’s “lowen”

Low makes a reference to Corey falling in love with the character of her first book and then losing interest in her because she’s not like the character..she says something along the lines of ‘it was difficult for there to be 3 people in this relationship when the other person was a character I made up’

In the bonus chapter, lowen talks about how Jeremy is reading a book from another author And she’s hella insecure in that chapter and I think it’s just probably something she wrote and but disassociated from while she’s “lowen”

Verity also mentions she would lie to Jermey and say she was going to book tours/signings and get a hotel in NY and just chill because Jermey would give her more attention when she came back home.

Early on in the manuscript, verity makes it seem like she dated a lot and hooked up a lot, later in the manuscript she’s asking Jeremy how many women he’s been with and finds out it’s like 20 + and he asks her and she says 2. Lowen mentions dating a guy when she was 21 who liked being choked and Corey. 2 men. Verity meets Jeremy at 22.

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Last sentence of Page 312:

“Every terrible thing I’ve witnessed in my 32 years: -The night I stood on the railing. -The day I saw the man being crushed beneath the tire. -The manuscript. -The night I saw Verity standing at the top of the stairs. -The night she died in her sleep.”

In 32 years Low has only witnessed 5 bad things.

1. The railing incident happened when she was 10

The other 4 were in the past few months at age 32.

Why is there a massive gap in Low’s memory?

I’m going to fill in what I think happened in the gaps with the context that low and verity were brought up in a household with a lot of guilt and shame, verity’s parents were described to be extremely religious and low’s was completely not in tune with her daughter and made her feel like an outcast.

0. Lowen’s dad died at age 9, (could be considered a pretty traumatic experience)

Which could have lead to v

1. Sleepwalking Railing incident at age 10 (Mentions lots of blood which seems weird because the injury was her arm/wrist which shouldn’t be bleeding that much… leading me to believe there’s more to it that she doesn’t remember because she’s suppressed the memory. She also says her mom was terrified of lowen after this incident, instead of terrified of what might happen to lowen, implying more that we don’t know.

1.1 Lowen disassociates from her guilt and shame, takes on Verity as her new identity when triggered/needing to step away from her guilt/shame.

Example: 1.2 Low dates guy at age 21 that likes being choked, she sees it as perversion and disassociates. She flips to Verity after this relationship to escape her shame because Verity is more rebellious, feels little to no moral/ethical constraints thus leading Verity to meeting Jeremy at 22. Jeremy feeds into perversions Lowen suppressed, and he loves/ accepts her and she forms a codependent bond with him for this reason because daddy / mommy issues obvi. LOL

1.3 Verity becomes possessive when the twins come into the picture. She no longer has Jeremy all to her self and while most normal women do not think of sex to the extent that Verity describes…she is insecure and validates the health of her relationship and strength of their bond by the nature of their sexual encounters.

1.4 Verity neglects both children but I think begins to naturally gravitates towards Chastin Because of her nightmare/potentially because she was easier to deal with AND because Jermey said he was more in tune with Harper and better understood her and Verity could’ve grown resentful toward him paying attention to her.

1.5 Jeremy’s mom is mentioned to have taken the twins for a sleepover for the first time in the manuscript (I’m assuming she probably helped out a little here and there)

1.6 Jeremy’s mom dies. (This is all my assumption but I’m going to assume he was emotionally unavailable to Verity for a time period. Verity probably has a mental break down and goes to a care facility in NY and flips back to being Lowen)

1.5 Jeremy’s mom is mentioned to have taken the twins for a sleepover for the first time in the manuscript (I’m assuming she probably helped out a little here and there)

1.6 Jeremy’s mom dies. (This is all my assumption but I’m going to assume he was emotionally unavailable to Verity for a time period. Verity probably has a mental break down and goes to a care facility in NY and flips back to being Lowen)

1.5 Lowen meets “Corey” (verity is writing while under care in NY. The doctors tell Jeremy she’s taken on Lowen as an identity and he needs to go along with it to prevent another mental break since she’s in a fragile state. So she sends her manuscript to Corey (“jeremy”) Jeremy bring her home.

1.6 lowen’s mom gets sick and moves in. (This could just be Verity’s nurse? Or her mom coming to visit? There was probably something else here that triggered her and she flips back to being Verity.)

1.7 Chastin Dies, verity starts writing manuscript.

1.8 Harper dies a few months later…verity finishes manuscript and leaves it open on her computer. (I’m not stuck on proving if the manuscript was real or not but I think somewhere along the way Jeremy finds it and reads it, either doesn’t believe she actually did anything harmful but was disturbed OR does believe it, knows that she is mentally ill.)

1.9 Car Crash (Jeremy attempts to talk to her to see what the deal is, if she actually did what she wrote or to ask her to agree to professional help… She freaks out, either gets offended or wants to divert from taking blame for what she did OR she drives in her sleep and crashes her car into a tree and goes back to the facility in NY. After some time in the facility, she’s able to go out and is on an outing walking around with Jeremy until…

2. Pedestrian Killed Verity is walking across the street going back to the facility with Jeremy when the pedestrian is killed and blood is everywhere. (The reader meets Lowen because this event triggered her and lowen doesn’t want to confront it and she completely disassociates. This to me makes sense as to why Jeremy had an instant reaction to care for Low, who is a stranger to the reader but not to Jeremy.)

From event 2 onward, she remains as Lowen but Jeremy brings her back home and all this stuff about finishing Verity’s novel is just a safe way to try and lightly bring back her memory without putting her in shock

Because of medication she’s on, instead of being able to flip back and forth between Lowen or Verity like she’s previously used to, she’s stuck as Lowen and the more she reads about verity and Jeremy’s relationship, the more the more her jealousy and possessiveness start to bubble up and the more terrified she becomes of Verity’s unhinged thoughts/actions because those are the deepest parts of her that she’s suppressed but familiar with in her subconscious.

So when Jeremy kills verity… he is “killing” a hallucination… not an actual person. And the next day Lowen says she goes back to new York so they don’t seem suspicious to the neighbors for verity’s death but it’s really just her going back to the facility because her mental state was clearly deteriorating again and needed to be under care

One last thing that seemed super suspicious, all this stuff about keeping the accident details out of the news and verity having a ghost writer, the reason I think that stuff never actually happened and it’s just people in her life pretending is because of this:

Page 123. Jeremy “Did you see Pantem’s press release today?” he asks. “It’s only one sentence long in Publishers Weekly,” Jeremy says. I open the email and read the link. It’s not a link to Publishers Weekly, though. Corey sent me a link to the announcement made on Verity Crawford’s social media page, via her publicity team.”

Why would Jeremy say a publication but Corey sent a link to an IG post ? What does that detail tell the reader? Why was that intentionally provided for the reader?

Some additional information to ponder:

• Why would Lowen’s alias be Laura Chase after her street name (Laura Lane) and (Chase) a Yorkie she had as a pet named Chase

Why did verity write her first character inspired by Jeremy and named him Lane? (Laura Lane)

Why was Patricia (the lady Jeremy drowns in bonus chapter) walking a Yorkie.

-Why is Jeremy so attentive and protective of Lowen from the start? Enough to put a woman he barely knows in the same bedroom him and his wife were in? (I don’t believe Jeremy was stalking her because according to low she was in total isolation not leaving her apartment for months because of her mom and she never did publicity stuff for her books) his attentiveness to her seems like actions you’d expect from someone you’ve know for a long time.

-Why would Verity name their child crew (because they had sex in a canoe when he was conceived, and Low has a moment with Jeremy under the meteor shower and names their daughter Nova.

-Jeremy says he fell for a woman who wasn’t his wife months ago in the bathroom because he’s drawing a different in her identity swap.

-if we think about Letter v. Manuscript …the letter can’t be real because before Jeremey and low have sex for the first time, Jeremy puts a lock on the outside of Verity’s room because low keeps hallucinating and he’s just trying to connect with his wife who doesn’t remember anything. Meaning verity never left the room. (P. 223)

*Jeremy says on p.77 he has to give Verity her meds at midnight. Jeremey has had a few interactions around food that make me think he’s also medicating Lowen:

-the birthday cake that he doesn’t eat…

Jeremy talks about the secrete to the moist birthday cake he makes this total stranger is pudding…

he waits till midnight to give it to her and had to make sure he got up and put away before they went to sleep (probably because he didn’t want crew or the nurses to eat it either)

Lowen takes also takes a pudding cup later on when the nurse talks to her about the way she should behave in front of verity

-chicken casserole he makes, she’s the only one that eats it

-when he gives her pizza he had already been heating a slice up in the microwave and hands it to her and dishes himself a separate one

-when she asks for alcohol. He has to reach for a bottle of crown at the top of the pantry shelf (she never says she actually sees him pouring the alcohol) but sees him pour coke into it and said it burned her throat so something else could be in it.

-she also says she takes xanex regularly and then also drinks which can causes blackouts. She also said she stole her mom’s morphine…

I know it’s out of the box and wild but I think the movie will have an alternate ending that draws all these details together! I’d love to know your thoughts and if you find these details suspicious!

!spoiler here!<