Colleen Hoover’s 2016 best seller It Ends With Us features some undeniably distracting details, particularly for a book about something as serious as domestic violence. There’s someone named Ryle (not a typo). The made-up term “floral shop” is thrown around constantly.
And the main character goes through a phase where she’s strangely obsessed with Ellen DeGeneres. While Justin Baldoni and Blake Lively’s new big-screen adaptation wisely cuts back on that narrative device, the now-disgraced daytime talk-show host is still referenced three times in flashbacks. If you’re a casual viewer, you’d be reasonably baffled, but there is an explanation — sort of.
Early in the novel, readers learn that Lily Blossom Bloom, the irritatingly named aspiring florist played onscreen by Lively, was too embarrassed to keep a traditional diary as a teen and so wrote all of her thoughts and secrets to Ellen DeGeneres . The diary entries, as they appear in the novel, all begin with the salutation “Dear Ellen.” Lily references things in the letters that happen on The Ellen DeGeneres Show , and gets “mad” when reruns air in place of new episodes.
She suggests things she thinks might be funny to include on the show and evangelizes the wonders of DeGeneres as a concept to a young man named Atlas, who’s squatting in the house next door to hers. When Lily loses her virginity to Atlas, she writes about it to — you guessed it — DeGeneres, as so many teen girls do. The referenc.