Verity Book Summary

New York

Verity, a 2018 novel by Colleen Hoover, narrates the story of Lowen Ashleigh, a struggling New York City writer, grieving her mother’s death and going through a phase of writer’s block. An opportunity to exercise her writing skills knocks on her door when she meets Jeremy Crawford, the husband of the bestselling author Verity Crawford, in a pretty unbecoming circumstance as she watches a truck hit a person, it drenches her in the victim’s blood, and Mr. Crawford helps her clean up.

The Offer

On knowing her identity, at a publishing house meeting, Jeremy tells Lowen that Verity has been incapacitated by an accident and they need a ghostwriter to finish her final novel series. They offer Lowen a good sum for the same, and she temporarily moves into the Crawford home in Vermont at Jeremy’s request. While sifting through Verity’s office to get the hang of her writing style, she stumbles on a manuscript that is an unpublished autobiography containing unsettling secrets about the author that change the way Lowen and the rest of the world have been perceiving her so far. Verity, in her autobiography named So Be It, discloses the kind of ruthless person she truly is and talks about her involvement in the death of her children.

The Secrets

Lowen starts getting closer to Jeremy and his kid while trying to shove aside the frowning faces of the people around them. She is weirdly attracted to Jeremy, and the revelation of Verity’s viciousness in her autobiography plays a significant role in justifying her attraction. Her stay in Vermont is extended when her financial condition further degrades. While trying to finish the novel, she keeps reading the autobiography and has shocking revelations about Verity each time, whom she discovers is a jealous sociopath who killed her kids for strange reasons like not wanting to share Jeremy’s love with them. Lowen contemplates whether to let him know about this or not while she constantly feels she is being watched at all times as strange, inexplicable things keep happening around her. Her door gets locked, and things seem to move around the house on their own. She thinks Verity is behind all that, and she allows the benefit of the doubt because Lowen has a history of sleepwalking.

The Truth and its Consequences

Her suspicion turns out to be true when Crew mentions conversations with his mother, who is supposed to be comatose. In the meantime, Lowen starts sleeping with Jeremy, reveals what she has learned about Verity from her autobiography, and offers it to him to read. He is painfully shocked and sobs before confronting Verity, who acts unconscious until he threatens to call the cops on her. She sheds her pretense to tell him that she did it to test his loyalty and that she plans to flee with Crew and all the money. When Jeremy tries to kill her for murdering their daughter, Lowen advises him to make it look like she choked on her own vomit to avoid prosecution for her murder, to which he abides.

The Aftermath

The novel ends with a pregnant Lowen moving out of Vermont with Jeremy and Crew to start afresh. She discovers Verity’s letter addressed to Jeremy, revealing that the autobiography was an intense writing exercise projecting herself as an “antagonistic narrator.” This was the unique narration style she used in her novels. A panic-stricken Lowen destroys it and promises to take this secret to the grave while still suspecting Verity’s true intentions, as she has proved herself to be a master manipulator before Lowen’s eyes.

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