Spoiler Review: All Your Perfects by Colleen Hoover

---

Title: All Your Perfects

Author: Colleen Hoover

Publisher: Atria Books

Published: July 17, 2018

Pages: 308

Format: Physical SIGNED copy!

---

** SPOILERS AHEAD**

This might be my first super spoiler-y review but the content is too important. This has a major trigger for me: infertility. This is about to get very personal. I bought this book to get into a meet and greet with Coho! It was awesome and she’s awesome. This is a signed copy, which I cherish. Why hadn’t I read it yet? The universe knew that I couldn’t handle it at the time. I prefer to go into books blind all the time now. I don’t even have to read the description and CoHo is an auto-buy author. When this book was released, I was deep into my infertility treatment journey. I was just about to start my first IUI. There’s absolutely no way I could have handled reading this then.

I started this book late last night and finished it way early this morning. I stayed up way too late but I just had to know what happened. I’m having a hard time getting my thoughts in order so this might be a bit rambly. Like all her books, her writing is gripping and before you know it, you are in way too deep to even think about stopping.

“When you meet someone who is good for you, they won’t fill you with insecurities by focusing on your flaws. They’ll fill you with inspiration, because they’ll focus on all the best parts of you.”

Oh, Quinn. One of the things that Hoover did was get the turmoil we go through. Unless you’ve been in it, you have no idea. You can think you do but you really don’t. I was her. I went over 5 years doing all the same things and going through the same emotions. I remember dying a little inside every time someone announced a pregnancy, asked me when “we were going to have a baby,” seeing mothers complain about motherhood. You might be thinking, that’s selfish and irrational. It absolutely is but yet it is not. You try so hard not to hate yourself because you cannot do the one thing you should be able to do. Her reaction with her sister? I’m jealous because she handled it much better than I did, which I still regret. I had people walking on eggshells around me. My best friend, gosh I love her, sent me a very long text when she was telling me about her second pregnancy. I am tearing up just thinking about it right now. I hate that she couldn’t just say, “I’M PREGNANT!!!” but had to do it gently, which I needed and love her for. I understood Quinn because she wasn’t acting crazy. She was trying to survive being heartbroken and shattered. I remember the long showers too. All this being said, she handled it the wrong way with her husband. She shut down and she didn’t communicate her feelings. This is something that brought my husband and I closer. We cried together, we held each other, we went through it together. I completely understand her thought process of devastation with the idea of sex. It becomes clinical and chore. It gives you so much hope to be crushed month after month. It was so unfair to treat Graham that way because he was also going through it.

“No matter how much you love someone—the capacity of that love is meaningless if it outweighs your capacity to forgive.”

Graham was amazing most of the time but also at fault. He should have been open to hurting Gwen because not communicating was their downfall. It hurts, it hurts really bad, but that’s how you grow. You can’t pretend and then wonder how it all went to hell. At the same time, he went through a lot with Quinn. She was unfair to him and he was a rock for so long. I don’t completely blame him for what happened because it was on both of them. The love letters though were amazing. ❤

Okay, here’s where my issue is with the actual diagnosis. Ectopic pregnancies are very common but what happened to her is not. Surgery is something that can be necessary but the most common is losing a tube and not your whole uterus. I actually know a few people who had to have this done and lost a tube but not their uterus. I am not a doctor though but that sounded extreme. Also, when I found out it was endometriosis, I was even more confused. I have it and had it removed the year before I got pregnant. It wasn’t my main issue because it’s mild but it’s removable with surgery, in a lot of cases. It’s treatable and I’m a bit unsure why they had tried all these things but nothing to treat her endo.

“What’s the secret to a perfect marriage?’ The old man leaned forward and looked at me very seriously. ‘Our marriage hasn’t been perfect. No marriage is perfect. There were times when she gave up on us. There were even more times when I gave up on us. The secret to our longevity is that we never gave up at the same time.”

Overall, I loved this book and I could not put it down. It probably has to do with the fact that I relate to it so much. The writing is just as I would expect from Hoover, amazing. I appreciate Hoover tackling such a hard topic. It really needs to be talked about more because it’s more common than people think. The isolation is hard and feeling like you can’t talk about it makes it worse. It’s one of the things I would change. I would be honest and not care if it made people uncomfortable.