Confess

Love Letters in Paint

Confess began with an unusual creative exercise: Colleen Hoover asked her readers to submit real, anonymous confessions, which she then used as the basis for artwork woven into the novel’s narrative. The result is a romance with genuine formal inventiveness — each painting Owen creates responds to a real secret, and the reader knows that the confessions themselves are not fictional constructs but something closer to documentary material embedded in a love story.

Auburn Reed comes to Dallas to fight for custody of her young nephew after her long-term boyfriend’s death, and she takes a job at Owen Gentry’s art studio out of necessity. Owen’s work — paintings inspired by anonymous confessions submitted to a box outside his building — immediately captures her. What she doesn’t know is that some of those confessions are hers.

Art as Emotional Architecture

The studio setting allows Hoover to do something she doesn’t often do: use physical space expressively. Owen’s gallery functions as a kind of accumulated emotional record, each painting a real secret frozen in color and form. The conceit gives the romance an extra layer — the idea that intimacy can be created through witnessing, that someone can know your most hidden self before they know your name.

This theme of anonymous confession resonates beyond the plot mechanics. There is something genuinely moving about the idea that the things we are most ashamed of, rendered as art and witnessed by strangers, might become beautiful rather than damning.

Where Melodrama Creeps In

Hoover’s instinct for secrets and reveals, which drives so many of her novels, is both an asset and a liability in Confess. The plot depends on multiple characters withholding significant information from each other for extended periods, and the mechanics occasionally creak. Auburn’s custody situation generates real stakes, but the antagonists are drawn with broad strokes that reduce complexity.

Still, the pace never lags, and the emotional payoffs largely deliver.

The Confession Concept

Hoover’s decision to invite real readers to submit anonymous confessions for incorporation into the novel was genuinely unusual in mainstream fiction — an act of collaborative authorship that blurred the line between the novel’s fictional frame and the documentary material embedded within it. The confessions Owen paints are not invented; they are real secrets from real people, filtered through the artistic transformation of being rendered in paint and described in prose. The effect is an odd and affecting kind of authenticity running beneath the fiction.

The novel was published in 2015, early in Hoover’s transition from self-publishing to traditional publishing, and it shows her at a moment of growing formal confidence. The confession concept is not just a marketing hook but a genuine thematic choice: the novel is interested in what it means to make private pain visible, and whether visibility can change the character of that pain.

Confess was adapted as a Kindle Worlds online series in 2017, though the adaptation did not reach the mainstream visibility of later Hoover adaptations. The novel’s continued presence on BookTok recommendation lists has sustained its readership well past the adaptation.

Auburn’s Situation

The custody subplot — Auburn’s fight to remain in her nephew Adam’s life after her boyfriend Adam’s death left her without legal standing — gives the romance its stakes in a way that distinguishes it from Hoover’s lighter work. Auburn is not simply a woman falling inconveniently in love; she is a woman who has organized her entire life around a single relationship she has no legal right to, and whose presence in Dallas depends on a situation that could collapse at any moment.

This precariousness gives the novel its emotional texture. Auburn cannot afford to be distracted; she cannot afford to make a mistake; and she is, predictably, about to make the mistake of falling in love with someone whose connection to her anonymous confessions she does not yet know. Hoover structures the dramatic irony carefully — we know what Auburn does not, and our knowledge makes her choices more charged than they would be if she were simply unaware of the situation.

Art and Intimacy

The novel’s deepest interest is in the relationship between art and intimacy — the idea that being truly seen by someone, even anonymously, even in the form of a confession that becomes a painting that becomes a gallery exhibit, constitutes a form of connection. Owen knows something about Auburn before he knows her name. She has been seen without knowing she was being seen. When the gap closes, the question is whether that seeing constitutes intimacy or violation — and Hoover, to her credit, does not pretend the answer is simple.

Where Confess Sits in the Catalog

For readers working through Hoover’s back catalog, Confess offers something her lighter works do not: a genuine conceptual premise that gives the romance a structural rationale beyond circumstance. Owen’s gallery is not just a setting; it is the novel’s argument — that private pain, when made visible with care, can become something shared rather than shameful. The confession booth outside Owen’s studio is a real practice Hoover adapted, and the real confessions she incorporated give the novel a grounding that most romance fiction lacks entirely.

Final Verdict

Confess is a creative, emotionally engaging romance that uses its art-world premise to genuine effect rather than mere decoration. It is not Hoover’s most mature work, but it demonstrates her capacity for formal inventiveness alongside her trademark emotional directness.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — An imaginative romance with a genuinely original concept, anchored by characters whose secrets feel worth keeping until the moment they are revealed.

Reading Guides

• Colleen Hoover Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide and Where to Start (2026)