# Regretting You by Colleen Hoover Source: https://thegisthub.com/books/regretting-you-by-colleen-hoover Last updated: 2026-10-24 Published 2019 · 366 pages · ISBN 9781542016421 · Categories: Fiction, Relationships Regretting You is Colleen Hoover's novel about a mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter whose lives fall apart after a double tragedy, told in both of their voices. For readers who want a family drama about grief, secrets and first love. ## The gist **Morgan Grant** had her daughter, **Clara**, at seventeen and gave up her own plans to raise her. Now Clara is sixteen and wants the freedom Morgan never had, and the two clash constantly. Then a car crash kills Morgan's husband, **Chris**, and her sister, **Jenny**. The crash exposes a secret that Morgan must keep from Clara, and it throws Morgan back together with **Jonah**, Jenny's partner and the man she once had feelings for. Clara, meanwhile, falls for **Miller Adams**, a boy her mother does not trust. Hoover's argument is that parents and children see only part of each other, and that grief forces both to tell the truth. ## Key ideas ### 1. Two narrators show what each side cannot see Morgan and Clara take turns telling the story. When they fight, the reader hears both versions. Morgan sees a reckless teenager. Clara sees a controlling mother. Hoover uses this structure to show that both are partly right and both are missing the other's reasons. The example is Morgan's strictness about boys, which Clara reads as distrust but which comes from Morgan's own pregnancy at seventeen. ### 2. Choices made at seventeen shape a whole life Morgan had Clara at seventeen and gave up college and travel to raise her. Her fear that Clara will repeat that path drives most of her parenting. Hoover asks whether Morgan regrets her life, and the title hints at the question. The book's answer is mixed. Morgan loves her daughter completely, and she also mourns the person she might have been. ### 3. Grief makes people act worse before it makes them wiser After the crash, nobody behaves well. Clara rebels and lies. Morgan grows controlling and distant. Jonah nearly gives up. Hoover does not show grief as a noble process. She shows it as anger, secrecy and impulse. The example is Morgan's rage in the days after the funeral, which Clara sees but cannot understand because she does not know the full story. ### 4. Miller shows that loyalty can look like trouble Morgan distrusts Miller because of his reputation. Clara sees another side: a boy who cares for his sick grandfather and spends weeks moving a city limits sign so his favorite pizza place will deliver. Hoover uses Miller to show how adults judge teenagers by labels. The first meeting at the sign shows his patience and humor, and his care for Gramps shows his loyalty. ### 5. Protecting a child with a secret has a cost Morgan keeps a painful truth from Clara to protect her. The secret makes Morgan act strangely, and Clara takes her behavior as coldness. Hoover tests whether protection through silence is love or a mistake. The novel suggests it is both. The silence keeps Clara's memories safe for a time, but it also lets her carry a guilt that is not hers. ### 6. (Spoiler) The crash exposes an affair Morgan and Jonah learn that Chris and Jenny were having an affair. They find Chris's car at a hotel and then letters between the two. Jonah fears Elijah might be Chris's son. Hoover makes the betrayal double, by a husband and a sister. The example is the choice Morgan and Jonah make together: to hide the affair from Clara so she can keep her love for her father. ### 7. (Spoiler) The truth frees Clara from false guilt Clara believes the text she sent Jenny that night caused the crash. When Morgan finally tells her the whole truth, that Chris was driving and that the two were having an affair, Clara's guilt lifts. Hoover's point is that a secret kept to protect someone can also trap them. Honesty brings mother and daughter back together and lets each of them choose who to love. ## Questions this book answers ### What is Regretting You by Colleen Hoover about? Regretting You is a 2019 novel by Colleen Hoover told by a mother, Morgan, and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Clara. Morgan had Clara at seventeen, and the two clash constantly. A car crash kills Morgan's husband and her sister, Jenny. The tragedy exposes a secret, pulls Morgan back toward Jonah, the man she once loved, and pushes Clara toward Miller Adams, a boy her mother distrusts. ### How does Regretting You end? Spoiler: After a bitter fight on Clara's birthday, Clara admits she thinks her text caused the crash. Morgan tells her the truth: Chris was driving, and he and Jenny were having an affair. Clara's guilt lifts and mother and daughter reconcile. Morgan and Jonah finally come together, Clara and Miller become a couple, and the family rebuilds with baby Elijah. ### Were Chris and Jenny having an affair in Regretting You? Spoiler: Yes. After the crash, Morgan and Jonah find Chris's car at a hotel and letters between Chris and Jenny. They hide the affair from Clara to protect her memories. Jonah also fears that Elijah might be Chris's son, but he chooses to raise Elijah as his own. ### Who is Miller in Regretting You? Miller Adams is a boy from Clara's school who wants to make films. He lives with and cares for his ill grandfather, and he spends weeks moving the city limits sign so a pizza place will deliver to their house. Morgan distrusts him, but he becomes Clara's first love. ### What is the theme of Regretting You? The main theme is how parents and teenagers misread each other. The double narration shows each conflict from both sides. Other themes are the cost of choices made young, grief after sudden loss, the harm of secrets kept to protect someone, and second chances at love across two generations. ## Full summary ### A mother and daughter in two voices **Regretting You** is a family drama and romance by Colleen Hoover, published in 2019. It became a film in 2025. Unlike most of Hoover's novels, it has two narrators of different generations: **Morgan Grant**, a woman in her thirties, and her daughter **Clara**, who is sixteen. Their chapters alternate. The reader sees each conflict from both sides, which neither character can do. The novel is about the distance between a parent and a teenager, about grief, and about the cost of choices made too young. It is also about two love stories: one between adults who missed their chance years ago, and one between teenagers who are just beginning. ### Seventeen years earlier The book opens when Morgan is seventeen. She and her younger sister, **Jenny**, are close. Morgan dates **Chris Grant**, a charming, popular boy. Jenny dates Chris's best friend, **Jonah Sullivan**, who is quieter and more serious. Jonah and Morgan share a bond that neither of them acts on. Morgan becomes pregnant. She tells Jonah before she tells almost anyone else. She and Chris marry young, and Morgan gives up her own plans for college and travel to raise their daughter. Jonah leaves town. The prologue ends with a sense that Morgan's whole life was decided in a single moment. ### Morgan and Clara Seventeen years later, Morgan is a devoted mother and wife in a comfortable house. Chris has a successful career. Clara is sixteen, smart and dramatic, and she wants to be an actress. She has a best friend, **Lexie**, and a fierce sense of her own independence. Morgan worries about Clara constantly. She does not want her daughter to repeat her own mistakes. She is strict about boys, curfews and plans. Clara sees her mother as controlling and old-fashioned. She is closer to her aunt Jenny, who is young, fun and more like a big sister. Jonah has come back to town. He and Jenny are now together and have a baby son, **Elijah**. Morgan has to watch the man she once had feelings for build a family with her sister. Their history is never spoken aloud, but it is always there. ### Miller Adams Clara meets **Miller Adams**, a boy from her school with a bad reputation and a dry sense of humor. She finds him at the edge of town moving the city limits sign a little at a time. He wants the sign to end up past his grandfather's house, so that his favorite pizza place will deliver there. Clara helps him. It is a strange, funny first meeting, and it shows who Miller is: patient, odd and loyal. Miller lives with his grandfather, whom he calls **Gramps**. Gramps is ill, and Miller looks after him. Miller wants to make films, and he and Clara share a love of movies. The problem is that Miller has a girlfriend, **Shelby**, and Clara's family tells her not to get involved. Morgan also distrusts him because of what she has heard about him. ### The crash One night, Chris and Jenny are killed together in a car crash. Morgan loses her husband and her sister. Clara loses her father and the aunt she adored. Jonah loses his partner and is left alone with a baby. The novel follows the weeks after the crash closely. The funerals, the empty house and the strange routines of grief all take up space. Hoover shows how grief makes everyone in the family act badly. Clara rebels harder and turns to Miller. Morgan becomes more controlling and also more distant, because she is carrying something she cannot tell her daughter. Jonah struggles to care for Elijah. The crash also raises questions that Morgan cannot leave alone. Why were Chris and Jenny together that night? Where were they going? The answers threaten everything Morgan believed about her marriage and her family. ### Two people left behind The crash pushes Morgan and Jonah together in a way neither expected. They are the two adults left holding the pieces: Morgan with a grieving teenager, Jonah with a baby who has lost his mother. Jonah relies on Morgan for help with Elijah. Morgan relies on Jonah because he is the only person who shares her loss in the same way. Their old feelings return, and both of them feel guilty about it. It is too soon, and the people they have lost are Morgan's husband and Jonah's partner. Hoover lets the two circle each other for much of the book. Their scenes are quiet and careful, in contrast to the louder drama of Clara's chapters. Clara, meanwhile, notices more than her mother thinks. She sees Jonah at the house often. She sees her mother angry in ways that do not seem to fit grief alone. She also sees that her mother does not want her near Miller, and she decides that Morgan is trying to control her life at the very moment she needs freedom most. The gap between mother and daughter grows wider just when they need each other. ### Characters - **Morgan Grant**: one of two narrators. A mother who gave up her plans at seventeen and has built her life around her family. - **Clara Grant**: the other narrator. A sixteen-year-old who wants to act and wants her mother to let her live. - **Chris Grant**: Morgan's husband and Clara's father. Charming and well liked. - **Jenny Davidson**: Morgan's younger sister and Clara's favorite aunt. Free-spirited and close to Clara. - **Jonah Sullivan**: Chris's best friend, Jenny's partner and Elijah's father. He and Morgan have unfinished history. - **Miller Adams**: a boy from Clara's school who wants to make films and cares for his ailing grandfather. - **Lexie**: Clara's best friend, who keeps her grounded. ### Themes **Parents and teenagers.** Morgan and Clara love each other but misread each other at every turn. The double narration is the point: each sees only her own side. Hoover shows how a parent's fear and a teenager's need for freedom can look, from the other side, like control and recklessness. **Choices made young.** Morgan's life was set at seventeen. She fears Clara will repeat her path. The book asks whether Morgan regrets her life, and the title suggests a painful answer that is more complicated than it first seems. **Grief.** The crash removes two people at once and leaves the survivors to sort out what is left. Grief does not make the characters wiser at first. It makes them angry, secretive and impulsive. **Secrets and honesty.** Morgan decides to protect Clara from a painful truth. The book tests whether that protection is love or a mistake. **Second chances in love.** Morgan and Jonah have a chance they once missed. Clara and Miller have a chance at a first love. The two stories mirror each other across a generation. ### Spoilers: the secret This section reveals the main twist. Morgan and Jonah discover that Chris and Jenny were having an affair. They find Chris's car at a hotel and later find letters between Chris and Jenny. The betrayal is double: Morgan's husband and her sister. Jonah faces a second fear, that Elijah might be Chris's son rather than his. Morgan and Jonah decide not to tell Clara. They want her to keep her love for her father and her aunt. The secret makes Morgan act strangely, and Clara reads her mother's behavior as coldness. Clara also carries her own guilt: she sent Jenny a text on the night of the crash, and she believes the message caused it. Jonah, overwhelmed, nearly gives up on raising Elijah alone. Clara persuades him to keep caring for the baby and offers to help. Over time, Jonah chooses to be Elijah's father regardless of biology. ### Spoilers: the ending This section reveals the ending. The tension between mother and daughter peaks on Clara's birthday, at a tense dinner where they fight in front of Jonah and Miller. Afterward, Clara drinks with Lexie at her father's and aunt's graves, and Morgan finds them. The next morning, Clara admits that she believes her text caused the crash. Morgan finally tells her the truth: Chris was driving, not Jenny, and the two were having an affair. Morgan makes clear that both of them still loved Clara. The truth frees Clara from her guilt, and mother and daughter reconcile. Each gives the other permission to love the person she wants. Morgan and Jonah admit their feelings and come together at last. Clara makes up with Miller, and their relationship becomes real. The book ends with the family rebuilt in a new shape, with Morgan, Jonah, Elijah and Clara together. ### What the critics say Readers often praise Clara and Miller's romance and the mother-daughter conflict. Some find it uncomfortable that Morgan and Jonah fall for each other so soon after their partners' deaths, and some find the affair plot melodramatic. The 2025 film adaptation received mostly negative reviews but did well at the box office. ### Who should read it Read it if you want a family drama told from both a parent's and a teenager's point of view, with a sweet first romance alongside a grief story. It is lighter than some of Hoover's books but deals with infidelity, sudden death and teenage drinking. ## Do this week - Pick one recent argument with a parent or child and write down how it looked from their side. - Ask a parent or older relative one question about a choice they made at your age, and listen without judging. - List one secret you keep to protect someone, and decide whether it still protects them or now only burdens them. - Notice one person you have judged by their reputation, and find out one thing about them you did not know. - After finishing, discuss with another reader whether Morgan was right to hide the truth from Clara for so long. Summary by The Gist Hub (https://thegisthub.com). In our own words, not the book's text.