Main Differences between Season 3 and Book 3 of YOU

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably loved YOU since it first came to Netflix. Joe Goldberg is a terrible car crash that you just want to keep watching because you have to know what kind of mess he’s going to get himself into again.

By now, you also may have heard that YOU is based on a book series by Caroline Kepnes, the third installment of the series which came out this April called You Love Me. You may also be curious how different the show is from the books. Luckily, I have read all three books by Kepnes and watched all three seasons of YOU, the latest of which came out October 15th on Netflix. I thought it would be interesting to show the main differences between Season 3 of YOU and You Love Me, and see how each compares and what may be coming next for Joe — sorry, Nick — in the fourth season of YOU (officially confirmed!). SERIOUS spoilers ahead, along with discussion of murder, sexual abuse, and suicide:

First, book two and season two of YOU diverge massively from one another by the end, meaning where Joe ends up at the beginning of book three is wildly different.

While both book Joe and show Joe find themselves in Los Angeles and in love with Love Quinn (whose also pregnant in the book), book Joe winds up being arrested (at a Taco Bell!) and taken to jail for the murders of Beck and Peach. Dr. Nicky’s online fandom managed to crack the code and tip off the police, who justifiably try to hold Joe accountable for his crimes. Too bad they (and Joe) don’t know the power of Quinn money can out-maneuver any justice system. Speaking of which…

At the beginning of You Love Me, Joe is blackmailed & paid off by the Quinn family from ever seeing Love or their son again, and he ends up moving to Bainbridge Island, Washington.

While the Quinns end up getting Joe off his murder charges, the Quinns hand Joe a four million dollar payoff to stay away from Love and their son, Forty (unlike in the show where his middle name is Forty and first name Henry). Joe is forced to sign the contract that he will never contact Love or Forty ever again and will move away to Bainbridge. Because of this, Love and Joe never officially get married or live together after this point, and Joe never meets his son. Bainbridge is a small, quiet suburban town on an island in Washington State, which in the show is swapped for NorCal’s Madre Linda.

Natalie and Marianne from the show are a combination of the woman book Joe obsesses over, Mary Kay.

Mary Kay is a librarian at the local library where Joe volunteers (because his Quinn payout means he never needs to work again), and the woman who immediately becomes his newest obsession. Like Marianne in the show, she has a daughter and her husband is a drug addict, albeit, Mary Kay is still married to him (and was never an addict herself) while Marianne is not. Like Natalie, Mary Kay is older and relentlessly unhappy in her marriage and decides to cheat with Joe initially because she is bored. Mary Kay ends up marrying Joe in a joyful ceremony towards the end of the book.

Joe, like in the show with Natalie and Marianne, does not kill Mary Kay — her daughter accidentally throws her down a flight of stairs while they’re having a fight. Mary Kay goes into a coma and eventually dies in the hospital.

Joe is the one who hacks into security cameras, not his neighbor.

Joe hacks into the security cameras in Mary Kay’s home to watch her doing…various things, including fighting and having sex with her husband. Mostly, it’s to make sure she isn’t home when he plans on breaking in.

Sherry and Cary Conrad are similar to Seamus and Ivan from the novel.

Seamus is the lifelong friend of Mary Kay, who is obsessed with Crossfit and maintaining his body, like Cary. Ivan is Mary Kay’s husband’s half-brother, who has an online brand based on women improving their lives by using “logic over feelings”, similar to Sherry’s online “momfluencing.” Since Ivan has a crush on Mary Kay, Joe gets rid of him by seeking out women to go public about Ivan sexually harassing & assaulting them online. Seamus turns out to have been grooming and molesting Nomi, Mary Kay’s daughter. Joe murdered Seamus when he attacked Joe over what he thought was Seamus telling him to stay away from Mary Kay, but actually turned out to be about Nomi.

Theo is the equivalent of Nomi from the book, Mary Kay’s daughter.

In the books, Mary Kay’s daughter Nomi is a teenager in her Senior year of High School. Nomi harbors a secret obsession with Joe, who she believes is flirting with her, similar to how Theo harbors an obsession with Love. Unlike Love and Theo, Joe is shocked by Nomi’s revelation of her crush on him and immediately rebuffs her, to which Mary Kay walks in and the fight between the mother and daughter ensues. Nomi ultimately moves to NYC for college and only texts Joe to tell him that she took her mother off life-support.

Gil is the show equivalent of Melanda, Mary Kay’s best friend.

Melanda is an aggressively feminist English teacher at the local high school, who is Mary Kay’s best friend and Nomi’s Aunt-figure. She also hates Joe from the minute she meets him. She mistakenly believes Joe is a pedophile stalking and grooming Nomi, and so she breaks into his home and attacks him. Joe fights back and Melanda, like many others, ends up in the cage (now in the basement of Joe’s home, and equipped with a camera and intercom). Melanda attempts to free herself by telling Joe secrets about herself, such as that she’s been having an affair with Mary Kay’s husband for 10 years. However, before Joe can free her, Melanda kills herself in the cage and uses her blood to write “Single White Female” on the glass, a reference to the film of the same name she had been watching while in the cage.

Joe plots to kill Mary Kay’s husband with an accidental overdose just like he does Marianne’s, but is successful (in a roundabout way).

In the show, Joe’s master plan of forcing an overdose onto Marianne’s ex-husband fails when he gets the upper-hand on Joe, and Joe is forced to resort to stabbing him on the sidewalk. In the books, Joe plants heroin laced with fentanyl in Mary Kay and her husband’s home. However, Mary Kay finds the heroin and throws it away after confronting her husband. Though Joe believes his plan is thwarted, when Mary Kay decides to to leave her husband for Joe, he goes out and buys pills of his own that end up killing him.

In the book, Love attempts to commit a murder-suicide with herself and Joe.

In the show, Joe stages a murder-suicide committed by Love in order to get out of the marriage, blame Love for their crimes, and fake his own death. However, in the book, Love actually does attempt a murder-suicide. For most of the book, we only hear and see of Love through her Instagram account, where she posts pictures & videos of baby Forty that Joe watches. Love manipulates Joe into coming to LA to see her once she deduces he is in love with Mary Kay. There, she professes that she believed their love was strong enough to withstand the payoff and that Joe would have fought for her back by now. Love, who at this point is obsessive, extremely lonely, and in the throws of postpartum depression, ends up shooting the both of them. Joe survives, while Love does not. Joe is genuinely heartbroken to learn Love committed suicide and did not want her to die. Dottie, who is not nearly as bad as in the show, ends up taking custody of baby Forty and sending pictures to Joe every now and then (Dottie is also not getting divorced from Ray in the books). The Quinns end up covering up Love’s suicide as “cancer.”

Joe moves to Florida and opens a bookstore at the end of book three.

Instead of moving to Paris to try and find Marianne like in the show, Joe disappears to Florida after Mary Kay goes into a coma. He opens a bookstore and names it “Empathy Bordello” based on Mary Kay’s idea. However, just as Joe laments how terrible life is now that Beck, Love, and Mary Kay are all gone and that he’s all alone, a new, fresh face walks in, and “somehow my heart is intact. It ticks madly, just like hers.”

Kepnes is planning on coming out with a fourth book soon, and its likely YOU Season 4 will be around sometime in 2023.