All About Love

Bell hooks proses and musings on love. Not sure why, but I expected it to be a feminist text engaging with the idea of love. It is more a love text engaging with feminism. I recently lost my mom and "recently" ended a handful of important relationships and want to engage with this concept of love from someone I respect. I want to both play with an openness to love and optimism being apart of politics and I want to feel open to love when feeling like vulnerability can be so hard.

I liked her engagement with childhood and learning love that we reproduce when we are older, at least when we don't interrogate it and seek to change that relationship. And her critiques of patriarchy and the ways that socialized men and socialized women commonly relate to love, care, and empathy.

The section on grief and love was my favourite part, and how we know love fully, and the love and value we have for a person, in the process of grief.

Definitely lots of engagement with Christianity and spiritually which doesn't speak to me but the politics and musings on childhood and patriarchy and loss are worth the read.

This is a book about love, which begins by promising a different perspective than the common romantic-love angle in similar books. I hoped I would love it, but perhaps it was just the wrong introduction for me to bell hooks' writing. There are moments of brilliance, such as the excellent sixth chapter: Values, which discusses richly and poetically in how social systems influence thoughts on love.

However, most of the writing failed to land. It felt like an attempt to marry academic writing with memoir, with too little rigour for the former and too little reflection for the latter. Narrow personal reflections are given as evidence for problems with love painted with broad brushstrokes, and throughout the book the perspective is very US-centric, never considering love from any non-US or non-western perspective. Repetition also mars most chapters. In the end, the book is a bit too loose and while hooks' perspective is joyful, loving and admirable, it doesn't translate here into writing that works.

This was a bit of a miss for me, which is disappointing to myself because I really want to get behind everything bell hooks writes. But I found there was actually a huge amount of really harsh this or that black & white aspirational blanket statements and not very much room for nuance or even concrete guidance on how to get to this "true love". One of the first and biggest ideas the book opens with is that abuse and love can not coexist and at first I thought I was just being resistant to having unexamined assumptions shaked but now at the end of the book I do think I can say actually, no, I disagree, I still do think love and abuse can coexist. it's not GOOD, it's quite bad, but hurt people hurt people and you can hurt people you love deeply, the two things can both be true.

BUT a lot of the writing was beautiful and inspiring and all of the emphasis on love as being an action and something to work on rather than something passive that happens to you I appreciated, bel hooks writing style is always lovely, which was a bit redeeming, and I want to pick out some of the reference works cited.