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.