All About Love: New Visions
By bell hooks
Publication Year: 2001
Type: Non-fiction
Genre: feminism, self-help
Read on 2022-11-26
★★★☆☆
I found the earlier chapters clearly defining love as “the will to nurture our own and others’ spiritual growth” really brilliant and challenging in a good way. hooks unflinchingly declares that love cannot coexist with abuse and neglect, distinguishes between cathexis (finding someone important) and love, and discusses how misguided notions of love are taught to us in childhood and a patriarchal society. There was so much to reflect on here, and I think this definition—borrowed from M. Scott Peck—adds substance to the related truism that “love is a verb/action”.
Unfortunately I found the majority of the rest of the book incredibly repetitive and near nonsensical. There doesn’t seem to be much coherence to the ordering and thematic focus of the chapters, apart from a few signposts dotted between meandering paragraphs that really don’t go anywhere or offer anything actionable. An example of hooks' writing style from the chapter “Healing: Redemptive Love”: “Without hope, we cannot return to love…Being positive, living in a permanent state of hopefulness, renews the spirit. Renewing our faith in love’s promise, hope is our covenant.” By the time I flagged this passage, my eyes were glazed over from reading so many short declarative sentences like these. After a while I really couldn't glean anything from them anymore.
This quote also offers a glimpse of the undeniably Christian and moralistic lens that hooks writes through. Concepts and the language of faith, spirit, and redemption undergird a lot of the central ideas in this book. The final chapter titled “Destiny: When Angels Speak of Love” contains the most explicitly Christian references, discussing the tale of Jacob and “angels”—both the divine kind and the “enlightened witnesses” in real life—and is by far the hardest for me to understand. In this chapter she also makes the stupefying claim that the proliferation of angel imagery in popular culture evidences a forthcoming religious wave. I could’ve said the same of devil imagery and Satanic worship or mushroom imagery and Gen Z bowing down to our fungal overlords but sure. I swear I’m not a total cynic, but I will admit to being very critical of the naturalization of explicitly Christian notions of morality (I fail to see how the concept of redemption is relevant when I don’t believe in the concept of sin, hell, or Christ) in culture.
Another big gripe I had with the book that is likely a generational thing (the book came out in 2001) is its absolute commitment to rooting everything in the gender binary and heterosexual, heteronormative relationships. I feel like any discussion on matters of love and patriarchy today would need to include not just the existence of queer people but a wider queer theoretical lens that conceptualizes a way of being beyond the binary. Even in decrying the naturalization of a men-are-from-Mars/women-are-from-Venus dichotomy and the patriarchal nuclear family, hooks continues to reify a dichotomous binary world of men and women and how either are socialized in this book. And while some of her points are relevant to me and my social circles, a whole lot of them just sound to me to be from a different time and an older generation. Another singular instance that I just can't stop thinking about is when she said she encouraged her lesbian sister to stay in contact with their homophobic family, and points to this as an example of the importance of community?? There were also numerous references to Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky (at one point she uses this case to demonstrate a pervasive toxicity of dishonesty (Clinton) and greed (Lewinsky) in our culture, woof) which also felt comically ancient to me, as a reader in 2022 who was a) not around when this went down and b) has since lived through far worse during the Trump administration.
With this book, I am taking the good and useful and leaving the rest. The good is great, and I’ve already been journalling about some of the concepts introduced to me and sending entire passages to my sister for future discussion. I’m no literary or cultural historian so I don’t know precisely how groundbreaking this book was when it first came out or its influence on culture since, but I will say that I think it’s a very positive thing that I found so much of it to be no longer relevant to my life and my little queer late millenial/early Gen Z bubble.
Random but fun: lots of quotations from 2020 presidential candidate and New Age writer, Marianne Williamson, which led me down a rabbit hole of her Wikipedia page. Honestly adds to Williamson’s credibility as someone who’s been walking the walk for a long ass time. She’s a real one.
