Global News Desk:
During the summer of 2022, amidst
recovering from a breakup and contemplating her life and personal growth, Emma
Goodwin made a conscious choice to explore a frequently recommended book—bell
hooks' "All About Love: New Visions.
“I loved it. It takes seriously a
subject that is scoffed at in popular culture, that a lot of people see as
silly,” says Goodwin, 26, a social media coordinator who lives in Philadelphia.
“What has stuck with me over the past couple of years since I read it is the
idea that to be a loving person is something you have to work at and not
something that comes naturally.”
Brianna Pippen, a visual artist
in the Washington, D.C. area, has read “All About Love” a couple times, and
values it for how it explores not just romantic love, but families and friends
and relationships in general. Tiffany Stewart, a writer and producer in Los
Angeles, first read “All About Love” two years ago with her reading group and
reread it recently.
Just from the book's
introduction, she knew it was going to “crack open” her mind and change
everything she had believed.
“We've always been told that love
should just feel good. It should be fluffy and light and easy. And that means
you're looking at the media version of love,” she said.
Published by William Morrow and Company
in 2000, “All About Love” endures as a word-of-mouth favorite — the kind of
book that continues to be read and discussed even without any breaking news
event, movie tie-in or publicity campaign. Friends recommend it to friends.
Fans post about it on Instagram and TikTok and review it on Goodreads, where
more than 190,000 members have included it on their to-read list.
According to Circana, which
tracks around 85% of physical book sales, “All About Love” sold more than
170,000 copies in 2023, compared to just over 27,000 in 2018. Morrow editor
Rachel Kahan cites the murder of George Floyd in 2020 as a turning point,
although sales were already rising.
“I think this is one of those
situations where the book's been around a while and the culture rises up to
meet it,” says Kahan, who was working with hooks at the time of her death, in
December 2021. A few months before, Kahan had told the author that “All About
Love” made The New York Times bestseller list.
“We were kind of laughing and
crying," the editor said. "She was so excited that the book was
getting all this attention from readers and influencing the conversation.” Scholars
of hooks welcome the late feminist's ongoing popularity, but some worry that
readers are gaining only a selective understanding of her, viewing her more as
a self-help author than as a political and social thinker.
The pen name for Gloria Jean
Watkins, bell hooks helped popularize the idea of “intersectionality,” a
concept coined by Black civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw, also known for
her work on the concept of critical race theory. Intersectionality holds that
racism, sexism and economic inequality reinforce each other and shape (and
distort) the ways we see ourselves, and each other.
Author of more than 30 books, hooks
explored everything from the lasting impact of slavery on Black women to the
failure of white feminists to work more closely with their Black
contemporaries. In her lifetime, she was often cited for the 1981 book “Ain’t I
a Woman? Black Women and Feminism,” its title taken from the memoir of 19th
century abolitionist Sojourner Truth.
She wrote often about love,
family and community, but within the framework of a society that hooks saw as
isolating us and setting us against each other. In “All About Love,” she
rejected the “dangerous narcissism” of New Age thinkers, and contended that
love had been distorted by “our obsession with power and commodity.” The
problem often began at home, she wrote, where too many children were subjected
to “chaos, neglect, abuse and coercion.”
“There can be no love without
justice,” hooks wrote. “Until we live in a culture that not only respects but
also upholds basic civil rights for children, most children will not know
love.”
M. Shadee Malaklou, who directs
the bell hooks center at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, where hooks taught
over the final decade and a half of her life, says that some find it
“convenient to flatten out a feminist of color.”
“bell was never depoliticized,”
she says. “For bell, the love she talks about is a love for justice. 'All About
Love' is a love letter to justice." Stewart said she found that “All About
Love” had both a personal and political message, aligning the “individual
journey” with the ”communal and societal one.” We are affected on many levels
by “this hyper-individualistic energy and temporary satisfaction,” Stewart
added, and the book "teaches us to think outside of ourselves, which is
important because we can’t get through life without one another.”
The author was in her mid-40s and
had been publishing books for 20 years when she signed with William Morrow for
“All About Love,” the first of a “Love Song to the Nation” trilogy that also
included “Communion" and “Salvation.” The original editor of “All About
Love,” Doris Cooper, says she and hooks would work on the book at the author's
Greenwich Village apartment.
“I remember how beautiful that
apartment was, and that is was so light-filled. And when I look back, I think
that was not insignificant. bell believed in beautiful things as a
representation of love towards oneself,” says Cooper, now vice president and
editor-in-chief of Simon Element, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
“One day, I was walking in the
Village with her, and we passed a little jewelry store. She admired something
in there and she bought it for herself. I was really struck by the idea of
buying yourself jewelry."
Lily Edelman-Gold, who lives in
Monterey, California and works for the state's energy commission, was going
through a time of “intense loneliness” when she borrowed a copy of “All About
Love” from a friend, and wrote down favorite passages in a notebook. She
responded to hooks' insistence that love was more a verb than a noun, an act of
will as opposed to an abstract ideal. Edelman-Gold also found herself
discovering love's once-hidden presence.
“It was almost as though I could
feel all the love in my life wrapping itself around me, filling me up and
making itself known,” Edelman-Gold said. "The differences between romantic
and familial or friendship-based love had suddenly gotten much smaller and less
consequential. I realized that I had been conflating love and romance, as she
says many do, and assuming that love needs to come from the same source as
intimate and romantic satisfaction.
“It has allowed me to appreciate
the fun and happiness intimacy can bring without the expectation that it also
provides all the love in my life.”(News Source By ABC News)