At one library, this magnificent little jumble of words — otherwise known as “All About Love” (2000) by bell hooks — appears to have its own section on the shelf. One almost wouldn’t dare open it to desecrate its spotless, almost repulsively so, beauty. But evidently, its status as a New York Times Best Seller begs to differ. Even though nearly every other page has been annotated into an illegible disaster, it still looks perfect. Quite reflective of its inside quality.
The section is called “Creative Nonfiction.” At another library, under a different heading, the book is tattered and worn with age, but still appears untouchable. A book simply touched by time, with no trace of fingerprints on the dark cover. This heading is labeled “Self-help/identity politics.” Here, the book almost appears to be a disgrace to bell hook’s name and reputation.
“All About Love“ (2000), written by the iconic bell hooks — yes, all lowercase — starts off by redefining love entirely. She says we’ve been treating it as a noun; an event that just happens. Instead, says hooks, we should view love as a verb; giving love is an active choice we make. In other words, there’s no guarantee that any of us will “find the one.” It’s a fresh, new perspective, one not regularly seen in Disney movies, where the princess always finds the one without lifting a finger.
However, hook’s claim seems to have been planted as a bitter, cynical little seed, with no resulting blossoms. Her tales of ravaged romance have rendered the seed sterile. Her two long-term romantic relationships were both destroyed to dust by internalized patriarchal thinking; neither she nor the partner in question knew how to give nor how to receive love. Hooks writes how women, similar to herself, are taught to give love, regardless of the quality of the received, and men are not even taught to do either; they do not understand emotional vulnerability and are thus emotionally distant with the women in their lives; both are afraid of intimacy but express it in extremely different ways.
Evidently, hooks speaks from her experience and perhaps entirely so. Although she makes generalized statements about men and women she does not seem to see other possibilities beyond her own horizons. Her own idea of “new visions” creates the idea of an impossibly unattainable heaven; hooks’s analysis of her own tragedies constricts the entire world to one stifling fate and leaves no room for any rectification. The line between critical analysis designed for self-help and creative nonfiction evidently becomes blurred throughout the course of the book, and the interest of the reader dips and wanes out of existence.
The real sparkle behind her words lies in her storytelling; the moments of purely doomed and cynical fairytale filter through the weak attempts at analysis and string together a basic picture of bell hooks’s entire life. Her best ideas do truly arrive from the simple anecdotes: the idea that love is like a blossoming flower that needs to be consistently watered is so simple, even cliché, but truly fits in hand with her stories of constant neglect in both her family home and the houses of straw she built in her romantic relationships. A system as cruel as that of patriarchy is doomed to never last. Once she began to analyze the story further, exploring the common power dynamics in heterosexual relationships, the real gloom started to settle and cloud over the novel– it was like a permanent sterile and bitter dust, covering every inch of every page. She seemed to no longer own her experiences, instead they became the depressing property of the reader, opening up for discussion the desire of “more.” But wasn’t the very novel itself supposed to be the discussion?
The great and explosive freedom of the self-help genre seems quite alluring; who doesn’t love rerouting a few lost souls? But how often does a self-help book feature a forever disconsolate author? In this case, the soul rerouted seems to have been hooks herself– she appears to have no desire to reach the reader. Upon second glance, the book seems to be a series of stolen diary entries.
This book is the perfect quest for a young and aspiring Sherlock Holmes: by the end of the novel, one can hope to have practically painted a picture of bell hooks, without even seeing her face or reading her autobiography, officially.
“All About Love” can be found in any local library or bookstore, under the genre of creative nonfiction (hopefully!)
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