Book Review: All About Love by bell hooks
For the months of July and August, I’ll be living at my childhood home in San Jose with my entire family: my parents, my four younger siblings, and my grandpa. In what may prove to be a silver lining of this COVID-induced world of uncertainty, we are getting a chance to live together as a family again for, perhaps, the last time. The weight of this “final opportunity” is amplified by the pandemic that induced it, a pandemic that is reminding us how ephemeral life is. Our family has been having some profound, difficult, and honest conversations about love — what it means to us, how we show it, when we’ve felt it, (and maybe most importantly) when we haven’t felt it.
I finished this book just as I was moving in — and I found it to be relevant to many aspects of my life. hooks writes about love with urgency and from many different angles, making a case for a tectonic shift of our culture towards love. Some of the angles she takes definitely missed the mark for me. She sometimes oversimplifies or takes logical steps that don’t make sense. But on the whole, I found her message rang true in my life and in my view of the world. She calls attention to how we’ve collectively undervalued love, instead acting from a place of fear at all levels of society: within ourselves, with our romantic partners, with our families, with our friends, with our communities, with our country. It was odd to read a book that approached love through an almost academic lens but also included personal narratives from hooks’ own experiences.
When I finished this book, I wanted to have a conversation about love with each of my loved ones. I wanted to ask them, “What does love mean to you? What does it look like? How can I better love you?” In my recent reading of The Fire Next Time (my review), I admired Baldwin’s ability to speak with love so clearly and precisely. We often demur when speaking of love, choosing the safety of remaining vague and assuming that love can simply be felt. hooks challenges us to see the ways in which our assumptions about love fail us. From my personal relationships to my grappling with institutional injustice, I’m now striving to define the practice of love and engage in it more explicitly.
