All about Love: Love Song to the Nation Book 1

In hooks’s kitchen hangs a replication of graffiti art she once came across while walking to her job as a professor at Yale University. The print reads, “The search for love continues even in the face of great odds” (xv). The artwork was deeply moving for hooks who, at the time, was mourning the ending of a relationship with her former partner of 15 years. hooks’s grief at the time was “deeply rooted in the fear that love did not exist, could not be found” (xvi). The bold declaration of the graffiti art gave her hope for the future that, despite her pain, she could return to love. The snapshots of the artwork that hang on hooks’s kitchen wall were given to her by the artist himself, whom she sought out after the graffiti was erased from the construction wall where he had painted his profound message.

hooks examines the utter lack of public discourse on love. She notes that many people, particularly young people, have become cynical about love, giving up on it entirely. Folks both young and old are often apprehensive about love and unwilling to even speak about it in casual settings. However, she fears that young people are especially cynical about love. Hooks’s own desire to return to love allowed her “the incentive to think more, to talk about love, and to study popular and more serious writing on the subject” (xx). Unwavering in her quest to find and understand love, hooks asserts that “profound changes in the way we think and act must take place if we are to create a loving culture” (xxiv).

hooks also discusses divergent cultural attitudes toward male writers who write about love versus female writers who do the same. Over the course of her academic training, virtually all the canonized writers of love were men, save for Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When women do write about love, their works are often dismissed as escapism: “Male fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape” (xxiii).

This book functions both as an academic exploration of love and a call to action. In writing this text, hooks provides readers with “radical new ways to think about the art of loving, offering a hopeful, joyous vision of love’s transformative power” (xxix).

In Chapter 1, hooks considers contemporary culture’s understanding of love. She recognizes that the general “confusion about what we mean when we use the word ‘love’ is the source of our difficulty in loving” (3). Without a universal, comprehensive, and fixed understanding of love and what it entails, people can never learn how to effectively give and receive the love they desire.

The word “love” is generally defined as a noun, but hooks, like many scholars before her, believes it is best understood as a verb. In particular, she appreciates the definition coined by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck, who defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (4). This definition confirms another truth, which is that “love and abuse cannot coexist” (6) hooks acknowledges that many people, especially in childhood and as the result of growing up in dysfunctional families, are conditioned to believe that abuse is sometimes a condition of love. This “faulty thinking” in childhood “often shapes our adult perceptions of love” (9). Many people, hooks included, are unwilling as adults to accept a definition of love that would force them to contend with the possibility that they did not know love earlier in life. To challenge the lovelessness in her life, hooks had to first learn a new meaning of love; from there, she was able to learn how best to love and be loved. hooks admits that while she received “care” from her parents, care is only one component of love, which also includes “commitment, trust, knowledge, responsibility, and respect” (7). She describes her upbringing as one in which “aggressive shaming and verbal humiliation coexisted with lots of affection and care” (6).

The lovelessness experienced in early life tends to breed fear later in life. hooks admits to wanting desperately to know love once she reached adulthood, but her ability to experience it was ruined by her fear of being intimate. Being truly intimate requires taking risks, and many people lack the courage to do so. This fear of vulnerability and the possibility of being hurt keeps people from taking the risks that love demands; as a result, “far too many people in our culture do not know what love is” (11).

To begin the journey to knowing love, hooks suggests that readers begin to think of love in new ways. Establishing clear definitions is critical to the process because “what we cannot imagine cannot come into being” (14).