In this month’s book, All About Love: New Visions, author bell hooks writes, “Creating a false self to mask fears and insecurities has become so common that many of us forget who we are and what we feel underneath the pretense. Breaking through this denial is always the first step in uncovering our longing to be honest and clear.” To talk about this book and how it affected me, I have to be honest about a part of myself I normally mask and keep hidden. With a deep breath and some trepidation, I admit: 

I love period romances. 

This isn’t exactly what hooks is talking about, but bear with me– ever since I was a teenager first exposed to the wonders of the 2005 Pride & Prejudice adaptation, I’ve been enamored by authors like Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters, and Elizabeth Gaskell. But, as a teenager, I was in no uncertain terms told that those movies were silly, that period romance and drama movies were for airheads and weepy single women who lived in houses with an unbalanced cat-to-human ratio. So I hid my love for them, read them online for free, and watched the movies alone or, later, with my partner who knew about my little secret. I love old period love stories; but, strangely, few others.

Modern romances, even those trying to bring back the feeling of period romances (a la Bridgerton), just don’t hit the same notes. Even if their plot beats are similar, even if their dialogue is spot-on, few contemporary pieces of media land in the same way as the old Victorian pieces do. It made me wonder: why? What do so many modern romances lack that Austen and Gaskell nailed? What insights did they have to love that I couldn’t quite grasp? It was a narrative question that’s hovered in my head for years, even after over a decade of enjoying a loving, respectful relationship with my partner. A question that, even as I wrote short stories where love for another was an important motivator, I worried I wouldn’t be able to answer. 

So, when I was recommended to put “anything by bell hooks” on the Book of the Month list and the first result for her work was All About Love: New Visions, I didn’t even bother to research further. I already had some background knowledge of hooks from encountering snippets of her work in college. Her pen name’s lack of capitalization and the number of times she popped up as recommended reading for different courses made her stand out, paired with the short quotes I’d read of her work. It was finally time to take her off my “Authors to Read” list and discover how one author had influenced so many people with her talk of love and community. 

All About Love: New Visions asks the question that most people ask while bobbing their heads to one side like they’re one of the Roxbury Guys: What is love? Pulling from a variety of philosophers, psychologists, and theologians, hooks creates a definition of love and explores the different ways it can be present– or lacking– in our lives. Contrary to my initial perception, All About Love doesn’t only focus on romantic love, but dedicates a significant amount of time to familial love, friendships, community love, and divine love, and the ways our society prioritizes or de-prioritizes each based on their role in politics or production of capital. Broken down into thirteen short essays, hooks tackles our long-held perception of love and provides a critical look into how we engage with our communities. 

For many, love is difficult to talk about for a variety of reasons, one being that most of us have grown up without a concrete definition. Through exposure to our family’s version of love, to those who claim to love us, and to representations of love in the media, many folks are left with ambiguous, sometimes conflicting, ideas of what love should be. Some believe it to be ethereal and mysterious, gracing a lucky few at intersections of fate; others, a feeling of care that is ever-enduring, even in situations of disrespect and abuse. hooks skewers all these conceptions, starting with a definition of love from psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s book The Road Less Traveled: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” hooks expands later in the same essay that, “care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust”, are the ingredients needed for a loving, truthful relationship with another person. These definitions, by nature, disclude the idea of love coinciding with neglect or hurtful behavior and change it from a noun, a “thing” that we may or may not understand, to a verb– an action that we and others take towards us. 

By giving love a concrete definition, hooks opens the door to evaluating the relationships we hold with others. She places no love above any other while she does so, making it a point to question why we as a society place romantic love on a pedestal while devaluing our relationships with ourselves and our community. Each type of love, whether between family members, friends, strangers, or members of a belief system, adds dimensionality to our lives that otherwise wouldn’t be present. Placing one kind above any other can erode the boundaries you may have set in all other types, opening the door for mistreatment otherwise not permitted in other loving relationships. 

All About Love goes on to talk about each type of love in turn and the different elements that create honest, loving relationships between others and within ourselves. Somewhere between the chapters, as I was ruminating on some of the passages with my morning tea, a light went off in my head. hooks had, unintentionally, answered the questions I’d been harboring about romance for years. Our current culture, though removed nearly 25 years from All About Love’s publication date, still encourages us to, “treat partners as though they were objects we can pick up, use, and then discarded and dispose of at will, with the one criteria being whether or not individualist desires were satisfied.” Likewise, much of our media has a main character who wants to “get the girl/guy”, a person that will fulfill the character’s desires and provide successful narrative closure. Compare that to Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice or Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South, where both romantic couples endure a failed first proposal based on nothing but mutual attraction only to grow to appreciate the other’s point of view and acknowledge their failings before ending in wedded bliss. In period romances, many characters nurture each other’s spiritual, or personal, growth to receive their happy ending– falling in line with Peck’s definition of love. That mutual uplifting, that willingness to enter conflict to see the other become a better, kinder version of themselves, is something that period romances (especially Austenian romances) emphasize, while few pieces of modern media do. 

It’s interesting to consider that this avoidance of conflict and focus on individualism is still a significant problem today, both in media and in our everyday lives, and arguably worse than when hooks first critiqued it. Several of her criticisms have since come across as dated thanks to vast improvements in certain parts of our culture, such as women’s roles in relationships, her critiques on gender socialization, and her comments on addiction in relation to materialism; and yet her warnings against individualist and capitalist structures are spot on. I can’t help but wonder if, thanks to the intervening years of significantly increased wealth disparity and the political ramifications of 9/11 haven’t pushed our culture even further away from mutual aid and understanding. The increased political divides and rampant, targeted misinformation campaigns seem to only push this concept further, cutting any chance of forming significant, loving relationships in our communities before they have a chance to take root. It’s a depressing thought, that hooks’ work on love within our communities and living by a love ethic is needed even more today, but the tools we need are available within ourselves. We just need to use them. 

While All About Love can come across as didactic and declarative in ways that don’t always align with my own experience, I still found it to be an insightful and thought-provoking read. Apart from helping me understand my adoration of period romances and giving me a glimpse into how to write better character relationships for my fiction work, it’s also given me the gift of reflection. My life is full of loving connections with others, family, friends, and partner alike, and with the tools that hooks provides, I hope to strengthen those ties with this new perspective. I’d happily recommend this book to anyone interested in growing and nurturing the relationships they have in their lives, with the caveat that some of the language and discussion will come across as dated. 

Now, if you all don’t mind, I’m off to make some tea in a big, fancy cup and re-watch the 1995 Pride & Prejudice BBC miniseries through this new lens of love. Happy loving, friends, and happy sipping.