Sometime over the last few years, everyone you know has decided to read All About Love.
And when I say “everyone,” that includes but is not limited to: that one Instagram model you follow who only posts lifestyle content and her ass. That friend of yours who has declared that she’s in her “villain era” because she learned how to have boundaries. The person across from you on the train who has the book’s bleeding red cover peeking from inside of their New Yorker tote bag in a very totally absolutely casual way. Even the guy you met off Tinder says he’s reading it. (You only find this out however when you see him post quotes from the book online after he’s ghosted you. Yes, you should probably unfollow him.)
I first noticed this uptick in readership of the late author bell hooks’ 1999 book in the early days of the pandemic when the book started popping up on various aesthetically curated Instagram feeds. While bell hooks has been firmly part of the Black feminist canon for the last few decades, it’s only recently that screenshots of quotes from the book began to become an average part of my Twitter scrolling experience. Like most things that reach such omnipresence online, there has been a touch of irony in how people discuss All About Love. “It’s cuffing szn & the girls are getting ready,” reads the caption of one TikTok that shows two girls on a train deeply engrossed in the text. Another meme: “Your ex is having raw sex with someone and you’re reading —” juxtaposed with a photo of All About Love beside it. It’s relatable because who among us has not gone on a journey of self discovery to escape the knowledge of ex sex?
In a world on fire, we have to contend with the knowledge that there is no going back.
It is a curious time in history for one of hooks’ groundbreaking works to find itself. There’s an earnestness to the text that runs counter to our irony-stricken culture. The frankness of the title is not a trojan horse for cynicism or pessimism. All About Love isn’t just interested in love as a subject to be approached from a sterile, clinical distance, but from a place of great sentimentality.
Early in her book, hooks writes about dismissive and fearful attitudes hardening the souls of people, making love even more difficult to take root in our lives. “Young listeners remain reluctant to embrace the idea of love as a transformative force,” she writes. “To them, love is for the naïve, the weak, the hopelessly romantic.” This might seem ever more true today when manosphere misogynists like Andrew Tate goad their young audiences into viewing sexual relationships as a game of manipulation and aggression.
hooks said her own journey to understand love came from a place of heartache that left her wanting to connect with people on a deeper and more sincere level. A part of this journey became grounding love in a concrete definition. hooks quotes German sociologist Erich Fromm’s definition of love: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” For hooks, the most convincing description of love is one that involves the choice to love, and thus “counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually,” as she puts it. Within these parameters, love is not only chosen, but learned; and as such, the climate of love in our society can change. The recent obsession with hooks’ book is a symptom of that desire for love’s evolution.
It may seem odd that a queer woman’s sentimental meditation on love has emerged as a distinct book of the moment when much of our current pop media suggests the imminent downfall of romantic love, particularly heterosexual partnerships. There are multiple reality series dedicated to torturing people under the guise of romance, including Netflix’s Love is Blind and Too Hot to Handle and British import Love Island. Queer people aren’t exempt from this phenomenon — consider The Ultimatum: Queer Love. Such series dress the anxieties around heterosexual partnering in raunchy drama and tantalizing storytelling. Safe to say, no one on Love Island is nurturing anyone else’s spiritual growth; at best, you can get a drink refill. Music is hardly any better. R&B was once full of soulful love crooning: now the Weeknd makes vampiric toxic fuckboy music for people in serious relationships with cocaine. Some have said we’re in the era of “late heterosexuality” and hey, maybe they’re right.
If it sounds like late heterosexuality is related to late capitalism, that’s the point. The American penchant for isolationism has begun to collapse in on itself, along with our institutions. There has been a loss of “third places” — or, more succinctly, the places outside of the home and work that people commune — due to the increase in cities funding gentrified food halls over things like community centers, parks, and other public spaces. We work longer for lower wages, making quality time and date night all the more difficult.
In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, the Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy suggested that loneliness should be viewed as a public health crisis when he said, “at any moment, about one out of every two Americans is experiencing measurable levels of loneliness.” It almost feels like a joke. In an age where almost anything we want is just an app away — groceries, fast food, transportation, and even sex — there’s also never been a time when people have felt lonelier. While the era of lockdown is over, what didn’t end was the gulf of loneliness that became much more apparent over the last few years.
And here lies the reason for the popularity of All About Love. In a world on fire, we have to contend with the knowledge that there is no going back. Late heterosexuality and late capitalism will not end in new golden ages for either, despite the efforts of Andrew Tate and the entire trad wife army. The world of yesterday is gone, and our loneliness is out in the open. hooks herself was celibate for 17 years, and says that self-love is the biggest project of all.
Individually and yet collectively, many of us have arrived at the beginning of the journey that hooks was on when she wrote All About Love: at heartache. All of us stuck together on this dying planet, in this dying society, are struggling with the heartache of grief of what has been lost. Some of us turn to the Tates of the world to try to avoid acknowledging that grief, but some of us are looking to love to face it. As hooks says, “we are taught to feel shame about a grief that lingers…Love knows no shame. To be loving is to be open to grief, to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love.”
The way we grieve the old world is related to how we have learned to love each other. Here’s hoping how we build the next world is truly all about love.
Hanna Phifer is a culture writer and journalist.
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