Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life

by bell hooks

“bell hooks’s brave memoir of struggling to find her own work, love, and independence.” ―Gloria Steinem
With her customary boldness and insight, brilliant social critic and public intellectual bell hooks traces her writer’s journey in Wounds of Passion . She shares the difficulties and triumphs, the pleasures and the dangers, of a life devoted to writing. hooks lets readers see the ways one woman writer can find her own voice while forging relationships of love in keeping with her feminist thinking. With unflinching courage and hard-won wisdom, hooks reveals the intimate details and provocative ideas of the life path she carved out of words, lighting the way for all writers who would tread in her wake.
This memoir is an illuminating vision of a writer’s life from one of America’s treasured authors.
“I love this book. Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us.” ―Maya Angelou

Genres: Writing, Memoir, Nonfiction, Feminism, Race, Social Justice, African American

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

About the author

bell hooks (deliberately in lower-case; born Gloria Jean Watkins) was an African-American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern female perspective, she addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.

Reviews

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

"If you want to read books that focus on black women, you better start writing and keep writing."

4.5/5

Reading this book is akin to pulling a tooth that needs to be out, and as someone who's had that done eight times, I know a thing about necessary discomfort and healthful dispossession. The purging quality of the writing is tangible, and I can well imagine hooks' sigh of relief once the last edit had been sponged off and the publisher had finally acquiesced to the finished product. Inevitably, this will lead to complaints about "anger" from the usual sort, but considering no one pulls this shit when slurs and threats of genocide are spewed across the table (freedom of speech for the Powers That Be always trump the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of the Powers That Be Not, dontchya know), they're full of it. If your definition of anger consists not of deprivation of humanity but of the pointing to truth, your instinct to defend yourself does not make you in the right. It just means you're fragile, sinking your teeth in the last vestiges of your power and dreading, above all the humanity of those you're threatening, to let go.

[W]hen those girls would talk about the strong free black matriarchs I just saw them longing for a world where they would not have to do anything, or give anything to the struggle to liberate black women.

It's always funny for me to imagine what this would would look like or even feel like if it was peopled mainly by white men. It's a scary thought. On many levels white men remain a mystery to me.

The top review of this is a patronizing take on all of hooks' actions, which makes me glad the average rating is as high as it is cause seriously, what the fuck? The amount of shit she went through from childhood on, her admirably ravenous escapade through the written word at a young age, working and thinking and living at Stanford of all places, finally making her way out of the morass of patriarchal academic entitlement and into her rightful writing place, and one person's response to it all is to shake their head, make a flatulent attempt to empathize (unless you've lived the black woman's coming of age in the USA, you have no idea what it's like), and then close off by being entertained at an Angry Black Woman? Good fucking lord bro, if you are indeed a bro. If that's how you're going to respond, stay in White People Land, please. You've done enough damage as is.

I sit at my desk dreaming of ways to blow up the building and they think I could rise in the company.

She can't even see that he supported her writing so much because he never believed anyone other than him would take it seriously.

While this is a memoir, this is also theory of sorts, as hooks came of age when the theory she needed was scant to the point of ironic nonexistence, ironic due to her simultaneously bumping hips with Lorde and Olsen and Rich and other names populating my more academically inclined shelves. You'd think the last two would have helped with intersectional business on some level, but naaaah. I found it interesting that hooks found white lesbians standing in solidarity with her, considering all that I've heard about queer white people subconsciously feeling ripped off by the fact that their whiteness has been compromised to the point of throwing them in with nonwhite people (Stanton or Anthony, anyone?), but I suppose some people were working hard to unpick their racial privilege even back then. It'd give me hope for the future, but I'll have to save that determination for when I've entered grad school myself.

How could I have thought that I could speak truth to power and not be punished.

Some books are candy, some books are watercolors, and some books are as bloody as someone who beats themselves against the status quo in the honest effort of becoming a good person. Some are hit back harder by society because, let's face it, the status quo calls for a certain measure of physical characteristics of the straightened and bleached variety, and there's just no helping what the genetic whirlpool's dished out sometimes. Judging the rating by average and number, there's thankfully enough people who have been helped by this book to tide over the obnoxious travesty that is the top review, but it doesn't help. I just hope the work's future is full of those who have no fragility complexes getting in the way of their emotional resonance, self-critiquing dialectic, or both.

[T]here is no world where just gender matters.

[Sam Stephens · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wrote and then re-wrote several reviews of this book before deciding to just say this: the book is marvelous. It's the type of book that makes you genuinely sad to finish. It's compelling and terrifying, beautiful and raw. It's bell hooks at her finest as she takes you on a journey through her maturation into an artist and writer. She never shies away from that which is most deeply human and all that keeps us from experiencing the depths and possibilities of love. “Wounds of Passion” deals with trademark conviction regarding issues of racism, class, and gender, but also spirituality, displacement, home, loneliness, relationships, love, courage, and growth. It's worth reading and then re-reading. And lastly, I will happily die on the hill that no one, especially men, should read “The Will To Change” before they have read this book.

Quotes:

Love and Honesty

- “Lying is at the heart of all acts of betrayal. And so I understood that to tell the truth was the only way to make loving somebody a sane thing.” (p. 32)
- “I need the truth to see clearly. Loves make me dizzy, make me feel as though I am falling, toppling over with no way to regain balance.” (p. 33)
- “When love is real, there is no need to lie. Everything can always be forgiven. There is no need to lie.” (p. 35)
- “She thought he loved her for her mind. He was enchanted with her smart talk, her blunt speech, her ways of thinking about the world. Yet still and all he did not take her seriously. She did not know that though--not then, not in the beginning.” (p. 65)
- “Men lie to make male domination work better. It was that simple. Nothing so complex as nature.” (p. 70)
- “Words like honor and loyalty were crucial to my understanding of kin. To know anyone and what they were worth, one had to know their people.” (p. 79)
- “In his family, it was easy to see the ties that bind and harder to see the love. They were close knit but it was more to do with a network of obligations.” (p. 85)
- “She did not know then that he wanted a women to love him who would never see the hurt.” (p. 89)
- “It's true. I learned from the backwoods people that it was no use trying to possess anyone. I learned from them that wild things need to roam free, that you have to let things go and come. I learn the hurt in life, the anguish jealousy causes. I learn about "free love" in high school when we study utopian movements. I am convinced that women will be safer if we put our faith in free love.” (p. 90)

Spirituality

- “Church is one of the few places where I feel the presence of magic.” “Religious inspires her. It is the place of hope.”(p. 149)
- “All that I am learning about the mystical dimensions of religious faith takes me back to the heart of loving. To be with god is to love. It is required and understood that a person be found faithful. The ethics of being that govern my life are grounded in spiritual life.” (p. 153)

Home and Belonging:

- “It reminds her of the ways you could not possess things or people for long. She was not into possession. The houses she had grown up knowing were all places where folks hungered to possess things so tightly, they choked them to death.” (p. 175)
- “I hated renting from white landlords. The contempt and fear they showed when they saw black people coming to look at their places was one of the ways I saw through the myth of there being no racial prejudice in housing. For everyone in the world it seemed, land, housing, was always the boundary keeping everyone in place. To cross the boundary one had to pay the price.” (p. 179).

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

For a good part of Wounds of Passion, I was frustrated by hooks' decisions, which I worried would bring her harm. At times, they did. I was also frustrated by how passive she was, though hooks maintains that she was always in control, even when she listens to a tape recording of herself sounding like a small child. bell prides herself on her insight into the hearts of those around her, even though she does not see that she has entered into a relationship with a man that strongly recalls her father.

Unfortunately, as readers and often as friends, we are powerless to do anything more than disapprove, which is what made reading a memoir that attempts to outline a new model for relationships difficult. For the most part, Wounds of Passion does not seem to offer an alternative worth following.

So why did I continue reading?

Well, Dr. Maya Angelou's quote on the back reads "I love this book. Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us." That's authority. Yes, it can be irritating to read about the explorations and recommendations of an overly confident 19 year old, but as Paul McCartney once said "who's sensitive at that age? Certainly I wasn't." Good point. Finally, my wife read Wounds of Passion when she was studying African American literature in college and remembers it fondly. (I actually read my wife's copy, underlined passages and all).

So I resolved to be patient, and I know the exact point in Wounds of Passion when I started to root for her. bell hooks is in a restaurant with Mack and one of his ex-girlfriends, who has invited them out. The ex is flirting with Mack and ignoring bell. Suddenly, the ex looks at hooks and says that "she can't stand those black people who go on and on talking about being black." hooks knows an insult when she hears one, and her response is priceless:

I tell her loudly so everyone can hear Look, bitch, I don't play this shit. Don't invite me out to dinner to insult me. I will slap you across that room. And just as I am raising my hand to do just that she storms out.

Wow. I would never respond to an insult with such confidence. Who yells in a restaurant? I was so impressed that I actually went into the next room to read this scene to my wife.

[Hannah Joslin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’m not sure I can write a review of bell hooks that would even be slightly meaningful, so I won’t try. I will, however, be telling everyone who will listen that bell hooks is fucking incredible.

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

A good memoir about how she came to writing. When she spoke in Seattle she discussed how difficult it was to get this book published because it was considered experiential at the time and the people who publish didn't want to take a risk! belle is an academic writer, but this book reflects her personal journey. She talks about her early relationship with a writer and their breakup and how it affected her writing, unusual for a black woman to reveal so much personal info. This book is a bold book that is deep and moving. I know it has been popular and am glad she proved the publishers wrong. It is a book I plan to read again and have many post it notes though out.

[Katherine · Rating 5 out of 5]

hooks' emotional fluctuations and unpleasant family relations are difficult for some people to get through when reading this book. However, if you ever have the opportunity and self-discipline to finish Wounds of Passion, hooks' gives great insight into the modern movement for the use of birth control and women's rights. Throughout the memoir hooks' uses two voices to tell her story: one is in third person, looking back at the her past and the other narrative explains the events as they are happening. hooks' explains many stereotypes that exist in the south, such as problems with domestic violence, race issues, discrepancies with social class, and the exploration of her sexuality, all of which bring together an empowering novel that works to not necessarily find solutions to these issues, but I believe hooks' wants the reader to acknowledge the homogenous patriarchy that continues to exist in America today. It is an impassioned and truthful read into the mind of a black writer living in the South.

[tamarack · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book blew me away. i never imagined an autobiography could be so beautiful and poetic. this non-chronological story tells of hooks' life as a writer and lover. she speaks of being a black feminist writer surrounded by deaf white ears, and of a creative spirit punished by patriarchal culture. hooks tells of growing up in kentucky, traumatic loss of love between her parents, her love of her grandmother's house and idealised marriage of 70+ years. moving back and forth between the world of her childhood and her adult life in california where she lives as a student discovering a new world of un-segregated race relations, this book brings together two worlds of experience. i've never read anything like bell hooks - in this book she is the definitive voice on love and writing.

[Marni Fantyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

bell hooks is an inspiration. I've never read any of her other books but I'm inspired to read and learn more about this courageous woman. As an aspiring writer I couldn't have picked a better book to read about the struggles and tribulations of finding voice in the midst of all the silence. Her dedication to telling the truth, even at times where it could potentially create so much hurt, is not only admirable but beautiful. I look forward to growing and learning more about my own voice using this book as a guiding path through my own choices in my life as a writer and as a lover.

[Jo · Rating 5 out of 5]

A rare, five star book. Written with so much heart. An examination of the multitude of selves we are in the world and being into relationships some encased by the author others are her observations of her friends and family. Also I love how she emphasizes this is her non-linear, perhaps not entirely non-fictional, autobiography so it is entirely her perspectives and observations. Brilliant.

[Nina]

Wounds of Passion, which is the second of bell hooks' memoirs, is about the romantic relationship that heavily influenced hooks' development into one of the most prolific feminist writers and cultural critics of our time. She's written over three dozen books and her first (non-poetry), Ain't I a Woman, was written when she was just nineteen years old. At that time she was dating a much older poet. And so, the memoir documents the ways he encouraged her writing but also the unhealthy aspects of their relationship, including his attempts to control her.

She approaches this accounting of her relationship with compassion, refusing to oversimplify their relationship into victim-victimizer. (Well, mostly. She's human and there are moments where she does slip into pettiness). It's true to form. For hooks, reconciliation is the thing. She's committed to a feminist worldview that encourages us to reconcile across race and gender (not in a hokey liberal way but through radical facing of the truth).

Shortly before reading this memoir, I read hooks' essay, "Penis Passion". If that essay was like overhearing my mother talk about sex with her friends then Wounds of Passion has been like seeing my mother fully. Like being at the point in my own dating life where I'm seeing the choices she made as I'm being presented with the same options. I better see why she did what she did and how she became the woman I met. And I do consider bell hooks' work to be a mothering force in my life. I do turn to her work for guidance where my not-feminist mother can't help. So Wounds of Passion felt like an urgent experience.

This is a book that I've been recommending to other Black feminists who date men. It's important that see the fullness of our literary and feminist foremothers and Wounds of Passion certainly presents a vulnerable bell hooks.

[Flora R. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t believe it took me so long to read this book since I brought it home from a used book store last year. I can’t believe that I read Stephen King’s “On Writing” first, that I’ve started and finished and given up on so many mediocre works in between. I know it’s crazy to call something a perfect book, but Jesus, this book moved me. It might be time for me to read every other word bell hooks has written.

I know that I haven’t described much of how this book was written so let me say: at first I thought that her switching between first and third person narration would be confusing or frustrating, but after a few chapters it fit like a glove. bell covers a lot of ground in this book that I initially thought would be something closer to a book about writing, and it’s beautifully done. I’m certainly fanboying out here, but whatever, it’s my good reads account and I’m allowed to write what I want!

[Seth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly profound. A gentle, sensitive look at the author’s own life, mediated between past selves and the present, wiser self. As much about developing a writing discipline as an account of race, womanhood, sex and white academia along the author’s journey of becoming. Beautifully written, full of truth.

[Chrissy MacLaughlin]

No rating because this is essentially a memoir, but it was so uniquely and well written and thought provoking and emotional.

[Veronica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Devastating, in the most beautiful way.

I've never read anything quite like this. bell hooks writes with unflinching, defiant honesty. Reading through this book felt an invitation to some inner sanctum of her soul. The text consists of bell's memories of her life as a young black woman and writer, setting out in the world, attending Stanford University, and the consuming relationship she entered into with an older man and mentor. It alternates between her direct memories, told in third-person, italicized narration, and her present-day reflections on her actions, the lessons she's learned, and the woman she's become.

This was a reflection on writing, certainly, but also about what it means to be a young Black woman, navigating a world of white (and Black) expectations, and male dominance.

bell's voice is a singular, truthful voice that swims against the current, challenging women to take a closer look at the way we view ourselves and each other, to accept the individual creative process, and perhaps hardest of all: to love and honour ourselves.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wounds of Passion is aptly titled. It is a book about injuries to a self that passionately wants to bear witness to its painful truths, which is to say: born on the other side of the tracks in Kentucky, witness to the rage of a father who thought his wife betrayed him, black in a country where the white elites had become post-racial feminists (aren't you over that black thing yet?), wanting to be an academic rather than an a literary writer, not wanting to be drawn to a cold, brilliant, sexy man who could not manage the intricacies of the openness to which he had pledged himself (for me, not for you), and not wanting her religious/poetic sentiment to be confined within the institutions of social faith, as opposed to transcendent faith.

This is a subjective memoir, one-sided as all memoirs are, yet self-critical and fair. hooks's insights into male/female dominance dances are powerful; her representation of what it feels like to be black in America is compelling. The narrowness of her social awareness is something that is both forced on her and born within her, because she is not very social except when she is intimate...and there the wounds and passions are deep. hooks explicitly acknowledges that she is not a person who believes in footnotes; she is a person who believes in what she experiences and how she experiences it.

The subjective is incontrovertible, although we all know it is a kind of prison. Few of us are so attentive to our perceptions, and so articulate, that we can put them on a page. Quite often we therefore ignore or gloss over our own sentience. Not hooks. She convincingly makes the case that she did, in fact, live by a creed of honesty in the first three decades of her life. She doesn't claim to be a saint or perfect, but she does assert a willingness to think through the consequences of how we are, as opposed to how it would be convenient to be, or how we ought to be.

Most of the writing here is strong and vivid. Some of it is overdrawn and perfervid, and not in a good sense.

It always has seemed to me that race, as in racism, is the greatest unresolved American theme (in part because Americans have no chance of ever resolving their historical relations to the original peoples of these lands.) hooks is no racist, but she is deservedly tough on whites. So a white reader will have to endure many unhappy paragraphs in this book.

Curiously, hooks seems, however, to pose race as the dominant problem in her life while focusing more intensely on sexuality and female/male relations, illustrated through her deep analysis of a 10-year involvement with a black male named Mack (probably not his real name, as bell hooks is not bell hooks's real name.)

The issue she focuses on is whether a man and a woman can divvy up elements of their relationship in such a way as to permit each to thrive in equal, if differentiated, measure. With Mack, that proves impossible. But as a literary writer, hooks isn't postulating that the same would be true with any man. She's specific, fascinatingly so. She gives him a lot of credit for supporting her, putting up with her, loving and desiring her, until she begins to exceed him: her book is published first, she's the one offered a job at Yale.

As a counterpoint to the Mack/hooks's relationship, she offers a wonderful portrait of the relationship between the poet Robert Duncan and his male partner/lover Jess. Duncan was famous and a little bit (or a lot) flagrant in different ways. Jess was not so famous but held his private ground just fine. hooks adored Jess. Duncan seems to have adored Mack . But Duncan and Jess had an equipoise that escaped Mack and hooks.

This book was published in 1997. I pulled it out of a throwaway pile because, as I've said, black and white issues are at the moral center of the American experience. These last 8 years we have had Barack Obama as the American president. When I was a boy, a black president would have been unimaginable. Maybe that is why the Trump revolt is unfolding today--a desire to put America back in the 50s. Sorry, the 2050s are coming, the 1950s are gone.

A final point: throughout the book, hooks takes on the issue of whether human beings of one social category or another can fully understand the experience of human beings of another social category. I think she proves that is roughly possible. A black reader will not read this book exactly as a white reader will read it, but there's a bit of transcendent commonality in both the wounds and the passions. As Flannery O'Connor said, everything that rises must converge.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was the first book by Bell Hooks that I have read, but I am immediately going to Amazon to find other books by her. This memoir centers on Hooks' life as a writer and how her life shaped her politics.
It goes into her childhood struggles, how she tries to carve a place for herself as a writer while struggling to have a romatic relationship with a man. Hooks' work is studded with womens studies, feminist theory, racial theory, and literary reference.

The first two thirds of the book are absolutely amazing, however, it starts to unravel a bit at the end. Hooks' adds stories that don't fit with the flow of the rest of the book, and because her life is not over, it comes to an unconclusive end.

[Kony · Rating 5 out of 5]

Like Bone Black, here's an impressionistic collage of remembered moments that speak to and for my heart. bell hooks brings subjective truth, sets it to the music of well chosen words and simple sentences.

As with Bone Black, my connection to bell hooks and her writing comes from a deeply personal place, I think. But maybe it's just that her truths transcend social boundaries and would touch chords in any open heart/mind.

[Aubrey Hales-Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

bell hooks...where have you been all of my life. It has been a long time since I have read a book at exactly the right time and place in my life.

[Mon Gilham · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easily among the best reads of 2022 for me, and without question, the one to leave the most lasting impression. If you are a writer yourself, whether critical or creative or both, read this book. If you are interested to learn more of how deeply embedded writing becomes in a writer's life and how this bleeds into every avenue of their lived experience, read this book.

It's no secret to anybody that knows me, just how much I absolutely adore bell hooks' writing style and "Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life" was no exception. With a slightly more experimental form, hooks adopts both 1st person narrative and 3rd, rotating between the two seamlessly as the book goes on. This offers readers a more well-rounded insight into hooks' relationship with writing, the ways she interacts with it as both a craft she works at with great discipline, while also establishing it as the true love of her life - the one thing she's always felt most drawn to and seduced by. Her use of 3rd person also brings an element of further romanticism to her writing, and positions herself as a character within the realm of the page, beyond that which most biographies ever do.

Writing with frank honesty, poetic language and the kind of self awareness one can only dream of, hooks reflects on her time at university as well as the impactful love affairs of her early life. She admits to having "...difficulty with loss - with letting go. I understand this part of myself so well, I protect it. I do not allow my heart to attach itself." (pg.29) Comments of self-analysis and matter-of-fact introspection like this are scattered like hidden gems throughout the entire book. I found them simultaneously endearing and awe-inspiring. It made me want to be more like that.

Reflecting on her childhood, and specifically early experiences of the relationship dynamics between her parents, and then grandparents, hooks traces how these close encounters of how love behaves shaped her most ingrained attitudes around love. She attributes much of how she sees the world and instincts of how to behave within it to her race and class influencing her identity, particularly as she navigates the change in social landscape when moving away from the South for further education.

"Let us not forget I am child of backwoods, of wilderness, and renegade horses running free. I am already becoming a woman of my word." (pg.10) And yet she does so in a humbled yet steadfast way, free from shame or bitterness, or any complication. Whilst proud of the values her upbringing within the black community has equipped her with, hooks remains unafraid to still dissect and unpack the nature of these values and their intricacies. "She believed in commitment and constancy. To be true to one's heart was the foundation of everything. She had not learned that from wild spirits but from Daddy Gus, her mother's father, her favourite man in the whole world." (pg.90)

"Wounds of Passion" overall is a captivating and moving story of a young woman venturing out into the world at large, embracing all the learning curves that come her way, never shying away from pushing back when it is needed and claiming ownership over her own voice. It explores many complex themes from family to selfhood to attachment and connection, to then having the backbone to stand apart from the crowd and the rewarding yet unrelenting journey of deciding what you stand for.

This book is also exactly what the title says, a tale chronicling "a writing life,"at once a highly immersive and inspiring exploration of a woman's unwavering pursuit of bettering her craft. "...it is clear I have a passion for words... I will write poetry all my days" (pg.60)

From ideas on education, class, race and interrelationships, "Wounds of Passion" really has so much to offer. There is such a strong thought-provoking quality to hooks' voice, so much within her stories that conjure relatability while providing such valuable insight to the impact our lived experiences have on the development of our creative craft. "I write better when I am shut away, confined. To be closed in is sometimes a comfort. It makes you hear in the stillness every sound in the words you write." (pg.118)

[Jugu · Rating 5 out of 5]

bell you are so dear to me

"These different understandings of whiteness separate them. She sees the politics of race in the everyday. Race politics for him are a matter of ideas. He sees race as a fact of life to forget, to move past. His understanding of the heart of the matter is different from hers. The ways she finds whiteness suspect annoy him. He would rather not think about it. He has no desires to go searching in the shadows of anyone's mind to see the dangers lurking within. His world is peopled with white friends, and white lovers. He does not suspect his own need to be the only black person in a sea of whiteness" (52)

"Every white person he brings into our life enters like a missionary. He does not seem to notice. Something in him is affirmed by the way they select him from among those black people who are the exception" (55)

"Early on then in our love life we confronted differences in how the world would respond to us, especially white folks. All too often folks chose one of us to label good and the other bad. Having been involved in relationships with white partners we could both see the difference it made when we were two bright black folks together. Suddenly, we were looked at with suspicion. As though it was the oddest thing in the world for two bright aspiring gifted black folks to be passionately interested in one another. It was evident to us that our bonding was seen as political- some aberrant admiration of blackness in a world where so many folks just assumed that the goal of our lives was to assimilate into the white mainstream as smoothly and as swiftly as possible. Having white partners was one way to make that transition" (74)

"The white girls he had loved had never wanted to go home and meet his mother. He could present them when he was ready. Like trophies presented at the end of a game. They were to be a sign of his success, of his having left the past behind, of his having left blackness. She was not a sign of progress. And her journey over to east Palo Alto- to the black section of town- to get her hair done revealed her retrograde tendencies" (83)

"They listen to me but they don't hear. They don't have to hear. This is what it means to be among the colonizers, you do not have to listen to what the colonized have to say, especially if their ideas come from experience and not from books. They ask you if there is a book they can read that will explain what you are talking about. I can hear everything the white girls who are my roommates and my peers are saying about the condition of women, can read my tattered copy Simone de Beauvoir and be down with the discussion. When it comes to thinking about the intersection of race and gender I stand alone.
That is until I return home. And then I can be with him and he understands. To begin with he hears my pain at being silenced, not heard. He listens to my frustration when I want to write papers on black women and slavery, black women and domestic violence, black women and sexual liberation, and can find hardly anything. He listens to my rage. But he knows, he is older and has been more places and seen more in this world so he knows that rage is not enough. Again and again he says to me "If you want to read books that focus on black women, you better start writing and keep writing'"
(98)

"He thinks I am arrogant about writing, crazy to not be so interested in what other people think of my words. These words are written for me, I tell him" (115)

"I have no desire to own things. Giving things away is more fun. Belongings demand too much" (140)

"It is as though Middlebrook takes all the issues we have been talking about since girlhood on, inside her students and brings them out in the open. This end to silence is so nurturing to our spirits and at the same time, now that these secrets are no longer locked away, we have to confront more, make more difficult choices, we have to feel more pain" (144)

"He has a few primary passions- poetry, sex, and music- and rarely moves beyond them into other worlds. Because he goes along with her dreams and schemes she can't see that it is just that- a humoring of her whims and not a sharing. Mack appropriates but he does not share. There is nothing she gives him that he does not feel another woman cannot replace" (242)

[Saski · Rating 4 out of 5]

This beautiful work taught me that I have so much to learn. RIP bell hooks.

Quotes that caught my eye

She had been so into theater in those days. Her passion for the stage and performance just went away in a flash when she saw the way race limited everything for black females on the stage. (24)

The contempt on his face stunned her. And in a flash she saw past the pretty features, the lips like ripe plums falling to earth, and saw the hard cruel vanity unmasked. She remembered what her Big Mama had told her about looking past the outside to see the inside. She decided on kindness. She found it in the not so beautiful guitar-playing white man…. (25)

After she slept with him there was never the same ease between them. She regretted the loss of that ease the passion that took the comfort away. (29)

Nobody told me leaving home would be like this—that the world would be so full of lies. I thought that when I left home, I would leave the lies behind, that I would make a whole new world for myself full of clarity and light. The truth is the light. This was the way I saved myself when all around me everything was closing in. Whenever bad things happened I would tell myself Look for the truth. Be guided by the truth. Never be so attached to someone that you are not willing to see the truth. (36-37)

He wants only to make wo4rds do his bidding. He is willing to stray from the path of truth to reach that final beauty. They have a different relationship to language. She like3s to peel away the layers, to strip everything, to leave world naked. He likes to dress worlds up, to cover them in layers and layers of language. He likes to obscure the truth. She likes to expose it. In their own ways they are both interested in the archaeology of the “lie”. (37)

I arrive at college confident that I am a poet. I want to learn craft. I end up taking creative writing classes with white male professors who cannot hear my words, who dream of pushing hard dicks into the bodies of young tight raw flesh while we are reading poems. I want them to find words. They hope to enter a space without words, to enter flesh that is young and tight and raw—flesh that can be pushed and forced—that can be separated. (39)

I had been around white people long enough to know that their ideas about black beauty were different—that they did not seem to understand a thing about how black folks see ourselves. Whenever Angel had that seductive sound in her voice and that dreamy look in her eyes when she talked about his beauty, I just paused inside and watched with amazement that white folks who understood nothing about us were so sure they knew everything—all our secrets even the secrets of our desires. They don’t know us and never will. (44)

There is nothing about white folks she wants to know. They have been tried in the courts of black folks’ justice and found guilty as charged. They have been found guilty because the blood of the slaughtered is still on their hands. It covers the land, spreads across the nation. Everywhere they call home is a place where blood was shed in their name, in the name of their longing to have a country where they could be free. Everything about their lives is stained with blood. She is afraid of blood. (45)

They are not renegade white folks like the few friends she had in high school. They are regular old white bread through and through. They are into success, material comfort, into education and culture, but they try not to think too hard about anything. (52)

It was our ritual marriage. I had broken the allegiance of family to be loyal to him. Love and betrayal were linked then. (77)

…that there is nothing a woman cannot do that a man can. Baba teaches me these things. Mama is more concerned that we know a woman’s place. I like it that Baba sees every place as a woman’s place. (94)

At first I long to live in a huge house like Baba’s where I can really find my space of solitude. Then the more I think about the planet earth, the more I want to live simply, to occupy as little space as possible. (96)

They listen to me but they don’t hear. They don’t have to hear. This is what it means to be among the colonizers, you do not have to listen to what the colonized have to say, especially if their ideas come from experience and not from books. They ask you if there is a book they can read that will explain what you are talking about. (98)

I know that black women are not free, that we do not have the feminist consciousness that we spend so much time talking about in these classes. No one wants to hear me tell them that these strong black women, these matriarchal folk they read about in sociology magazines, are tired of working and want more than anything to live in a world where their prince will come and take care of them. This is no dream black women have repudiated, they simply live in despair of that dream coming true so they do what they must to survive. (100)

I want to work—to pay my way. I work the same amount of time as he does and am getting paid less. It pisses me off every time I think about anybody thinking that work will liberate. (119)

Mack looks down on people, judging them more by what they think and what they know rather than what’s inside their hearts. He does not have the time to look inside anyone’s heart. (122-23)

In social settings I am awkward. How can we be real with so many strangers. How can we smile and tell the truth to so many people we don’t know. Small talk makes me feel the way I do when a mosquito is buzzing around my head—irritated—and then finally unable to get any relief I just slaughter the damn thing. I slaughter the moment by saying something real. Everybody acts like I can’t see that they think I am strange and out of place like some antique in a room full of modern furniture. I don’t care what they think—they are not real to me. Just ghosts that have nothing to do with my life. (124)

They would rant and rave about a sister who would do it a white man. That sister was a traitor to the race. Of course the brother doing it with a white woman was not betraying the race in their eyes, he was just getting some pussy. Pussy had no power, no color, but dick now that was tied to meaningful manhood, to notions of privilege and choice and power. Manhood was manhood precisely because it could not be told what to do. It could not be shaped and formed like clay. But pussy was pussy; it had no color and no allegiance. (164-65)

… the only world I have been in where I could focus almost exclusively on patterns of gendered domination was when I was living at home within a structure of racial apartheid. Since white folks were never present in our domestic lives it was possible to see all issues of power solely in relationship to sex roles. That’s why I think it was there that I began to create patriarchy and not out in the world somewhere. The moment anybody black moves out into the world somewhere, away from segregation, we always have to think about the ways race matters, sometimes more than gender, sometimes the same as gender, but always in convergence and collusion. It’s the connectedness of race and gender that the white students and teachers in the classroom want to deny. That’s why it becomes so clear to me that they think of feminism as this little colony that they own—that is their property, just like lots of black men felt like the Civil Rights movement, and Black Power struggle, belonged more to them than to women. (206)

That’s the point, not that everything in a marriage or partnership be equal but that each person has the right, the power, and the freedom to choose. (240)

[Dora Carson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This autobiographical work follows bell hooks’ life and relationships from the time she enters college at Stanford University through the completion of her PhD. The main focus is on her primary romantic relationship, but she also discusses issues with school, work, friends, and her childhood memories. The book is not written as a straight narrative but rather goes back and forth in time and switches between first person and third person narration.
The writing is very moving and really transported me back to my own struggles in college and during my twenties. I was especially interested in how hooks describes the many antagonistic reactions she received as a feminist, as someone who wanted to talk about race and feminism, and as a straightforward and overly honest woman. It was an interesting look into the history of feminism and intersectionality.
As a fan of hooks’ academic writing, I was interested in her time growing up in Kentucky, her interest in becoming a poet, her struggles to get her seminal work “Ain’t I A Woman” published, and her struggles to complete her PhD. I was also fascinated by the life choices she made—namely, to not marry but to stay in a relationship and to have an open relationship. In the book hooks identifies herself as bisexual, but she does not discuss any relationships with women.
Her discussion of her primary relationship and the problems she faced in it may resonate with many women. I appreciated the way she could look at her relationship critically but not put all the blame on her partner.
I loved all the references to poetry in the book and I thought hooks’ descriptions of her childhood in Kentucky were really evocative.
Overall, I learned something about hooks as a woman, about the history of feminism and racism, about life in Kentucky in the 50s and California in the 70s, and about life for a woman in academia. I also learned something about myself from reading this book, and for that I am grateful.

[Sharifa Ahaja · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.80

"When we are loved we are afraid love will vanish/ when we are alone we are afraid love will never return / and when we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard not welcome/ but when we are silent we are still afraid." - Audre Lorde.

"'I was moved by violent conflicts and yearnings. A need to be reassured in love that all but obscured any act of loving.' ... I am intimate with the sound of my own pain."

Haha... holyyyy fuck. I think I need to go lie down and maybeeeee pull an Esther Greenwood after reading this book (crawl into a hole tbh).

Okay, in all seriousness this book really did make me fidget a lot and make me uncomfortable just because bell hooks really does suffer so much in this book yet she always brings herself to rationalize everything (even though I think she sees the good in people a little bit too much) - I see myself in her. It was kind of like opening up a mirror and seeing my relection staring back at me. in the wise words of Adrian, she really is like me. no cap. anyways, this book is really fucking good and i am kind of sleep deprived writing this so at this point im just typing to type and i am ramblinggg buttt this was one of my favourite reads of 2022. also my first bell hooks book! not counting the excerpt my gender studies teacher included in our syllabus.

[Kei · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another wonderful book by Bell Hooks I recently finished. I can see so much of myself in Bell Hooks when she was in her early twenties. From valuing the truth and despising lies and being heavily impacted by her upbringing and her parents' strained relationship and her relationship with them individually, to how she was so selfless when it came to love because of past abandonment wounds, and how passionate she is for words, writing, and knowledge. I also love how we get to see how she evolves within her writing and womanhood and how we see her seek communion despite her appreciation for solitude. While reading this book, it felt as if I was sitting in front of her while she talked about parts of her life and what fulfilled her the most. I was enthralled the entire time I was reading this book. I think her desire to work on things within a relationship that clearly made her unhappy whilst simultaneously pitying herself was kind of counteractive, but it goes to show how much will she has. I believe concepts and dynamics within relationships were likely to be completely different than they are now, so I won't speak much on it. One truth is Mack was a stoic abusive man that never took Hooks seriously and mocked her work. I really disliked him, but I digress. I will be getting my own personal copy to annotate. I really loved this book and was sad to finish it.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life” by bell hooks

Legendary feminist theorist and writer bell hooks has long been an iconic voice in my reading journey, a clear, direct, bright voice filled with both hope and rage related to the intersection of race and the feminine. This memoir carries all those hallmarks of hooks’s style I have come to know and adore, and yet this was the first (minor) disappointment in her catalog. Perhaps I had unclear expectations for the book, but the more essay oriented chapters defied the usual narrative logic of memoir in a way that did not always land. The writing felt stuck between two genres, excelling in neither. The book did drag a bit until about halfway through when hooks’s passion for writing, the subject I had been anxiously anticipating, came into focus. When hooks starts writing about writing, everything snaps into place and I’m enthralled with how she writes her relationship with the craft. 


To be clear, this book is still a wonderful memoir detailing her difficult long-term relationship and how it impacted the writer she has become. However, it is clear to me that hooks is the master of the essay and her narrative prose is simply good. What a gift, when a disappointing read by an author you love still counts as a good, thought-provoking read.

[Amanda A · Rating 3 out of 5]

Much like many of the books I've read recently, Wounds of Passion was one I wasn't initially planning on checking out. I was particularly fond of the use of first and third person within this memoir -- It was almost charming, in a way. It made a lot of sense to add in commentary from a future version of yourself when recollecting tales from your past. Definitely a clever way to highlight the naivety of one's younger self without making it seem like a "bad" thing, if that makes any sense.

This memoir highlights the complexity of how love and relationships intersect with career, specifically one in writing and academia. It was interesting to see how bell hooks' relationship left its mark on a majority of her writing career, especially in discussions about how her partner both stunted and motivated her to do better. I was also drawn to the ways in which hooks described every other relationship in her life and how it may have affected her, regardless of circumstance or duration. Wounds of Passion provides notable insights into intersectionality and dialogues about how race and gender affects societal perception. I'd give this a 3.5/5 stars -- Will definitely consider picking up another one of hooks' works in the future!

[Juan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Big picture: Really beautiful. Poetic. A bit repetitive. Experimental: written non-chronologically and in two voices. More about bell hooks' "emotional landscape" than the trajectory of her life.

Small picture: Persistent omission of commas. Little-to-no dialogue.

Topics: feminism, misogyny, racism, intersectionality, childhood trauma, abuse, the craft of writing, poetry, aesthetics of life, relationships, "free love".

Related works in my eyes: Just Kids by Patti Smith and Educated by Tara Westover.

Just Kids by Patti Smith
--
building and nurturing ones's and another's artistic lives in collaboration with a partner; discovering oneself through poetry; creating beautiful spaces, treasuring and ritualizing aesthetics of life; finding community with like-minded artists

Educated by Tara Westover
--
the labor of carving out a woman's career in academia and the related development of her intellect and personhood; journeying towards the light of independence and self-actualization out of the shadow of childhood trauma

[Denise · Rating 5 out of 5]

Been reading through bell hooks catalogue (she’s written 14 books!) and it is so refreshing and resonating seeing literature about black life and the way it intersects race and gender. Especially reading this as someone who grew up in the south and moved to california—recognizing many places she mentions in the state—is so validating. Art really is a mirror and I feel so connected to her even though I’m from a different generation/upbringing, I still resonated on so many levels being an aspiring writer, artist, and radical feminist.


Feeling thankful for feminist literature, especially black-centered literature when our experiences have been erased from dialogue and from the arts in general for so long.

[Wei-Wei · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first full length bell hooks book and it was refreshing. I felt quiet and contemplative every time I picked it up, feeling lucky enough to be privy to such a rich and reflective inner life. There are secrets here, and yes, much passion. There is pain and memory and lessons learned and I am grateful to have learned so much from this short novel. She writes with poeticism and ache which transcend the pages. Thank you bell hooks, for offering so much of yourself to us readers so that we may understand another perspective, an important one. Your themes and repetition of not placing blame, intersectional feminism, finding independence, reflecting on the past and more were needed.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it.

Things that stood out to me:

Switching narrative voices, like a narration and then a retelling from the memory of that, highlighting how memory and recall rewrites our lived experiences so that what’s real and what’s unintentionally adapted blurs together. The narration is overtly subjective but not less powerful for being subjective

bell hooks’ feminist views vs. her relationship with Mack; the tension between the two was almost unbearable towards the end of the book, making the reader feel restless until the last chapters.