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Loving Corrections
New York Times–bestselling author adrienne maree brown transcends binary thinking about "accountability" and shares dignified, holistic ways for individuals and communities to address harmful and destructive patterns.
This selection of prescient, compassionate essays explores patterns we engage in that are rooted in limited thinking. Through a lens of “loving correction” rather than mere critique, author adrienne maree brown helps us reimagine how to hold ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities accountable by setting clear boundaries, engaging in reflection, and nurturing honest relationships.
Loving Corrections is divided into two sections, with the first portion featuring new essays including “A Word for White People” and “Relinquishing the Patriarchy” and writing on topics like moving from fragility to fortitude, disability, and navigating critique within activist communities. The second section expands and updates pieces from brown's popular monthly column “Murmurations” in YES! Magazine that explore accountability—within oneself and community—with depth, inventiveness, and empathy.
Along with allowing us more authentic access to ourselves and to each other, the “corrections” in the book’s title are intended to explore and break identity-based patterns including white supremacy, fragility, patriarchy, and ableism. brown also offers practical guidance on how to apologize and be accountable from our nuanced positions of power, history, and resources.
Building on her previous work—especially Holding Change and We Will Not Cancel Us—brown reminds us how much we need each "It is only through relationship that we learn how to be, understand our impact on others and explore small shifts that may yield remarkable collective change."
This selection of prescient, compassionate essays explores patterns we engage in that are rooted in limited thinking. Through a lens of “loving correction” rather than mere critique, author adrienne maree brown helps us reimagine how to hold ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities accountable by setting clear boundaries, engaging in reflection, and nurturing honest relationships.
Loving Corrections is divided into two sections, with the first portion featuring new essays including “A Word for White People” and “Relinquishing the Patriarchy” and writing on topics like moving from fragility to fortitude, disability, and navigating critique within activist communities. The second section expands and updates pieces from brown's popular monthly column “Murmurations” in YES! Magazine that explore accountability—within oneself and community—with depth, inventiveness, and empathy.
Along with allowing us more authentic access to ourselves and to each other, the “corrections” in the book’s title are intended to explore and break identity-based patterns including white supremacy, fragility, patriarchy, and ableism. brown also offers practical guidance on how to apologize and be accountable from our nuanced positions of power, history, and resources.
Building on her previous work—especially Holding Change and We Will Not Cancel Us—brown reminds us how much we need each "It is only through relationship that we learn how to be, understand our impact on others and explore small shifts that may yield remarkable collective change."
203 pages, Kindle Edition
Published August 20, 2024
258 people are currently reading
4087 people want to read
About the author
Adrienne Maree Brown
27 books2,779 followersadrienne maree brown is the author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds and the co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She is the cohost of the How to Survive the End of the World and Octavia’s Parables podcasts. adrienne is rooted in Detroit.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 96 reviews
January 14, 2026
I generally vibe with Adrienne Maree Brown’s thinking and appreciated this book’s emphasis on how social justice, accountability, and care can overlap with one another. That said I found this book’s content quite similar to Brown’s other work as well as other books that have covered similar social justice topics; Loving Corrections thus came across as a bit repetitive. There were also some areas where I wished Brown showed more precision in her writing. For example at one point she uses the language of pro-choice movements to describe anti-vaxxers which was quite questionable to me – if a writer is going to do that I’d want more rigorous analysis and precise argumentation. I did appreciate the inclusion of pro-Palestine, anti-Zionist sentiments which I don’t recall being featured as prominently in her other books. Still, wanted more depth from this one overall.
August 27, 2024
There is nothing in this that hasn't been said better elsewhere, sometimes by AMB. I agree with so much in this book and yet felt so annoyed by the do this and don't do that scolding. Maybe I'm being harsh, but there are so many books to read out there and perhaps I'm not the only one who will be disappointed and would better spend their time on something else.
September 8, 2024
amb just gets what we need in this moment: writing that is easy both on the eyes and on the soul. her books feel like therapy, rendering radical imagination & transformative justice so normal/obvious that punishment/cancel culture become obsolete, and i think that is exactly the point. main thesis of this one = accountability is an act of love, and one that we can & should generate internally rather than externally. who are we to patronize others on their bullshit when we struggle to claim our own ignorances and faults? what are we willing to risk to look in the mirror and heal ourselves? made me wanna read more ursula le guin and of course octavia butler. always recommend amb!!!
November 30, 2024
Another brilliant and timely offering by one of my favorite thinkers right now. READ THIS BOOK, you all, and then let's talk about it! Here is my review in quotes that I underlined, wrote in my journal, sent to beloveds, and are so dang resonant:
1. "One of the messages of The Dispossessed is to stop with the rampant individualism. I prefer the feeling of being in harmony to the feeling of superiority. I'm going for, "I love exactly who I am, and I am living in the right time, doing the right work with the right people." I think at the end of The Dispossessed that's what Shevek is walking around feeling: "Maybe I don't have all that, but I have all this and it's so good." Le Guin talked to birds, and she wrote in response to the natural world, not just in response to humans. How many scifi writers have been doing that, asking what birds are doing to survive? How are ants surviving? Mice, squirrels, all these creatures that are proliferating are collaborative, collectivized creatures that do things in community with each other.
How are they doing it? How do we make that a viral experience? How do we nourish a viral experience of self-loving, and being in relationship?"
2. "When our bodies are able or perceived as healthy, we do not live in the world we think we live in. I remember this world, in my bones. At some points in my life, I did not have to measure the miles, count the stairs, eyeball the support capacity of the chair, pray the wheelchair was thick booty-sized, ask strangers to help me exist. I didn't have to process other people's commentary on my gaining or losing weight, and what that might have to do with my health. There was a freedom in it, a trust in my body's capacity to carry me, hold me, lift me, move me, and change with me, and that was affirmed by others.
For me, it was little tastes of freedom, brief periods of freedom, because from early in my life I felt the implication that something was wrong with my body. My miraculous body! Yes, in the pauses, and looks and suggestions and recommendations all around me, I was being told often that my body needed control, management, that I needed to constantly strive to be normal, to have a normal, slender, fit, active, strong, white, perfect, beautiful, 20/20, functional, flawless body. And that all the parts of myself that spilled outside of this mold were a failure on my part. I have had to make it a practice to stay grateful for the opportunity to learn to love this body more deeply every day. We live in a world of wondrous, divergent, temporary bodies are made to survive on earth..."
3. "To learn what you need to know, to process what might be stuck, to perhaps heal your centimeter of a collective wound ..you might need to speak the words to another human, a professional, but definitely a friend or circle of intimates. Talking about what is tender, intimate, private, new-this is one of the ways we make authentic connections. That, and playing together. At every age, most of us need to ground and process what's happening in our lives. And as we get older, if friendships can't hold both play and real talk, they tend to fall away, because life needs both. We are social creatures; even the most introverted of us need to connect to others sometimes to better understand ourselves. But social media and other internet spaces aren't meant to hold tenderness, even if some of us curate pockets that feel connective and holy. Social media is designed to sell and control, sell and control, using our humanity as the pathway and product. It can be really healing to share when we have curated spaces of people who care about us, but the boundaries of social media are s0 slippery, it can end up having the opposite impact. Bringing our tender parts as statements or confessions to the general public online can often mean the most vulnerable parts of us are getting bruised up by exposure in a space that is designed to sell things and grow visibility. Even when the majority of responses are kind or positive, emotionally appropriate, we can get hooked on the one response that critiques, derides, or attacks us in the Place where it already hurts. We can get caught in a cycle where we are measuring public engagement on the fault lines on our heart' broken places, doing further damage to open wounds, or worse, beginning to identify with the wound."
4. "If accountability happens outside of us, and is judged and corrected by others, how can we learn to recognize, let alone honor, our own needs, and values?
I suspect that this externalization of accountability, especially the structural outsourcing of accountability from the self or community to the government or religious institutions, is part of what feeds cycles of harm. When we are not able to choose accountable actions on our own, when we are only held accountable once we are caught by another body, many of us can get caught in a state of arrested development, childlike, acting from a place of reckless abandon, instant gratification, and short-term thinking.
When we are stuck in this collective fragility, outsourcing our accountability, we often expect others to do the labor of not harming us, while also not being harmed by us. We are fragile because we are not living with internal clarity around what feels right to us, so we lack the internal capacity to assess the potential harm of each action. Too many of us are living according to an amorphous, highly adaptive, and reductive external standard for accountability. Instead of rooting our choices in what we truly believe and value, we end up making choices that conform to a variety of external values and standards. I believe it is time to deepen our practices of internal accountability. How do we answer for our own impacts and choices? How do we discern what deserves our attention, what boundaries we honor, what we communicate and how?
I want to focus on this because I think too often we claim a victory based on some external public declaration, campaign. war, or shift in social standard. The thinking is: now that we have articulated a commitment to this standard, we have some way to hold others accountable to it."
5. "A second practice toward internal accountability is to recognize that you have healing to do, given the conditions and legacies you were born into. There is healing related to how your people have suffered, and healing related to how your people have created suffering for others. As a multiracial person, I can immediately reach the healing work needed on both sides of that coin in the family trees that I am aware of. But even for the many of us who cannot access our full history-because our lineage has been lost, stolen, or erased —I would say that an honest assessment would reveal that all of us have caused harm, some of which has been systematized and sustained. And all of us need healing in our lives. Recognize that the healing need is a universal one and tell yourself the truth about your parts of that.
Next, identify what healing means to you, what it feels like within you. I believe healing is the victory that actually moves us beyond oppression. And that healing isn't a fixed state but rather an embodied state that is cultivated with ongoing practice. If you've been developed as a traumatized, numb, selfish, or harmful person, healing is evidenced when, under pressure, you are able to stay connected, stay present, stay inter-dependent, and be accountable for harm.
For me, working with an embodiment framework through a somatic lens has most helped me feel healing, rather than just think about healing. I feel the presence of my healing work when what I feel within is totally aligned with what I am expressing and practicing externally, socially. I know I am in healing dynamics with others when I can fully be myself, without feeling pressure to wound myself with contortion, dishonesty, or overextension. How do you know when you feel healing in yourself, and in your relationships? Ultimately, internal accountability is about moving from fragility to fortitude, from within. You are not a set of constructs"
6. "Follow the love, proliferate love.
Yes, this writing is about accountability, but my real goal at all times is to help us learn to love ourselves and each other.
I know the blessing of loving myself, my coworkers and collaborators, my family, my friends —it feels like some of the most important political work of my life, weaving networks of love and care among my loved ones.
Love is how humans flock; love is how we murmurate.
Among the masses, we find our people, figure out the right distance, and then we change together, and we thrive."
7. " I think about the things I grew up believing that now seem ignorant to me. This thought floods me with humility about how fast we can learn in times of change.
To be accountable to my ancestors who were racist, homophobic, colonizers, capitalists, to those who killed and raped and stole land and people, to those who lied and robbed and hurt children and manipulated partners and generated systems of punishment, I live my life not in denial of all this complexity, but as an evolution from those harmful, dehumanizing, and traumatizing worldviews.
There is a saying that has been popular in the past few years:
"I am my ancestors' wildest dream." I love this idea, and I have put seeds in that soil. I love that it highlights those ancestors that dreamed of their own liberation and of their successors.
But there are also, in my lineage, ancestors for whom I am likely their worst nightmare. A Black, queer, pansexual, poly-curious, unmarried, childless, defiant, feminist, post-capitalist Earth lover, constantly thinking about what might be the most revolutionary next step I could take. Yes, I know there are ancestors who would feel they had failed in their work because
I exist.
But what I know, which these ancestors may have some sense of now, is that the impulse to dominate, and control, and harm, and deny the truth of divergent human experiences is rooted in self-loathing. There is something in those fear-based, scarce, damaging worldviews that is a fundamental rejection of the miracle of life. So many of the systems my ancestors survived are structural, systematized self-loathing.
I have to honor that those ancestors lived in a time of less knowing, less connectedness, and less possibility."
8. "Ananda asks, "Blessed One, are you saying that admirable friendship and admirable companionship is half of the holy life?"
The Buddha replies: "Don't say that, Ananda... Admirable friendship, admirable companionship is actually the whole of the holy life."
This is a twenty-five-hundred-year-old insight into the kind of animal we are, a social animal for whom meaning-making in community is like food and water. The moment I heard this story, sitting quietly with one hundred yogis listening to our teachers, adrienne appeared in my mind as the admirable friend who helps create the condition for me to whether becoming myself, with integrity, with grace, and with courage. The one who will not judge me because I will not judge her. She was so clearly present that I almost forgot to relay the story to her afterward. I felt she'd been there to hear it with me. She is, in fact, almost always there to hear me.
Be generous in your pursuit of good friends on your path of loving corrections and radical imagination. Give yourself a community who loves you enough to risk losing you to help you grow. Find and cherish those mirror-friends who witness your worth when you cannot, and who in your silent darknesses, can reach inside your heart and ring that bell. The operative word in loving corrections is loving."
9. "I worry that the world, which can abundantly care for us and for which we have found no replacement, is going to become uninhabitable to us and so many other species because we chose to live such contentious and distracted lives. We humans have made so many decisions that separate our species from the natural order, and thereby from curiosity and wonder about the world around us. Watching how biodiversity— and our chance of survival — has decreased as our wonder has dwindled and been confined inside fences, buildings, and screens, I can't fight the urge welling up inside me to rekindle our wonder about all that is still living and changing on Earth, even now.
It is too late to sidestep the crises that arise from the tech-utopian, false-solution futures that capitalism has predicted and promised, but perhaps, and I daresay I hope, that it is not too late to have a future in which our species is here and living in right relationship with the Earth and the other survivors of our palest age."
1. "One of the messages of The Dispossessed is to stop with the rampant individualism. I prefer the feeling of being in harmony to the feeling of superiority. I'm going for, "I love exactly who I am, and I am living in the right time, doing the right work with the right people." I think at the end of The Dispossessed that's what Shevek is walking around feeling: "Maybe I don't have all that, but I have all this and it's so good." Le Guin talked to birds, and she wrote in response to the natural world, not just in response to humans. How many scifi writers have been doing that, asking what birds are doing to survive? How are ants surviving? Mice, squirrels, all these creatures that are proliferating are collaborative, collectivized creatures that do things in community with each other.
How are they doing it? How do we make that a viral experience? How do we nourish a viral experience of self-loving, and being in relationship?"
2. "When our bodies are able or perceived as healthy, we do not live in the world we think we live in. I remember this world, in my bones. At some points in my life, I did not have to measure the miles, count the stairs, eyeball the support capacity of the chair, pray the wheelchair was thick booty-sized, ask strangers to help me exist. I didn't have to process other people's commentary on my gaining or losing weight, and what that might have to do with my health. There was a freedom in it, a trust in my body's capacity to carry me, hold me, lift me, move me, and change with me, and that was affirmed by others.
For me, it was little tastes of freedom, brief periods of freedom, because from early in my life I felt the implication that something was wrong with my body. My miraculous body! Yes, in the pauses, and looks and suggestions and recommendations all around me, I was being told often that my body needed control, management, that I needed to constantly strive to be normal, to have a normal, slender, fit, active, strong, white, perfect, beautiful, 20/20, functional, flawless body. And that all the parts of myself that spilled outside of this mold were a failure on my part. I have had to make it a practice to stay grateful for the opportunity to learn to love this body more deeply every day. We live in a world of wondrous, divergent, temporary bodies are made to survive on earth..."
3. "To learn what you need to know, to process what might be stuck, to perhaps heal your centimeter of a collective wound ..you might need to speak the words to another human, a professional, but definitely a friend or circle of intimates. Talking about what is tender, intimate, private, new-this is one of the ways we make authentic connections. That, and playing together. At every age, most of us need to ground and process what's happening in our lives. And as we get older, if friendships can't hold both play and real talk, they tend to fall away, because life needs both. We are social creatures; even the most introverted of us need to connect to others sometimes to better understand ourselves. But social media and other internet spaces aren't meant to hold tenderness, even if some of us curate pockets that feel connective and holy. Social media is designed to sell and control, sell and control, using our humanity as the pathway and product. It can be really healing to share when we have curated spaces of people who care about us, but the boundaries of social media are s0 slippery, it can end up having the opposite impact. Bringing our tender parts as statements or confessions to the general public online can often mean the most vulnerable parts of us are getting bruised up by exposure in a space that is designed to sell things and grow visibility. Even when the majority of responses are kind or positive, emotionally appropriate, we can get hooked on the one response that critiques, derides, or attacks us in the Place where it already hurts. We can get caught in a cycle where we are measuring public engagement on the fault lines on our heart' broken places, doing further damage to open wounds, or worse, beginning to identify with the wound."
4. "If accountability happens outside of us, and is judged and corrected by others, how can we learn to recognize, let alone honor, our own needs, and values?
I suspect that this externalization of accountability, especially the structural outsourcing of accountability from the self or community to the government or religious institutions, is part of what feeds cycles of harm. When we are not able to choose accountable actions on our own, when we are only held accountable once we are caught by another body, many of us can get caught in a state of arrested development, childlike, acting from a place of reckless abandon, instant gratification, and short-term thinking.
When we are stuck in this collective fragility, outsourcing our accountability, we often expect others to do the labor of not harming us, while also not being harmed by us. We are fragile because we are not living with internal clarity around what feels right to us, so we lack the internal capacity to assess the potential harm of each action. Too many of us are living according to an amorphous, highly adaptive, and reductive external standard for accountability. Instead of rooting our choices in what we truly believe and value, we end up making choices that conform to a variety of external values and standards. I believe it is time to deepen our practices of internal accountability. How do we answer for our own impacts and choices? How do we discern what deserves our attention, what boundaries we honor, what we communicate and how?
I want to focus on this because I think too often we claim a victory based on some external public declaration, campaign. war, or shift in social standard. The thinking is: now that we have articulated a commitment to this standard, we have some way to hold others accountable to it."
5. "A second practice toward internal accountability is to recognize that you have healing to do, given the conditions and legacies you were born into. There is healing related to how your people have suffered, and healing related to how your people have created suffering for others. As a multiracial person, I can immediately reach the healing work needed on both sides of that coin in the family trees that I am aware of. But even for the many of us who cannot access our full history-because our lineage has been lost, stolen, or erased —I would say that an honest assessment would reveal that all of us have caused harm, some of which has been systematized and sustained. And all of us need healing in our lives. Recognize that the healing need is a universal one and tell yourself the truth about your parts of that.
Next, identify what healing means to you, what it feels like within you. I believe healing is the victory that actually moves us beyond oppression. And that healing isn't a fixed state but rather an embodied state that is cultivated with ongoing practice. If you've been developed as a traumatized, numb, selfish, or harmful person, healing is evidenced when, under pressure, you are able to stay connected, stay present, stay inter-dependent, and be accountable for harm.
For me, working with an embodiment framework through a somatic lens has most helped me feel healing, rather than just think about healing. I feel the presence of my healing work when what I feel within is totally aligned with what I am expressing and practicing externally, socially. I know I am in healing dynamics with others when I can fully be myself, without feeling pressure to wound myself with contortion, dishonesty, or overextension. How do you know when you feel healing in yourself, and in your relationships? Ultimately, internal accountability is about moving from fragility to fortitude, from within. You are not a set of constructs"
6. "Follow the love, proliferate love.
Yes, this writing is about accountability, but my real goal at all times is to help us learn to love ourselves and each other.
I know the blessing of loving myself, my coworkers and collaborators, my family, my friends —it feels like some of the most important political work of my life, weaving networks of love and care among my loved ones.
Love is how humans flock; love is how we murmurate.
Among the masses, we find our people, figure out the right distance, and then we change together, and we thrive."
7. " I think about the things I grew up believing that now seem ignorant to me. This thought floods me with humility about how fast we can learn in times of change.
To be accountable to my ancestors who were racist, homophobic, colonizers, capitalists, to those who killed and raped and stole land and people, to those who lied and robbed and hurt children and manipulated partners and generated systems of punishment, I live my life not in denial of all this complexity, but as an evolution from those harmful, dehumanizing, and traumatizing worldviews.
There is a saying that has been popular in the past few years:
"I am my ancestors' wildest dream." I love this idea, and I have put seeds in that soil. I love that it highlights those ancestors that dreamed of their own liberation and of their successors.
But there are also, in my lineage, ancestors for whom I am likely their worst nightmare. A Black, queer, pansexual, poly-curious, unmarried, childless, defiant, feminist, post-capitalist Earth lover, constantly thinking about what might be the most revolutionary next step I could take. Yes, I know there are ancestors who would feel they had failed in their work because
I exist.
But what I know, which these ancestors may have some sense of now, is that the impulse to dominate, and control, and harm, and deny the truth of divergent human experiences is rooted in self-loathing. There is something in those fear-based, scarce, damaging worldviews that is a fundamental rejection of the miracle of life. So many of the systems my ancestors survived are structural, systematized self-loathing.
I have to honor that those ancestors lived in a time of less knowing, less connectedness, and less possibility."
8. "Ananda asks, "Blessed One, are you saying that admirable friendship and admirable companionship is half of the holy life?"
The Buddha replies: "Don't say that, Ananda... Admirable friendship, admirable companionship is actually the whole of the holy life."
This is a twenty-five-hundred-year-old insight into the kind of animal we are, a social animal for whom meaning-making in community is like food and water. The moment I heard this story, sitting quietly with one hundred yogis listening to our teachers, adrienne appeared in my mind as the admirable friend who helps create the condition for me to whether becoming myself, with integrity, with grace, and with courage. The one who will not judge me because I will not judge her. She was so clearly present that I almost forgot to relay the story to her afterward. I felt she'd been there to hear it with me. She is, in fact, almost always there to hear me.
Be generous in your pursuit of good friends on your path of loving corrections and radical imagination. Give yourself a community who loves you enough to risk losing you to help you grow. Find and cherish those mirror-friends who witness your worth when you cannot, and who in your silent darknesses, can reach inside your heart and ring that bell. The operative word in loving corrections is loving."
9. "I worry that the world, which can abundantly care for us and for which we have found no replacement, is going to become uninhabitable to us and so many other species because we chose to live such contentious and distracted lives. We humans have made so many decisions that separate our species from the natural order, and thereby from curiosity and wonder about the world around us. Watching how biodiversity— and our chance of survival — has decreased as our wonder has dwindled and been confined inside fences, buildings, and screens, I can't fight the urge welling up inside me to rekindle our wonder about all that is still living and changing on Earth, even now.
It is too late to sidestep the crises that arise from the tech-utopian, false-solution futures that capitalism has predicted and promised, but perhaps, and I daresay I hope, that it is not too late to have a future in which our species is here and living in right relationship with the Earth and the other survivors of our palest age."
November 21, 2024
the ceiling on this book is so high that I feel compelled to give a five (even though not every aspect of it necessarily resonated with me at this moment in time).
Love Looks Like Accountability and Righting Imagination were particularly excellent pieces of writing. Grateful to amb for putting this into the world.
Love Looks Like Accountability and Righting Imagination were particularly excellent pieces of writing. Grateful to amb for putting this into the world.
March 7, 2024
I've spent a week savoring this slim book and never want it to end. Thankfully, her footnotes give so many sources for further reading, so I can stay in this world much longer. A perfect book for changemakers to start.
Read
September 24, 2024It was so incredible to see adrienne read from this in person with legends Prentis Hemphill and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Their vision for a healed world continues to move me. I _loved_ the Murmurations section of this book.
“Our spiritual work is, at its heart, finding a sacred peace in the present, which will change, and which will end.”
“Invest your precious life force into relationships where you feel seen, respected, cared for, challenged, grown, center as you are, and loved.”
“Healing isn’t a fixed state but rather an embodied state that is cultivated with ongoing practice.”
“Loving Corrections is about learning to attend to the quality of connection, knowing it is fortified by our direct and timely communication.”
“I am a student of belonging and I recognize that my liberation is tied up with the liberation of all oppressed peoples.”
“Talking about what is tender, intimate, private, new — this is one of the ways we make authentic connections. That, and playing together.”
“When we understand that our pain and grief are part of our aliveness, part of how we learn to be, and part of how we contribute to the life of our planet, we can learn to eat everything and make it fuel.” 🍄
“How do we build the future on a deep yes, a deep a deep longing for what we want?”
(I am a student of longing)
“I pass my current experiences of self-love and radical self-acceptance back to my ancestors who thought they could only belong through some version of destruction, of themselves and others.”
“To get to a new way of being, I have to be brave enough to break my own heart (quoting Cheryl Strayed) every time it took an outdated shape, in the name of connection.”
“Give yourself a community who loves you enough to risk losing you to help you grow.”
“Our spiritual work is, at its heart, finding a sacred peace in the present, which will change, and which will end.”
“Invest your precious life force into relationships where you feel seen, respected, cared for, challenged, grown, center as you are, and loved.”
“Healing isn’t a fixed state but rather an embodied state that is cultivated with ongoing practice.”
“Loving Corrections is about learning to attend to the quality of connection, knowing it is fortified by our direct and timely communication.”
“I am a student of belonging and I recognize that my liberation is tied up with the liberation of all oppressed peoples.”
“Talking about what is tender, intimate, private, new — this is one of the ways we make authentic connections. That, and playing together.”
“When we understand that our pain and grief are part of our aliveness, part of how we learn to be, and part of how we contribute to the life of our planet, we can learn to eat everything and make it fuel.” 🍄
“How do we build the future on a deep yes, a deep a deep longing for what we want?”
(I am a student of longing)
“I pass my current experiences of self-love and radical self-acceptance back to my ancestors who thought they could only belong through some version of destruction, of themselves and others.”
“To get to a new way of being, I have to be brave enough to break my own heart (quoting Cheryl Strayed) every time it took an outdated shape, in the name of connection.”
“Give yourself a community who loves you enough to risk losing you to help you grow.”
May 6, 2025
3.4 stars. I love Adrienne Maree Brown, but I think the Emergent Strategy Series does not seem to resonate with me. I like the disclaimer that was in the beginning of this book - that these essays do not provide truths, but rather truths to AMB at the time of writing it. And a lot of these lessons were not the ones I needed right now. She talks a lot about compassion in the first few essays for white people, for Zionists, for COVID anti-vaxxers. I understand what she is trying to say, but it's not the place I'm in right now and that's okay. Her interview with her sisters also seemed more like a personal project, it's beautiful the way they've all come together to create check ins and that at the end they're so grateful for having great parents in a healthy relationship with class privilege, but I didn't get much guidance from it. I did enjoy the middle chapters about love as accountability and thinking about who we're accountable to, but a lot of it also felt like beginner abolitionist essays about internalizing transformative justice. I still love AMB - I love all the projects she works on and her values are really aligned with me, but maybe the style in which she writes these self-help-like essays doesn't quite work for me.
August 31, 2025
I respect AMB’s thinking and community work a lot, but after the first couple of chapters this book deeply disappointed me. The initial argument and idea of “loving corrections” was great, but after that each chapter veered in seemingly random directions that were often overly brief, shallow, and lacked a structural analysis. I read this in a book group and we agreed that by a point it was really starting to feel like amb’s shower thoughts, despite each spurt of a chapter being framed as “righting” a number of social ills.
Brown could really benefit from a co-author or editor who could help her to develop the good kernel of her argument into something focused and useful for people. As I mentioned in my earlier update she is far too reliant on her own personal experience in a way that isn’t clear about what the reader is supposed to glean from it. This works better in areas of her expertise (eg speaking about race as a Black woman) but falls offensively flat when she tackles issues like ableism without centering the most impacted and vulnerable members of that community (eg, “righting ableism” chapter spends more time handwringing over thinking bad thoughts about people who refused vaccines than talking about people pushed out of public life by eugenics and abandonment).
Brown could really benefit from a co-author or editor who could help her to develop the good kernel of her argument into something focused and useful for people. As I mentioned in my earlier update she is far too reliant on her own personal experience in a way that isn’t clear about what the reader is supposed to glean from it. This works better in areas of her expertise (eg speaking about race as a Black woman) but falls offensively flat when she tackles issues like ableism without centering the most impacted and vulnerable members of that community (eg, “righting ableism” chapter spends more time handwringing over thinking bad thoughts about people who refused vaccines than talking about people pushed out of public life by eugenics and abandonment).
October 31, 2024
a hopeful and exciting collection of essays! if you follow AMB’s writing, it’s fairly unsurprising — and if you don’t, i’d recommend starting with emergent strategy and pleasure activism.
January 25, 2025
I’m moved, invigorated, and rejuvenated.
December 14, 2024
Lots of good stuff in here on ways of living, accountability to oneself and others, and accepting death as part of life.
“If you’ve been developed as a traumatized, numb, selfish, or harmful person, healing is evidenced when, under pressure, you are able to stay connected, stay present, stay interdependent, and be accountable for harm. (…) I know I am in healing dynamics with others when I can fully be myself without feeling pressured to wound myself with contortion, dishonesty, or over-extension.”
On another note, I didn't realize until this book just how wealthy amb is and grew up! Not super rich, but more comfortable than most people I know. That seems to me like a relevant underlying condition in which some of these interpersonal dynamics play out.
“If you’ve been developed as a traumatized, numb, selfish, or harmful person, healing is evidenced when, under pressure, you are able to stay connected, stay present, stay interdependent, and be accountable for harm. (…) I know I am in healing dynamics with others when I can fully be myself without feeling pressured to wound myself with contortion, dishonesty, or over-extension.”
On another note, I didn't realize until this book just how wealthy amb is and grew up! Not super rich, but more comfortable than most people I know. That seems to me like a relevant underlying condition in which some of these interpersonal dynamics play out.
October 20, 2024
i think we all (myself obviously absolutely included) could use some help in rewriting the narrative away from cancel culture and the defensiveness of playing the victim roles. we cannot make productive change when we are doing either of those things. shame and blame are not the answer. i went into this book wanting to learn how to have productive conversations w more conservative people in my life, and i came to several reckonings with my own beliefs and their flaws while reading this book. adrienne marie brown remains one of my favorite authors and she didn’t disappoint here
August 6, 2024
I thoroughly enjoyed this book . Brown offers reflections directly speaking to a variety of populations about a range of topics. The book aims to assist us with correcting ourselves and others in ways that lend toward collective change and engaging community and relationships.
It offers very simple and accessible language to break down common barriers toward collective change, recognizing that not all aspects are within our control and the long and nonlinear road to change.
My only drawback of this book is that is it claims to offer practical ways to practice change in each area; but outside of one section all the practical guidance is self-reflective questions. They are still worthwhile but I don’t think it fully lives up to what was originally described.
Disclaimer: I received a gifted ARC of this book from the publisher. No review was required and all thoughts are my own.
It offers very simple and accessible language to break down common barriers toward collective change, recognizing that not all aspects are within our control and the long and nonlinear road to change.
My only drawback of this book is that is it claims to offer practical ways to practice change in each area; but outside of one section all the practical guidance is self-reflective questions. They are still worthwhile but I don’t think it fully lives up to what was originally described.
Disclaimer: I received a gifted ARC of this book from the publisher. No review was required and all thoughts are my own.
July 7, 2024
amb’s work always astounds. It’s hard to put into words how brilliant the work she does truly is and how impactful these essays are. The drawback for me was the conversation with her sisters. It felt disorganized, but still interesting. Grateful to NetGalley for an advanced copy!
May 19, 2025
3.5 ish
loving and compassionate but not very informative if ur already dedicated to abolition and radical compassion, i love amb's brand of spiritual anarchy tho
loving and compassionate but not very informative if ur already dedicated to abolition and radical compassion, i love amb's brand of spiritual anarchy tho
September 15, 2024
As usual, adrienne maree brown offers so many necessary and pressing questions for movements and individuals, paving such a loving path to doing the difficult work of making change.
February 11, 2025
A loving curation of learnings and ideas - imagine a collage of several thinkers brought together in conversation with the author. The title of this book holds true. Everything offered to us is with kindness and for the purpose of contemplation/introspection. adrienne does a lovely job modeling that for us in the way she talks about her own journey/arc. I particularly enjoyed the Righting Imagination and Righting Family chapters. There are some sections throughout the book that feel a little repetitive, but maybe that’s the point?! Like all her works, a reminder that small changes are not to be overlooked. With rigor and consistency, we can make waves within ourselves and those around us.
January 2, 2025
Continuing my tradition of reading and finishing an amb book as the first book of the new year.
Her prose jumpstarts so many ideas and affirms the direction I want to move.
Loving Corrections does build on other philosophies shared in Emergent Strategies and her other writings but could stand alone if you are primed to hear the message. It is a book of 'corrections', asking you to rethink your approaches, mindsets, and relationships.
Her prose jumpstarts so many ideas and affirms the direction I want to move.
Loving Corrections does build on other philosophies shared in Emergent Strategies and her other writings but could stand alone if you are primed to hear the message. It is a book of 'corrections', asking you to rethink your approaches, mindsets, and relationships.
March 3, 2025
wow, this book is such a gift. i really believe amb is one of the most brilliant minds on our planet in this moment. this book articulates so many truths i feel deeply in my bones ~ it was like my body was remembering as i was reading. thank you, thank you, thank you, for calling us in yet again with such love and tenderness and honesty
November 27, 2025
The messages in here get at the roots of dismantling oppression within ourselves and our interpersonal relationships, which ultimately gets us to a place where maybe we can dismantle the oppressive systems of our whole society. Coming from a workplace where our leadership team was reading “Radical Candor,” a book that ultimately upholds the status quo of capitalist corporate management, Loving Corrections is a breath of fresh air that actually feels like it could help solve the problems instead of glossing over them.
December 8, 2025
loved this, it was like free therapy/chicken soup for the soul. AMB leans into grace, kindness, and humanity to foster nourishing community activism and I enjoyed how she highlighted aspects of the natural world (fungi, whales, etc) to support a more holistic relationship in envisioning a future for a more just society. I haven't read Ursula L. Guin before but now I'm really itching to!
April 9, 2025
i rec i rec i rec!!! amb meeting and matching the moment and offering so so so much wisdom for these times. loved a lot
December 30, 2024
A lil closer to a 3.5! It’s a good book, but the second have do murmurations were a bit repetitive
May 31, 2025
read this book for class and loved it. made up of beautiful essays collectively made for any human who is living in our world. everyone should read it, not just those who identify as activists. a lot of helpful takeaways.
Read
January 11, 2026TO THE PURSUIT OF GOOD FRIENDS AND RADICAL IMAGINATION(Thich Nhat Hanh mention)
February 22, 2025
Free Palestine
A seamless bridge from Emergent Strategy.
A gift from AMB that definitely calls many rereads.
Love how it’s written with both decolonial ideologies as well as a toolkit.
Can’t wait for her new book on LOVE!
A seamless bridge from Emergent Strategy.
A gift from AMB that definitely calls many rereads.
Love how it’s written with both decolonial ideologies as well as a toolkit.
Can’t wait for her new book on LOVE!
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 29, 2024
i love everything amb writes, and this is no exception. she encourages questioning, curiosity, and learning. a tender and direct nudge to reflect on accountability and change.
also the convo between sisters section felt so intimate and special to be a part of when reading it !
also the convo between sisters section felt so intimate and special to be a part of when reading it !
August 20, 2024
Loving Corrections aims to assist us while dealing with common barriers we tend to face when it comes to communicating with others to build up relationships as well as collective change. I really appreciated the way adrienne maree brown wrote in an accessible yet direct way where anyone from newbie to seasoned activist will find something to take away from this book. I do wish there were more practical guidance tips to practice (outside of self reflective questions) included in each section.
Thank you to AK Press for the advanced reader copy!
Thank you to AK Press for the advanced reader copy!
December 5, 2024
Good stuff but pretty scattered and while I took away a few things, most was familiar.
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