NEW YORK — In the summer of 2022, Emma Goodwin was getting over a breakup and thinking hard about her life and how to better herself. She decided to try a book she had heard about often, bell hooks’ “All About Love: New Visions.”
“I loved it. It takes seriously a subject that is scoffed at in popular culture, that a lot of people see as silly,” says Goodwin, 26, a social media coordinator who lives in Philadelphia. “What has stuck with me over the past couple of years since I read it is the idea that to be a loving person is something you have to work at and not something that comes naturally.”
Brianna Pippen, a visual artist in the Washington, D.C. area, has read “All About Love” a couple times, and values it for how it explores not just romantic love, but families and friends and relationships in general. Tiffany Stewart, a writer and producer in Los Angeles, first read “All About Love” two years ago with her reading group and reread it recently. Just from the book’s introduction, she knew it was going to “crack open” her mind and change everything she had believed.
“We’ve always been told that love should just feel good. It should be fluffy and light and easy. And that means you’re looking at the media version of love,” she said.
Published by William Morrow and Company in 2000, “All About Love” endures as a word-of-mouth favorite — the kind of book that continues to be read and discussed even without any breaking news event, movie tie-in or publicity campaign. Friends recommend it to friends. Fans post about it on Instagram and TikTok and review it on Goodreads, where more than 190,000 members have included it on their to-read list.
According to Circana, which tracks around 85% of physical book sales, “All About Love” sold more than 170,000 copies in 2023, compared to just over 27,000 in 2018. Morrow editor Rachel Kahan cites the murder of George Floyd in 2020 as a turning point, although sales were already rising.
“I think this is one of those situations where the book’s been around a while and the culture rises up to meet it,” says Kahan, who was working with hooks at the time of her death, in December 2021. A few months before, Kahan had told the author that “All About Love” made The New York Times bestseller list.
“We were kind of laughing and crying,” the editor said. “She was so excited that the book was getting all this attention from readers and influencing the conversation.”
Scholars of hooks welcome the late feminist’s ongoing popularity, but some worry that readers are gaining only a selective understanding of her, viewing her more as a self-help author than as a political and social thinker.
The pen name for Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks helped popularize the idea of “intersectionality,” a concept coined by Black civil rights advocate Kimberlé Crenshaw, also known for her work on the concept of critical race theory. Intersectionality holds that racism, sexism and economic inequality reinforce each other and shape (and distort) the ways we see ourselves, and each other.
