Hello. Welcome to my channel, or welcome back if you’ve been here before. My name is Beth Ann. Today, I wanted to talk about one of the books I read in October. This is communion, the female search for love by bell hooks. Um, I straight-up love this book five stars. It was the sort of book that changed my life a little bit. Um, I need to keep thinking about things and digesting, um, and, um, bring into my life some of the lessons she talks about. Um, so what does she talk about? So, uh, gives it away in the title, the female search for love. One thing I appreciate about this book is that it’s all-encompassing. It’s not just about love and romantic relationships, so it spends a lot of time on that.
Um, But then it also talks about friendship. So females, women finding, um, intense, lasting connecting friendship, um, and also kind of cross-generational relationships. So every aspect of, um, of finding love and connection. And the title says it all: communion is about, um, she could have equally as well, I think, said connection, but that doesn’t imply the deep level of connection that she means knowing a whole person and feeling known and seen as a whole person. And so she’s talking about how women find that. And, of course, the whole thing is colored by patriarchy. So her whole message is how women find communion with other people or fail to find communion with other people in our patriarchal culture. So these are, think of them as essays; although they do flow together, they’re not standalone, but they do feel like essays.
Each chapter is on a particular aspect of relationships and female identity. Um, and it’s also a part memoir. So, she’s drawing on her own experiences. She wrote this. This was published in 2002. Um, so she was writing this from the, Yeah, 2002. So, she was writing this from a midlife position. Um, she was middle-aged and looking back and thinking about what was wrong with her relationships again, including friendships, not just romantic love, um, how that was due to her kind of internalizations of patriarchy and the expectations that she had from that, as well as the patriarchal attitudes of the people that she was in relationships with. Um, how she’s grown and developed and what she’s learned approaching middle life.
She says she started writing this book as a message to other middle-aged women. Still, it ended up being so comprehensive and so much about what she wished that she had known that, uh, she really, then it was written for an entirely female audience, right?
Anybody who identifies as female, um, including very young people. And I wish I’d read this in college, when I first heard about bell hooks, um, which would have been from 2006 to 2010 when this book would have been newer. Um, I wish I’d read this book in college. I’m still determining. And she says this too, at the end of the book: She’s unsure if she’d known all this stuff or if it really would have affected her path. Still, she could have gone down her whole path, maybe shortened some of the worst periods, um, a little bit, but, um, gone down at all with a greater awareness of self and her worth. Um, so that’s powerful. This will be a book that I keep on my bookshelves. It is like a thing to have my daughter start reading when she’s in her teenage years.
I’m just throwing that out there. Um, in terms of tone, this book is fantastic. It was a candid conversation about how I felt with a close female mentor. This is the sort of female mentor I wish I had who could sit down lucidly, maybe with a glass of wine. And candidly, say like, this is how the world works. Um, and like here’s, uh, here’s what you should do in response to it. Um, that style is charming. It makes this book very easy to read, even though it discusses some tricky and complicated topics. Her writing is so simple, straightforward, and beautiful that you can follow her message consistently.
She nails clarity. She doesn’t get bogged down in any details. She doesn’t have to spend much time doing any definitions or anything. It’s also rooted in her own experience. Um, that even though it’s nonfiction, it is storytelling. And
That’s what makes a nonfiction book suitable, right? Is that it’s still storytelling? It still carries you along. So she nails that. One other piece I like is that it’s entirely focused on women and how they find love and relationships. Still, she’s talking a lot about the feminist movement and feminism. Um, and one thing she gets into towards the end is how damaging patriarchy is for men and how it cuts off men from having communion and from really having that sense of connectedness and belonging, um, and knowing with other people.
Um, and so for women and men trying to be in heterosexual relationships, this is a real problem that kind of both parties are cut off from really a dreaming, achieving connection, um, in part because of patriarchy. And so I appreciated that at the end because as I’ve gotten older and, um, of course, I’m married to a man, but I also have several excellent male friends struggling with relationships. And, uh, it is just so easy to see, you know, kind of how damaging our cultural expectations of what masculinity is and what being a man in a relationship is, how damaging those are, and really how hard it is to break away from them. So she does, um, cover quite a bit of that as well, really throughout this book, but I would say more towards the end.
Um, but anyway, so it’s, uh, even though it’s very feminist and rooted in a kind of critiquing patriarchy, the whole sense of this book is that people are just people; men and women aren’t that different. It’s not men are from Mars. Women are from Venus. We all want to have a kind of connection and feel love. Um, and how we’re all limited and able to do that by our culture and society and, um, some suggestions for overcoming that. So, I highly recommend this just for general reading. I mean, especially like my best friend who is reading this, if you’ve been struggling with your romantic life, this book is fantastic. Um, just five stars recommend everyone. Everyone should read this. Um, and I will continue with bell hooks, his other books about love, so she wrote a love trilogy. This is the third book. I mentioned in my November TBR video that I will continue with the other two books in the trilogy.
If you’re interested in learning more about bell hooks, please watch those future videos. All right. If you like what I’m doing here, please like this video and subscribe. Let me know what you think if you’ve read bell hooks before or have had similar thoughts or conversations about similar topics, even if you still need to have read the particular books I’ve read. I’d love to hear your opinions.