Product Description

San Francisco Chronicle best-seller. Wounds of Passion is a memoir about writing, love, and sexuality. With her customary boldness and insight, Bell Hooks critically reflects on the impact of birth control and the women's movement on our lives. Resisting the notion that love and writing don't mix, she begins a fifteen-year relationship with a gifted poet and scholar, who inspires and encourages her. Writing the acclaimed book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism at the age of nineteen, she begins to emerge as a brilliant social critic and public intellectual. Wounds of Passion describes a woman's struggle to devote herself to writing, sharing the difficulties, the triumphs, the pleasures, and the dangers. Eloquent and powerful, this book lets us see the ways one woman writer works to find her own voice while creating a love relationship based on feminist thinking. With courage and wisdom she reveals intimate details and provocative ideas, offering an illuminating vision of a writer's life. bell hooks is the author of several books, including Killing Rage , Bone Black , and Wounds of Passion . She is Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York and lives in New York City. Wounds of Passion is a memoir about writing, love, and sexuality. With her customary boldness and insight, bell hooks critically reflects on the foundations of her writing life—the triumphs she enjoyed, the suffering she endured, the pleasures she experienced, the setbacks she overcame, and the dangers she faced. Writing the acclaimed book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism at the age of nineteen, hooks emerged early as a brilliant social critic and public intellectual. Wounds of Passion describes her subsequent struggle to devote herself to a life of writing. Eloquent and powerful, this book shows how one woman writer works to find her own voice while creating relationships based on feminist thinking. With ample courage and wisdom, hooks reveals intimate details and provocative ideas, offering an illuminating vision of a writer's life. "I love this book. Each offering from bell hooks is a major event, as she has so much to give us."— Dr. Maya Angelou "A carefully rendered portrait of difficult love."— Time Out New York " Wounds of Passion is bell hook's brave memoir of struggling to find her own work, love, and independence."— Gloria Steinem " Wounds of Passion wraps us in a bountiful blanket of finely textured, artfully woven memories that surround our hearts, warm our souls, and comfort our minds."— Julia A. Boyd, author of In the Company of My Sisters

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #406973 in Books
• Published on: 1998-12-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

From Amazon.com
Feminist scholar bell hooks (Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism) has long raised uncomfortable questions about race, gender, and class. Wounds of Passion explores her long-term, sexually open relationship with Mack, a fellow poet she met as an undergraduate at age 19. Some years older and working toward his Ph.D., Mack, an urbane, physically striking black man, slips through the shoals of racial enmity in American academia while hooks slams up against them with passion and fury. "I talk about being black, curse, talk loudly, speak bluntly," she says, frustrated, but not surprised that this dooms her initial attempts to get a graduate degree. It baffles those who set and follow rules, too, starting with her father, who repeatedly tried to break her spirit as a child. Bearing witness to the wounds of past and present, hooks shuttles between straight narration and sometimes precious third-person observations. Raw and mean, hot and sugary, her feelings spill onto and stain the page.

From Library Journal
In this sequel to Bone Black (LJ 9/15/96), hooks (English, CUNY) reveals her passion for poetry, feminism, and the man with whom she spent 15 bittersweet years of her life. She returns to her painful childhood, to the oppressive South, to her abusive father, and then moves on to a relationship with someone who shares her intense desire for writing and sexual enjoyment. She continues her quest for love and acceptance, finding some semblance of peace and stability with this constant companion, but whom she eventually leaves. As in her previous book, hooks moves from first to third person, allowing the reader to eavesdrop on her innermost thoughts, hear of her bisexuality, and witness her fling with white men. An exceptionally written memoir; strongly recommended for poetry aficionados and feminist collections.?Ann Burns, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
In her 15th book, hooks continues the memoir she began in Bone Black (1996). The little southern black girl who dreamed of being a writer from the age of ten is now a young woman entering Stanford University, away from home, from the South and Jim Crow laws, for the first time in her life. At 19 she takes a lover, Mack, an older black intellectual and poet, and begins work on the book that, 11 years later, would be her first published work, Ain't I a Woman? The relationship with Mack is at the center of this book, which is otherwise a review of all of hooks's usual concerns--race, gender, sexuality and desire, money and its uses and abuses, aesthetics, poetry. Her affair with Mack is turbulent, with an occasional undercurrent of violence that hearkens back to the relationship between her mother and father delineated in the previous book. hooks eschews conventional chronological structure to tell the story of her young adulthood and coming of age as a writer. Instead, she repeatedly moves back and forth in time, in chapters that are often organized thematically, shifting from third-person reflections on her young self to first-person recollections that move uneasily between past and present tenses. The result is an ungainly and repetitive hodgepodge of tones that's most effective when it's most conventional. At its best, the book contains flashes of insight that serve as a vivid reminder of how astute and downright brilliant a social critic and thinker the author is (as in a passing observation about the corrosive effects of ``quiet drinking'' in a family). But too much of this volume is either self-congratulatory gush (no author should write about how ``daring and difficult'' the book at hand is), or painfully misjudged efforts at poetic effect. Only a writer as good and determinedly idiosyncratic as hooks could have produced a book as misguided as this. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Customer Reviews

bell hooks rocks
Wounds of Passion by bell hooks is an autobiography that explains the struggles of a very independent-nonconforming-feminist-black-woman-writer from the South struggling through a difficult childhood then later trying to adapt to the "foreignness" of the academic world of California. Just like hooks, this book is not easily placed into a clearly defined category. It could be at home among works of women's studies, feminism, African-American studies, cultural criticism, or autobiographies, just to name a few. This book is not merely a memoir of bell hooks' writing life. It presents several strong statements about American society and how difficult it is (even down to the family level) to be independent and to challenge the status quo. She calls the reader to bear witness to her pain and struggles throughout her life as a black female writer.

Two intertwining voices throughout the book make it a very interesting and unique narrative. As one voice is telling the story through time as the events are happening, another voice is looking back at these events as a third person in the here-and-now. This gives a reader more than the normal single-perspective and brings the reader a little closer to the story she's telling.

One of the many statements hooks makes with Wounds of Passion is blackness does not have a universal truth. This is exemplified by the following quote explaining the fundamental differences between her and her boyfriend Mack (who was born and raised in California) throughout their long, rocky relationship. Hooks explains, "He does not feel the pain of Jim Crow. Shared black skin does not draw them closer. Her kinda blackness is strange to him. His kinda blackness I've heard about but find it hard to believe" (52).

Many social issues surface in Wounds of Passion such as domestic violence, conflicting feminist views among black and white women, racial issues of the South, stereotypes, issues of social class, and several others. But hooks does not preach or prescribe any concrete "solutions" to these problems. She seems to merely want people to recognize these problems exist, and with that acknowledgment, be taking the first step in the overall solution.

She speaks many times about how poetry and words are a place for her to escape from the harsh reality of everyday life and how she moves beyond the boundaries of race and class through books (105). "Poetry is a place of transcendence" (109). Poetry is often a place where gender and race is not usually evident or important in the words and their meanings.

Although there's never any doubt that bell hooks is a feminist black woman, she says in the following quote about two good friends of her and Mack: "Their gayness is both significant and not solely defining. This is how she wants to feel about blackness, that it can always be significant without being the only aspect of her identity that matters. The same is true of being a woman" (237-238). This outlook will hopefully be the "norm" someday. Wounds of Passion will definitely help get us there.

hook's will never lie to you...
As a black woman poet/writer, I was able to connect with hook's experiences and frustrations. There were deeply moving passages that explored the pain in loving and the satisfaction of pain articulated. "Language is a body of suffering and when you take up language you take up suffering too." At times, though, I felt that hooks could have been more succinct; the book could have been half its size. All in all, it is an interesting exploration into the heart of a writer and is an honest read.

The Return of Bell Hooks
I have read so many of bell's books, and she is by far one of my most favorite authors; her work has greatly influenced my own thinking and writing. No one with a bit of openness and academic integrity can reject the wealth of insight bell has offered to feminism, race theory, and cultural studies.

With such a prolific career, however, there will be inevitable ups and downs. Without a doubt, bell's earliest works (ain't i a women, yearning, from margin to center, talking back...) are among her most groundbreaking; these works set the standard for studying race and gender as interrelated social phenomena. some of her later works lack the novelty and texture of her vintage writing.

for this reason, i am THRILLED to see wounds of passion. i love this book. having read bell's other books, i can appreciate the story she is telling -- it is interesting to see how her life experiences contribute to her academic writing. for those who describe the book as "self indulgent," self-centered, etc. Guess what? IT'S AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY!!! TO WHOM SHOULD SHE HAVE GIVEN THE ATTENTION????! Anyway, the book reveals how writing is often a mechanism for processing life's trials and tribulations. Congratulations, bell, on another wonderful work.