07/17/2026
I loved reading bell hooks in the 1990s. There is no better excuse than this to revisit her works. Thank you!
JD Vance has done something he almost certainly never intended: he has helped a Black feminist reach the New York Times bestseller list. More than two decades after bell hooks published "Communion: The Female Search for Love," and nearly five years after her death, the book landed on the paperback bestseller list for the first time in June. Its sales were up 1,000% over the year before, driven by readers who went looking for it after Vance announced a memoir of the very same name.
bell hooks wrote about whatever she thought was being ignored -- racism, poverty, patriarchy, and, in her later years, love, which she took as seriously as any of them. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, she took her pen name from her great-grandmother and kept it deliberately lowercase, wanting readers to attend to the substance of the books rather than to the woman who wrote them.
She published more than forty of them before her death in 2021, among them the landmark "Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism." The one now climbing the charts, "Communion," is a 2002 meditation on love -- on how women have been taught to search for it everywhere except within themselves, and how learning to love oneself is the work of a lifetime.
Vance's "Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith," released in June, is a memoir of his conversion to Catholicism and the way his faith has shaped his politics, and its title is a word-for-word match with hooks's. It isn't the first time one of his titles has echoed one of hers: his 2016 "Hillbilly Elegy" shares both its defining term and its subject with hooks's 2012 poetry collection "Appalachian Elegy," each of them an elegy for the same mountains.
Whether by coincidence or design, Vance has never said, declining to comment through his publisher, and HarperCollins -- which publishes them both -- maintains that the resemblance is accidental and that the books have nothing to do with one another. Twice is harder to wave off.
Whitney Alese, a content creator in Philadelphia who has been reading hooks since college, saw the announcement this spring and decided the answer wasn't to fight his book but to buy hers -- a case she began making to the nearly 150,000 people who follow her online. Her videos spread widely, a few drawing more than 800,000 views, and the conversation they set off grew large enough that Alese opened a free online book club devoted to "Communion," which more than five thousand people joined. Her thinking was straightforward: hooks's book was about love, and love seemed a better use of everyone's energy than outrage.
The independent bookstores -- the ones that had been keeping hooks on their shelves for years, whether anyone was asking for her or not -- did the rest. Just Book-ish in Boston sold through its first fifty copies and ordered a hundred more, stacking them where no customer could miss them. The Word Is Change, a Brooklyn bookshop, posted its own appeal on Instagram without ever typing his name: if any book called Communion was going to make the bestseller list that week, the store wrote, let it be the one bell hooks wrote.
E. Gale Greenlee, a literary scholar co-editing a forthcoming volume about her, has said that hooks died afraid she would be forgotten. She was not forgotten. She was read instead, argued over, pressed into the hands of strangers -- and her book was lifted onto a list it had never reached in the twenty-four years since she wrote it, by thousands of ordinary people who used the only leverage available to them, which was their voices and their money and one another. It entered the Times paperback list at No. 12.
It was an argument she made all her life -- that speaking is how the powerless make themselves real -- and she once compressed it into eight words. "Coming to voice," she wrote, "is an act of resistance."
To learn more or order a copy of bell hooks' "Communion," visit https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780060938291 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4f5wEfe (Amazon)
For her classic book "Appalachian Elegy," visit https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780813136691 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/3TaIWLV (Amazon)
For more of bell hooks' esteemed titles, we recommend "All About Love: New Visions" (https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780060959470), "Salvation: Black People and Love" (https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780060959494), and "killing rage: Ending Racism" (https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780805050271), and
She is also the author of the children's books "Skin Again" (https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781484799239) and "Happy to be Nappy" (https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781484788417)
