In Communion, bell hooks explores how women experience love in all its forms: love of self, love of others, and love of community. Her starting point is an observation: in a patriarchal society, women are taught that they are only truly complete when they are loved by a man. This conditioning leads them to lose themselves, to bend to expectations, to confuse sincere love with painful attachment.

hooks offers a vision that is both lucid and profoundly benevolent: it is impossible to love fully without first learning to know oneself. She challenges the cultural norms, childhood wounds, and internal mechanisms that too often prevent women from experiencing healthy, authentic relationships.
Through personal stories, a reading of gender relations, and a spiritual approach to love, she transforms this quest into an act of healing and liberation. Communion is not just a feminist essay: it’s an outstretched hand, a mirror, and a path.

At once intimate and political, this book illuminates the ways in which our worth has too often been measured through the eyes of others. hooks speaks frankly about rejection, the impossibility of truly loving oneself, and the fear of existing fully for oneself.
She reminds us that self-love is neither a luxury nor a retreat: it is a foundation, a deeply political and necessary act. When you close this book, you feel both overwhelmed and uplifted. We better understand the cycles in which we trap ourselves, the beliefs we carry without having chosen them, and above all, the power to reclaim our place.

For all those who once believed they had to be discreet, perfect, or useful in order to be loved, Communion opens a space for restitution. It’s a text that doesn’t give lessons, but offers a tender, demanding and profoundly human view. And we would do well to listen to it.

Communion by bell hooks, translated by Hajer Gam and Lorraine Delavaud, Points (Seuil)
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Anaïs Fauve-Sablon

Anaïs is an intern at Albertine Books and a student at the University of Limoges. Her greatest passion? Exploring the bridges between literature and society, particularly around issues of representation, diversity and self-construction. A reader and aspiring writer, she enjoys a great romance saga as much as personal development nonfiction or activist literature.

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