I want to tell you what my life with him was like. I lie awake in the night, the smell of another man's sweat on my body-the scent of memory.
He leaves our bed and sleeps in my study. We had not been sleeping together for weeks. They were water to her thirst, cooling the burning sensation, soothing the red welts on her skin left by lashes from fresh young branches still green. Poems were the way to leave pain behind-to forget. She spent many a night sitting in a freezing kitchen before a plate of cold food held together by congealed fat reciting softly to herself sweet words-Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth. Growing up, poetry had been the sanctuary, that space in words where longing could be spoken. When we try to leave behind all the limits of race and gender and class, to transcend them, to get to the heart of the matter."" (Oct.Chapter One Not everyone goes to poetry readings to find love. But her greatest achievement here is the open-ended question of whether it is possible to live what we believe. Hooks straddles two worlds admirably, writing with great insight about both academia and the world beyond. Perhaps that detachment is what allows hooks to cover difficult memories without a trace of bitterness.
These shifts are initially jarring, but their purpose soon becomes clear: they relate painful information. The present-tense, first-person narrative is occasionally interrupted by italicized passages in the third person. With remarkable evenhandedness she examines the 15-year-long life and then death of their relationship, experiences that are testament to the power of the past: even as she leaves Mack, she laments, ""Inside me I am still the country girl who never goes anywhere."" But hooks traces other influences on her early intellectual and literary development, and particularly her shock at discovering that while gender and class were considered to be important elements in academia, race was virtually ignored. On the more personal level, the book centers on her liaison with a man seven years her senior named Mack, whom she credits with encouraging her to write and publish her first book, Ain't I a Woman. In a consistently fresh and bravely honest voice, hooks relates her early development as a feminist writer and scholar and examines the struggle to practice in her private life what she supports in theory.
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