Shon Faye’s Love in Exile in Conversation with bell hooks’ all about love
By Maisie Wrubel
Love. Elusive, yet desired by all. A transformative force central to life, possibly even the reason for living, and the epitome of what it means to be human. For years, the challenge of capturing love has shaped philosophy, art, social theory, music, and literature. Yet despite the millennia spent in pursuit of this practically celestial four-letter word, our world today seems farther than ever from embodying whatever it is that “love” means. At least, that is the sense one gets from Shon Faye’s new memoir Love in Exile.
“Memoir” isn’t really the right word, though. Love in Exile is more, as evidenced by its extensive bibliography and critical engagement with the idea of love. Faye does more than simply recount her experiences with love; she uses them as entry points into a greater exploration of how love is mediated by hegemonic systems of oppression and how certain people are “exiled” from love because of these systems. Extending beyond the confines of a memoir and plunging into the expanse of feminist theory, Shon Faye reveals how the personal is political.
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However, Faye is far from the first person to embark on this kind of project. Auto-theory is a growing practice, particularly within feminist writing, and feminist thinkers have been discussing love for years. Probably the most well-known work of this kind – one that Faye repeatedly draws from – is bell hooks’ 1999 book All About Love: New Visions. Though over 20 years old, All About Love has retained a place of honor on bookstore display tables and bibliophile blog posts. Readers extol its persisting relevance, and bell hooks continues to be a household name in feminist writing largely because of it.
Like Faye, hooks sees love as the beating heart of being human – the reason why we live. She also believes that love is something our world has turned away from yet desperately needs. hooks diagnoses our struggle with loving as the result of confusion as to what “love” really means. Love is mysterious exactly because there is no common definition of it. It is misidentified as an individual feeling when it is so much more than that: to love is “an act of will,” specifically “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” Under this definition, agency and thus the possibility for politicization appear within the realm of loving.
This is the definition that Shon Faye leans into. But, unlike hooks, she does not begin her treatise with a definition of love – she allows for more fluidity in the term while still contesting the more common conception of (typically heterosexual) romantic love as love’s platonic form. In fact, Faye notes that “Plato would have been horrified” at the common belief that romantic love is “the pinnacle of human attachment and communion.” Rather than rejecting this supposed ideal of love specifically on the grounds of its lack of agency, as hooks would, Faye exposes love’s embeddedness within systems of capitalism and heteronormativity and how that embeddedness limits our understanding of it.
It would be a mistake to label All About Love as apolitical. Yet under the light of Love in Exile, it is hard not to see a thinness in hooks’ indictments of patriarchy and capitalism. While hooks spends a chapter on the latter (“Greed: Simply Love”) Faye lets her critiques permeate the text. They bubbling up to the surface in discussions of community (“friendship… is of very little benefit to capital”) and heterosexuality (“iterations of the ideal heteronormative relationship materially disadvantage women and… were, feminists have long argued, created to subordinate women to the interests of capital”) and frequent citations of Marx and Engels. There’s a charge to Faye’s observations and criticism, which at times verge on preachy, but which All About Love lacks.
Part of the weakness of hooks’ insights stems from her stricter adherence to the central theme of love. For example, in “Greed: Simply Love,” hooks argues that “to maintain and satisfy greed, one must support domination. And the world of domination is always a world without love.” However, her efforts to interrogate the roots of greed and the systems that support it feel under-researched and highly individualistic. hooks may call for a more communal approach to life, “living simply,” but her equating this with “showing respect for love” distracts from the true political implications of her call. Essentially, hooks’ commitment to tying everything to love dilutes her arguments, as they disappear into each other in their repetitive nature.
Faye, on the other hand, allows for more tenuous connections between her topics of discussion and love, which give her room to explore sex, addiction, and motherhood in ways that are far more in-depth and incisive than hooks. These themes are discussed in relation to her own experiences and how these experiences are the product of social systems. In Chapter Four, “Mother,” Faye not only discusses her lack of a desire to be a mother and how that has impacted her romantic relationships, but also the “mother” as a political entity in relation to the patriarchal Christian idea that “motherhood and true womanhood are indivisible,” racial disparities in pregnancy, the cost of childcare, and alternate, non-biological forms of mother-like care.
Yet Faye would be nowhere without hooks. Even in moments where All About Love is not explicitly cited, ideas in Love in Exile (such as men’s lack of emotionally fulfilling relationships and addiction being a false form of love) are traceable to the former text. If I ever questioned bell hooks’ influence or the deservedness of her acclaim (which, admittedly, I did after first reading All About Love), Love in Exile put those doubts out of my mind. Love in Exile may cut deeper than All About Love, but All About Love sharpened that blade.
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When it comes to love, Faye covers all her bases. Heartbreak? Check. Self-love? Check. Friendship? Check. For every one of love’s key subsets, Faye has a story to tell, and Love in Exile has a chapter that tells it. It is hard not to notice the underlying formula of the book. However, it is equally hard to remember that formula once you are immersed in Faye’s funny, poignant storytelling and cultural analysis.
Faye’s tendency towards the formulaic is evident in her chapter titles. The single relevant term that could have been used for each instead seems to have been fed into a “make it more intriguing” generator: “The Broken Heart” (Heartbreak), “System Failure” (Heterosexuality), “The Pantomime” (Sex), “Mother” (Motherhood), “Blackout” (Alcoholism), “In Community” (Friendship), “Self” (Self-love), “Agape” (Religion). Additionally, there is something a bit disarming about the start of each chapter. Consider for example the movement from the prologue to Chapter 1, “The Broken Heart.” Faye ends the prologue by earnestly expressing her hopes that her book will illuminate the beauty and necessity of the struggle to know love, but then quickly shifts tone at the opening of the first chapter, which she begins with the cheesy, self-indulgent, and overdramatic: “It was, without question, the worst thing that has ever happened to me,” “it” being a breakup. Faye makes no effort to bleed chapters into each other, instead beginning each with a pithy, culturally relevant, and perhaps cliché hook— In Chapter Two she writes, “Until the months following my breakup with B, I never really believed it when people said that their favorite singer had ‘saved my life’ or ‘brought me back to life.’ Then I began to listen to Norman Fucking Rockwell! on repeat.” She doubles down on cliché in Chapter Five’s “he came and went so quickly I still wonder if I made him up.”
Because of this formula, Love in Exile reads more like a collection of essays than a continuous narrative, the thread of Faye’s struggles with love tying it all together. There are other ways to approach auto-theoretical writing – take, for example, the free-flowing continuity of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts – but despite the formulaic feel, the format of critical vignettes aligns with Faye’s piercing voice. This format allows her to explore diverse topics all under the umbrella of love, a theme she deftly keeps afloat throughout.
Furthermore, the central themes of the chapters follow a progression, even if the movement between them lacks a feeling of fluidity and their titles feel a bit contrived. We begin in heartbreak, explore both false and atypical forms of love, and finally end up in religion and spirituality. Faye ends her final chapter, “Agape,” describing waking up on the coast of Ireland, looking out to the sea, being moved to fall to her knees and pray, feeling “as though I had found what I had always been looking for.” After 150 pages and thirty-something years of searching for love, Faye finds it in spirituality.
All About Love has a similar conclusion. hooks begins her final chapter, “Destiny: When Angels Speak of Love,” saying how, as a child, “the solace of knowing I could speak my heart to God and the angels made me feel less alone.” This sentiment of spirituality as a way to find love appears throughout All About Love. hooks argues that “all awakening to love is spiritual awakening.” For her, the two are inextricable, and it seems to be so for Faye as well.
It is significant that these two auto-theoretical treatises on love, despite their differences, both end up with their authors discussing their finding of love in spirituality. The kind of generous ethic of love that underlies the beliefs both Faye and hooks express in their respective books is reflective of an ethos that appears in the teachings of a number of religions. Spirituality of almost any kind entails an understanding of the interconnectedness of all beings, and when one sees everyone as connected, it is hard to not feel the necessity of love. These books suggest that when it comes to the search for love, there is something of a natural conclusion, a natural destination in the spiritual.
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Love in Exile is evidence of the power of personal experience in autotheory. In terms of her theory itself, Faye is not breaking ground, but she proves that the abstract is relevant to how one approaches life. And even though her ideas are not new, she makes them feel fresh with her unique perspective as a transgender woman and recovering alcoholic whose palpable dry humor winningly emerges throughout. Faye is honest – with her personal history, her politics, her tone – and thus moving. She is a gifted storyteller and astute reader who situates her life experiences within years of history and philosophy while referencing modern-day forms of media to be all the more culturally relevant.
This is the freshness, the brightness, that All About Love lacks. While indebted to hooks’ work, Shon Faye’s Love in Exile outshines it. Faye brings hooks’ ideas into the present in a way that hooks’ lasting acclaim cannot. And this is exactly what bell hooks would want, anyway. Her famously uncapitalized name was a choice made to center her ideas, rather than her person, in her written works. Yet, despite her best wishes, her name and person have become divorced from her thoughts, and the idea of “bell hooks” has come to maybe mean more than her writings, themselves. But Love in Exile honors bell hooks by taking her ideas and placing them within a new context, allowing them to grow with time and become more than what they originally were. Love in Exile is an act of love – to bell hooks, to the many other writers who have come before, to the reader, and to Faye herself.
