Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood
by bell hooks
From the 1996 paperback edition (Henry Holt and Company):
“Bone Black is a lucid, challenging, and entrancing read.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“With the emotion of poetry, the narrative of a novel, and the truth of experience, bell hooks weaves a girlhood memoir you won’t be able to put down—or forget. Bone Black takes us into the cave of self-creation.”
—Gloria Steinem
Stitching together girlhood memories with the finest threads of innocence, feminist intellectual bell hooks presents a powerfully intimate account of growing up in the South. A memoir of ideas and perceptions, Bone Black shows the unfolding of female creativity and one strong-spirited child’s journey toward becoming a writer. She learns early on the roles women and men play in society, as well as the emotional vulnerability of children. She sheds new light on a society that beholds the joys of marriage for men and condemns anything more than silence for women. In this world, too, black is a woman’s color—worn when earned—daughters and daddies are strangers under the same roof, and crying children are often given something to cry about. hooks finds comfort in solitude, good company in books. She also discovers, in the motionless body of misunderstanding, that writing is her most vital breath.
“Bone Black ... is a canvas of vividly impressionistic splashes of growing up young, gifted, black, and female.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
bell hooks is Distinguished Professor of English at City College of New York. She is the author of Killing Rage, as well as eleven other books. She lives in New York City.
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