Bone Black

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 good company in solitude, good company in books. She also discovers, in the motionless body of misunderstanding, that writing is her most vital breath.

• Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art, Second Edit
• Why We Write About Ourselves: Twenty Memoirists on Why They Expose Themselves (and Others) in the Name of Literature
• How to Leave Hialeah (Iowa Short Fiction Award)
• The Kiss: A Memoir
• Unreliable Truth
• Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir
• Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
• The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts
• The Other Side: A Memoir
• Seam (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry)