Remembering bell hooks and Joan Didion
In December of 2021, the literary world lost two very important women–bell hooks and Joan Didion. It’s painful for me to admit that I only knew a bit about Joan Didion and had never heard of bell hooks.
The first image of this post is that of bell hooks. In 2020, she was named one of ‘100 women of the year’ by Time Magazine. A serious student of women’s studies would know that hooks was a noted feminist writer and activist. Her book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, was critical of mainstream white feminism because the movement excluded the voices of women of color. Hook’s actual name was Gloria Jean Watkins, and she was born in Kentucky in 1952. Bell hooks was her pen name. Quite the intellectual force, hooks taught in prestigious universities and wrote numerous books and magazine articles. While hooks acknowledges that she grew up in “a racial apartheid”, she loved the hills of Kentucky and returned home to spend the remaining years of her career at Berea College where she founded the bell hooks Institute. In 2018, the Carnegie Center inducted her into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
from Appalacian Elegy, by bell hooks:
Such then is beauty surrendered against all hope. You are here again, turning slowly. Nature as chameleon, all life change and changing again—awakening hearts steady moving from unnamed loss into fierce, deep grief that can bear all burdens, even the long passage into a shadowy dark where no light enters.
Joan Didion is well known for Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a book of essays which chronicles the 1960’s counterculture. Another book of her essays, The White Album, is considered by critics to be a classic work of American non-fiction. Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934. In her senior year at the University of California, she won a Vogue essay contest and worked in New York for Vogue Magazine for seven years. Didion then married John Dunne, who also became her partner in writing screenplays. In 2012, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. Didion also appeared in a 2017 Netflix documentary entitled Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold. John Dunne died in 2003, and Didion wrote of her grief in The Year of Magical Thinking, a book that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2005.
from The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
Grief comes in waves, paraxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.