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bell hooks. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood. New York: Holt, 1996. 183 pp. $20.00.
Reviewed by Evelyn E. Shockley Duke University
African American Review, Volume 31, Number 3
1997 Evelyn E. Shockley
All memoirs are autobiographical, but not all autobiographies are memoirs. That bell hooks's Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood falls into both categories is clear from its first pages. As a subgenre of autobiography that focuses on the selected events of a life, the memoir underscores the agency of the author, freeing her from the constraints of the conventional chronological structure of autobiography. Thus, the writer of a memoir has more control over the representation of her life, and so it is not surprising that hooks-for whom control emerges as a crucial issue-chooses this form in which to tell her story.
hooks's preface explains that her purpose in writing Bone Black was to add substance to the inadequate documentation of the lives of black girls. Noting that, lately, feminism has taken great interest in studying girlhood, hooks expresses concern about the extent to which conclusions based upon the conditions of white girlhood will be generalized and may result in assumptions about the raising of black girls that are culturally inaccurate. So she offers her story, not to stand as the representative black girlhoodbecause, as she points out, black girls' experiences, like black women's, are diverse, varying according to class and other factors-but rather to begin the crucial work of documenting some of those experiences.
hooks's impulse to justify writing her memoir on the grounds that it will be useful to others is typical of women autobiographers. Also, her memoir resembles many other African Americans' self-written/self-told life-stories in that she emphasizes a desire to record and share black culture, as it was produced and experienced in her Southern community. Nonetheless, however standard her motivations and concerns, hooks's narrative is quite...