A coincidence of titles has turned into a small publishing phenomenon — and a debate about who owns a word.
A shared title
Vice President JD Vance's new memoir, "Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith," released this summer, recounts his conversion to Catholicism, the Boston Globe reported. It shares its one-word title with "Communion: The Female Search for Love," a 2002 book by bell hooks, the influential feminist scholar who died in 2021. Some readers also noted a second echo: hooks's 2012 poetry collection "Appalachian Elegy" preceded Vance's 2016 debut "Hillbilly Elegy," both invoking the same region.
Whether the overlap is coincidence or something more has been the subject of debate. Critics quoted in coverage of the episode framed it as a kind of erasure. "There is a systematic effort to erase the work of Black Studies," Régine Michelle Jean-Charles, a professor at Northeastern University, told the Boston Globe, arguing identically titled books can crowd hooks's out of search results. Others have simply called it an awkward choice. Vance's office did not comment, according to People; there is no evidence the title was chosen with hooks's book in mind, and "communion" is a common word with obvious resonance for a Catholic memoir.
Booksellers respond
Several Boston-area independent bookstores — among them Just Book-ish, All She Wrote Books and Porter Square Books — mounted what they called a "literary protest," steering customers toward hooks's book instead. "Even if it may seem like a small protest, it is one that... suggests to the administration that we don't stand for this as a people," Porsha Olayiwola, founder of Just Book-ish, told the Globe.
The campaign had an effect. Hooks's "Communion: The Female Search for Love" appeared on the New York Times best-seller list — a first for the title, according to the bell hooks Center at Berea College, cited by the Globe — and the bookselling platform Bookshop.org reported it as one of its top sellers of the year, as noted in coverage.
Who bell hooks was
Born Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks — she styled the pen name in lowercase to keep the focus on her ideas — was among the most widely read American thinkers on race, gender and class. Over four decades she published more than 30 books, including "Ain't I a Woman" and "All About Love," and taught at Yale, Oberlin and Berea College before her death at 69. "Communion" is part of a trilogy on love, examining how women seek genuine connection.
A word, reclaimed
The dispute is, in the end, about attention: which book a search surfaces, which name a reader associates with a title. What began as an odd overlap on a bookstore shelf ended with a decades-old feminist text finding a fresh audience — carried there, fittingly, by readers acting together.
