During her last of four shows at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday (Aug. 18), Olivia Dean opened up with her audience about a tough break-up, and the book that helped her get through it.
Speaking with the audience, she praised 1999’s All About Love: New Visions by the late bell hooks.
"I had just been through a pretty bad breakup, and I had come back to bell hooks, which if you haven't read bell hooks, it's All About Love," she said. "That's my book club recommendation for everybody. And it gave me this new perspective on how I should look at loving in my life. That it could be the skill that you can get better at and work on and figure out how to be better to other people."
She added that hooks’ tome fundamentally reshaped how she looked at love, and it’s given her hope for her love life again.
"She has this definition of love in the book and she goes… To love another person in your life — and that doesn't even have to be romantically; that could be a friend, a family member, just to truly love someone else — is to want them to be the best version of themselves. It changed my life because I realized suddenly that I deserve that kind of love and I want you to know, New York, that you deserve that kind of love too.”
In All About Love, hooks approvingly cites psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s definition of love: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
Dean recently wrapped a series of four shows at Madison Square Garden as part of her The Art of Loving Live tour. She’ll wrap up the North American leg of the tour later this month before heading to Australia and New Zealand in October. The tour is in support of her 2025 album of the same name, which garnered positive reviews and peaked at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 chart.
