This week, we're asking: do the fantasies we read in romance novels say anything about what we want in our real-life relationships? Devoted readers share how the genre has impacted their love lives. Host Brittany Luse revisits her conversation with writer Rebekah Weatherspoon about how she builds a world of desire.

Then, we revisit our talk with Dr. Gale E. Greenlee, teacher-scholar in residence at the bell hooks center in Berea Kentucky, about lasting impact of bell hooks' work, and how she changed the way we think about love.

If you have 10 minutes, please do the team at It's Been a Minute a huge favor by taking a short, anonymous survey about the show at npr.org/ibamsurvey. Tell us what you like and how we could improve the show!

Since hooks' passing on December 15, social media has flooded with reflections on her public impact as an author and scholar. Here, her friends remember what she was like in private.

A groundbreaking feminist thinker, writer and activist, bell hooks was clearly uninterested in being safe, respectable or acceptable, and charted a career on her own terms.

The prolific author, poet, cultural critic, feminist and professor, who wrote more than three dozen wide-ranging books, died Wednesday at her home in Berea, Ky.