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Author Toni Morrison
signs copies of her latest book "Home," during Google's online
program series, Authors At Google, in New York. Morrison's latest book,
"God Help the Child," will be released on Tuesday, April 21, 2015.
(AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews)
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Toni Morrison has written
11 novels and won all the great prizes, but found herself struggling with her
new book, "God Help the Child."
Much of her work, from
"Beloved" to "Jazz," has been set in the distant past. But
she placed "God Help the Child" in a time so close, the present, she
wasn't sure at first how to define it.
AP report continues:
"It's very
self-referential. One of the major things that is going on is 'Me. Me. Me, me,
me.' 'Look at me. Look at my picture. Look at my novel. I write about myself.
Look at my story,'" she said during a recent interview at her downtown
Manhattan apartment. "Don't get me wrong. Some of it is very good. But
it's not an invention of something you don't know. It's about yourself."
There are no stand-ins
for Morrison in her novel, no one who lives even remotely like the world
famous, 84-year-old Nobel laureate. She has instead written a modern fairy
tale, with one-name characters, magical traits and transformations and
questions about race and love and how to lift the curse of self-involvement.
Bride, a blue-black woman
so dark that her light-skinned mother, Sweetness, is frightened of her, is a
cosmetics entrepreneur haunted by a terrible misdeed from childhood: With her
mother's encouragement, she wrongfully accused a schoolteacher of sexually
abusing her. Meanwhile, Bride's errant lover, Booker, has never recovered from
the murder of his brother at the hands of a trusted adult, the presumed
"nicest man in the world."
Bride and Booker cannot
escape their troubles, or themselves. Booker is too traumatized to sustain a
long-term relationship, while Bride is so crippled by doubt and self-loathing
her breasts disappear. "Memory is the worst thing about healing,"
Bride observes.
Morrison believes her job
as a writer is to upend conventional thinking, whether about race (a social
construct, she calls it), or happiness. Romantic love or professional
fulfillment is the ideal resolution for most stories; Morrison favors the
"acquisition of knowledge." Sweetness, for instance, has been an
irresponsible mother, but at least she can acknowledge it.
"'I was pretty
once,' she thought, 'real pretty, and I believed it was enough,'" Morrison
writes in the novel of Sweetness. "Well, actually, it was until it wasn't,
until I had to be a real person, meaning a thinking one. Smart enough to know
heavyweight was a condition not a disease; smart enough now to read the minds
of selfish people right away. But the smarts came too late for her
children."
Born in Lorain, Ohio, in
1931, Morrison has been a compulsive reader since childhood. She taught for
several years at her alma mater, Howard University, before joining Random House
in the mid-1960s as an editor when she was virtually the only black woman in
the industry — a percentage that has hardly budged over the decades. She was
also a single mother who worked in her spare time on what became her debut
novel, "The Bluest Eye," released in 1970.
Over the next 20 years, she
rose to the very top of the literary world, winning a National Book Critics
Circle for the 1977 novel "Song of Solomon," a Pulitzer Prize in 1988
for "Beloved" and the Nobel in 1993. One of her secrets, she says, is
her "invisible ink," the ability to convey a message without
preaching, like withholding her characters' skin color in "Paradise."
Only by freeing herself
from the "white gaze," the "little critic that sits on your
shoulder," could the invisible ink flow.
"There was this
language and this culture and these people, and I could speak to them in the
same way Tolstoy wrote about Russians," she says. "I've always
thought this is not cutting out the white reader. This is just being the writer
who can focus on this culture and these people and make everything in it
relevant to anyone."
Writing is Morrison's
path to outside of herself, but it's undertaken alone, in her imagination: The
Civil War era in "Beloved," the 1920s in "Jazz," colonial
times in "A Mercy." A professor emeritus at Princeton University, she
remembers telling her creative writing students "I don't want to hear
about your little lives. You don't know nothing." Instead, she would
assign them stories about other times, other people. One project was to write
about slavery, not American slavery, but any kind of slavery.
"There was a girl
from India who wrote about eunuchs," she says. "And I thought that
they were all advisers to the Romans or something. But she wrote about eunuchs
in society and what they meant and where they had to put their sex, in a box
that was buried with them with they died. And how people touched them for good
luck."
Stretch the imagination,
she advised. Write about something you don't understand.
"I signed a contract
with Knopf to do a memoir several years ago," she says. "And then I
thought, 'I'm not doing that. It's not interesting. It's not new.' I mean, I
know all that stuff."
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