Professor Autumn Womack

And then part two was going to be the ghost of Beloved kind of keeps haunting families up until the 1980s.

So it was this longer timeframe of the novel.

And she finished Beloved, sent it to her editor, and she was like, I'm still working on part two and part three of this epic novel.

And he was like, this is it.

This is done.

We're good with her.

And so the Beloved, the ghost who keeps haunting a family into the 1980s, never happens.

So that kind of thing of how she was imagining the book.

And this also speaks to the work of a good editor, who says, no, this is actually...

This is it.

This is done.

So moments like that I find really fascinating.

It's exactly right.

It's a biography of the novel, a biography of the archive in a way.

So the book that I'm working on now really tells the story of Morrison as a writer in process and practice around different creative projects, sometimes the novel.

The novel features pretty heavily, but there's also other works that I look at that she...

other mediums and modes that she was experimenting in.

And so it really is how these novels came to be concerned with the questions that they're concerned with.

And I usually focus on a central question that's preoccupying her in each.

And there's so many questions that are preoccupying her, but a central question that's preoccupying her in the making or the writing of