Professor Autumn Womack

For something that I think I had been noticing or realizing, but I didn't quite have the language for before, which I think had to do with language with kind of a search for oneself and a past you think you know, but you don't really know, which I think is just an experience of...

coming of age and becoming a young adult.

And then I don't think I didn't come back to Morrison again until I was a junior in college when I read Beloved and Sula in the same class.

And it was a very similar experience.

I mean, I was a much better reader, better in the sense that I was reading more carefully and I was just kind of doing it a little more professionally.

But it was that same experience of like, oh, especially with Sula.

I was like, oh, this is giving me language for this kind of a complicated terrain of female friendships or this kind of like longing and relationships that is always kind of unfulfilled and just out of reach and what that does to you and what that does to your intimate friendships.

And it was just kind of devastating in that way.

And that was where I kind of fell in love with her.

in a different way as a writer.

And then I didn't really come back to her again until I started teaching.

Yeah, because I mean, I read Beloved in almost every class in grad school.

But I was really a 19th century person in my scholarship and writing.

And so most of my work was orbiting around that world.

And I started teaching a class at my first job before I came to Princeton on Morrison.

Now it sounds crazy to say, but I was like a break from 19th century stuff.

I was like, I can't.

I need something like beautiful, some beautiful prose.

So I'm going to teach a class on Morrison.

And that's when I really got into it on a different level.