Tanya Mosley

She was a Random House editor, a Princeton professor.

I mean, she's a Nobel laureate.

But she also talks about how African writers freed her because in reading them, they didn't have to explain anything to white people in their writing.

And so when you talk about this difficulty that people have with her writing, it made me think, what does it mean to write from that place where Blackness is assumed as the center?

And what does a reader have to bring to access that?

I want to ask you a little bit more about this misreading, though, from maybe just from the

Sometimes it just felt like the misreading felt like resentment.

You write about a 1979 New York Times profile, and Morrison had just won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon.

And I want to read directly from that article.

They described her as a big, handsome woman, often breathless, often late.

She will often put on an act, suddenly get down and be very chicken and ribs, sucking her teeth, poking a finger into her scalp and scratching, a strange, primitive gesture.

What do you take from that?

Well, I mean, almost 40 years later or more, a British magazine comes to you and they ask you for a hard-nosed critical piece on Morrison, specifically from the perspective of a black writer, right?

Were they asking you to write kind of a takedown or how did you interpret what they wanted from you?

That's how I felt.

I want to focus in on Song of Solomon, which was one of Morrison's most celebrated novels, and it was published in 1977.

It was her breakthrough novel, cited by the Swedish Academy when they awarded her the Nobel Prize.

You open this chapter by noting that despite all the gravitas, Toni Morrison was funny.

And that humor isn't incidental.

It has a name and a very specific function in Black culture.