Every story from Shortwave and Pear Science Podcast starts with a question. Like, why do we have nightmares? How does AI affect my energy bill? At NPR, we are here for your right to be curious about the world around you.
Follow Shortwave wherever you get your podcast, because the more you ask, the more interesting the world gets. From WHY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend, I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, Amanda Pete. She's in the new film, Fantasy Life, and a series Your Friends and Neighbors.
Pete is also a writer. In a recent piece in The New Yorker, she writes about being diagnosed with breast cancer while both of her parents were near death. I didn't really have that why me thing. Maybe it's because I'm Jewish.
I'm just sort of always waiting for the other sure job, so in this case it was three shoes. Also, we'll talk about Toni Morrison with Harvard Professor Namwali Serpal. She says no matter how many times she returns to Morrison's work, she finds something new. She's still haunted by the last sentence of the novel, Sula.
When that sentence comes into my life, tears always spring to my eyes. And David B. Cooley reviews the new Apple TV series, Margot's Got Money Troubles. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.
This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tanya Mosley. This has our first interview, and here she is. My guest is actor and writer Amanda Pete.
She first became known for her roles in the 2000s, in films like The Whole Nine Yards, Igby Goes Down, Seriana, and the Nancy Myers films Something's Got to Give, always bringing intelligence and wit to her performances. She also co-starred on television and shows like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, the HBO series Togetherness, the recent reboot of Fatal Attraction, and now the Apple TV series Your Friends and Neighbors, which recently started its second season. The show is about Coop, played by John Hamm, a hedge fund manager who was pushed out and now makes his money by stealing from his neighbors in a rich suburb of Manhattan. Amanda Pete plays Mel, his ex-wife, a former therapist who's struggling with aging, the loss of her career, and her deteriorating relationship with her teenage kids.
Pete also stars in the New Film Fantasy Life, which won the Audience Award at the South by Southwest Film Festival. Amanda Pete won the special jury prize for acting. She plays a formerly successful New York actress who starts a relationship with a 20-something former paralegal who's babysitting her children. Amanda Pete is also a great writer.
She was co-creator and showrunner of the Netflix series The Chair, starring Sandra Oh, and she recently wrote an essay in The New Yorker about how she was diagnosed with breast cancer. At the same time, both of her parents were dying. They were divorced and living on opposite coasts under home hospice care. Amanda Pete, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much, Terry. It's an honor to talk to you. It's an honor to talk to you. And I'm glad to hear that you're doing okay, just so listeners aren't in suspense.
Even though you had a second lump that was found, that was benign, and your diagnosis turned out to be stage zero. I have stage one. Stage one. Luminal B, high-risk one, lobular breast cancer, or had it, I should say.
Yes, and most importantly, you are cancer-free now? Cancer-free and extremely lucky. Congratulations. I'm really happy for you.
Thank you. And I'm really sorry about your parents. Thank you very much. So we'll talk about that New Yorker essay and your parents and your breast cancer all coinciding later.
Okay. But I want to start with your work. So I want to play a scene from Fantasy Life, and you play Diane Cone, an actor who used to be, you know, used to have some success, but you haven't worked in a few years and you feel like it has been. You're so depressed.
You're having trouble getting out of bed and participating in life. And in this scene, you're having lunch with your agent to talk about your career. So you speak first. I just, I'm feeling a little discouraged.
Oh, you mean acting once? Yeah. Let's process. Thank you.
Sure. Basically, I feel like nothing's happening. And nothing's going to happen. Well, I mean, can you say more?
I ran into Bob Hemple at the gym the other day, and he didn't even recognize me. Who is that possible? That's one and Oobie. Here's Alzheimer's Diane.
What? We're freaking. Oh, gosh. Family's having a hard time.
Jesus. I'm so sorry. I don't even know. All right.
What else? Ah. I don't know. Listen, it's going to take a little time, babe.
We're reintroducing you. Everyone. I just thought it would go fast. No, I know.
I still think creating content is a great idea. You know, a podcast or a pilot? It's good to have something. I just want auditions.
If I could say, hey, check out this hilarious pilot Diane wrote. Can you? Absolutely not. I look in the mirror and it doesn't seem right.
I look at other women who did stuff a decade ago and it doesn't seem right. Okay, no. Here's what's not going to happen. You're not going to touch your face.
You are gorgeous, Diane. You're a real **** woman. It's stunning. Could you just give me one second?
Yeah. Yeah. Of course. Put them on.
That's a great scene. I love this edition. Wait. You can create content.
Wait too close to home. Is it? Oh my God. I mean, listening to it, it's really just triggering.
What was the period in your life where you were feeling like Diane, that you were like over the hill, that you looked too old, you weren't getting rolled? I mean, definitely when togetherness was canceled. At that point I thought, okay, well that's that's that. That's it.
But you know, actors think that a lot. So it just has a new, a whole new level of doom, I think, when you're older. And wrinkly. You know what kills me about that?
There are so many people who are older. It's one of the biggest demographics in the country. It's probably older than you are. But if you want to live a life, you're going to be older, even if you're not yet.
And like, you're what? In your early 50s? I mean, there's 54. There's so many people that age.
It's a demographic. You can sell your movies to those people. Why would you? Why would you leave them out?
It just makes no sense. Make movies they want to go to. Yeah. Which I thought when I read the script was one of those.
It was, for sure. Yeah. And do you also relate to the whole idea of like, does this mean I need face work done? I mean, I probably think about getting a facelift or something, you know, every other day.
If not more. It's on my mind constantly because a lot of my friends have done it. A lot of them haven't. But a lot of them have.
And I know we were supposed to talk about death later, but I can't seem to just think about a facelift and changing my face. It goes straight to thoughts about death and what's the connection? What's the connection? I have almost like the superstitious thing that if I were to actually do an elective surgery to look younger, I would immediately get my cancer would come back or I would get Parkinson's or it's almost like recently I was thinking about my dad loved that ancient fable appointment in Samara.
Do you know that? I don't. I know the title. It's a merchant servant and Baghdad and he goes to the market and he sees death and gets spooked.
And so he runs back to his master and says, I need your horse. I need to run off to Samara because I just saw death and I'm so scared. And later the merchant goes back to the marketplace and says to death, why did you scare my servant like that? You shouldn't have done that.
And death says, no, I didn't mean to scare him. I was just startled because I have an appointment with him tonight in Samara. Oh, sorry. That was a really long winded answer to your Facebook question.
No, no. That's a good answer. Something like that. Even if it's just in a spiritual way, not a literal way that you would get ill from having somehow lacked gratitude for having health at this point.
Yeah. No, I understand. Tell me what you think of this. Here's my fear with actors who have face work done.
Your face is such an important tool and you have such really nuanced facial expressions and you're acting. And you can really see that in fantasy life, your new movie. And you have limited movement once you've had facial surgery because your skin is pulled so tight. Well, but let me tell you this.
Yes. At the, we had a little premiere for fantasy life and afterwards there was a little party. And as I was leaving an older, quite beautiful woman stood up from across the room and yelled, Amanda, she made a beeline for me and sort of opened her arms and said, I love, and I thought she was going to say your performance because, you know, we were at the premiere party and it said she said, I love your wrinkles and I found that to be really depressing. No, like in the car, going back to the hotel, I was like, wow, is it getting to the point where not taking away my wrinkles is as distracting as if I got a weird pull or lift or whatever?
Can I reinterpret that for you? Okay, please do. I love the idea that you haven't had a facelift. I love the idea that you've kept your face, that you look like somebody who hasn't had worked on.
So where are you now just asking over and over what to do? I just don't know where the line is because, you know, I get facials and I've, you know, I dye my hair, I go to the gym, I guess that's not the same, but I, you know, I do other things. So it's really it just exists on a continuum and I hate a continuum because it's so messy and I want to just be able to be purest because it seems like it would be much more relaxing. That's sort of my rant.
In terms of relating to the character that you play in fantasy life, do you relate to the depression? Yeah, I do. I sometimes don't know what to call it, but I'm no stranger to depression and no stranger to anxiety and I'm the daughter of a shrink. So these notions and labels have been batted around in my head and in my household all my life.
Yeah. And I really loved the part of fantasy life that dealt with mental illness, but sort of more average, expectable mental illness. Like usually we see, as Matthew Sheer always points out, like the Joker, with all his pills or girl interrupted or, you know, people who are stark raving mad, but in this movie, these are just regular folks who sometimes get taken down and I found that to be really beautiful and sort of rare. So that also spoke to me separately from the fact that she feels she's a husband, which also spoke to me.
We're listening to Terry's conversation with Amanda Pete. She stars in the new movie, Fantasy Life, which won the Audience Award at the South by Southwest Film Festival. She's also one of the stars of the Apple TV series, Your Friends and Neighbors. We'll hear more of their conversation after a short break.
I'm Tanya Mosley and this is Fresh Air Weekend. Let me move on to Your Friends and Neighbors, which is the Apple TV series that you're starring with Jon Hamm. You play a divorce couple and he, as I mentioned earlier, was a hedge fund manager, but was pushed out. So he's basically stealing from wealthy neighbors who he feels like they have enough stuff.
They won't miss this. They might not even notice that it's gone and you're the mother of two children and you still really care about each other, but you've had a partner. He's had another partner. Things aren't really working out great on that and so in this scene, you're on the steps of the family house that you used to share before you got divorced.
Your daughter is a senior in high school who's gotten into Princeton, but she doesn't want to go and you think, like, that's crazy. You got into Princeton and you're not going to go. You have to go. So you've gotten her, like, readmitted to Princeton after she rejected it.
And so she's really angry with you and decides to move out and move in with her father, the Jon Hamm character. So here is your character and Jon Hamm's character talking about your daughter who's just moved in with him. How's he going to remain? I'll let you know when she starts talking to me.
How are you? You know what? I've been better. You know why she came here, right?
Because I'm her father. Okay. The other vacation bear. The fun one.
Okay. Are you mad because she's pissed at you or because she came to me? Seriously. You always at work.
I was the one who had to hold the line. You've maybe emerged for a couple of hours on weekends, but all bets were off. You never said no to her. She was always so good?
She was good because I was on it. Brush your teeth, drink your milk, do your homework, be home by 11, get off your screens. You can't leave the house wearing that outfit. Whenever they came to you for permission or something, you'd be like, where did Mom say?
Yeah, because I was backing you up. You weren't passing the book. Oh, please. I gave everything I had to those kids and somehow I knew it.
Well, if the shoe fits, come on. Girls push back. Yes, they're mothers. They'll pass.
Yes, you're just thrilled to get her all to yourself. Well, it's not the worst. If I'm being honest, my house can be a little lonely. I mean, I lived with you guys for 18 years.
It's honestly kind of nice to have her slam indoors and rolling her eyes at me. Hint. The scene from Your Friends and Neighbors, Season 2, Episode 3, and Your Friends and Neighbors is streaming on Apple TV. So we know we were talking about available roles for women who are middle-aged or older.
And in this series, I mean, your character is dealing with perimenopause, anxiety, rage, sexual changes. So I think TV movies are starting to catch up with real life. Yeah, I agree. And I feel very lucky that Jonathan Trapper, I have a male boss, showrunner, who's interested in bringing this to the foreground this season.
So I was kind of blown away by that. So in terms of relating to your characters, like your children are teenagers now. Are you going through crises with them or are they like, fight back? Oh, yeah.
Some of those scenes with my adolescent daughter, Isabelle, were really way too close to home as well. I think when we shot those scenes about Princeton, Frankie was applying to colleges. So I hope I wasn't as brutal with Frankie as I was with my TV daughter, but I definitely had a lot of anxiety around that, and she's my firstborn, so I definitely put too much pressure on her. But I could really relate to it.
I could really relate to Melle's desperation and her, this feeling that there is no other pathway. There's no other algorithm if you're not doing Princeton. This or nothing, that kind of absurd attachment to that status stuff, the name. And you took a different path than your parents.
They weren't overjoyed that you wanted to be an actor. No, they were concerned and they didn't want to pay for anything. I wanted to have pictures taken and I wanted to start going out looking for an agent and they just basically said, when you're done with college, you can do what you want. But for now, you have to go to college.
So it never occurred to me even to try to go to conservatory. It just wasn't a part of the conversation. I want to get to the really beautiful essay that you wrote in The New Yorker about how you were diagnosed with breast cancer. At the same time, your parents who were divorced were each in hospice, home hospice, on separate coasts.
And the title was, my season of Ativan, I can understand why you were on Ativan. So as I said earlier, it turned out to be treatable with a lumectomy and radiation, even though it's a very dangerous kind of cancer that you have. And so you're cancer-free right now, which is beautiful. A lot of people go through the why me scenario and I'm wondering if you went through a version of how could it possibly be that both your parents were dying in a little hospice, and before all the tests came back, you thought you might be dying too because it's a very aggressive form of cancer.
Well, to be honest, I was extremely lucky that I was hormone receptor positive and hurt too negative. So my cancer is luminal B high-risk lung cancer, but it's not as aggressive as some other forms of breast cancer. So once I knew that, I knew that my cancer was going to be treatable. I just want to be clear about that.
But I didn't really have that why me thing. Maybe it's because I'm Jewish. I was always waiting for the other children in this case it was three shoes, but it was more just like, I mean, obviously I had a lot of meltdowns, but I was like, okay, roll our sleeves up, all hands on deck. My sister was incredible.
Who's a doctor? My sister's a doctor in Philly actually, and her husband, who's a chop in Philly. They were sort of like, we had almost like a team, I felt like, and a team around me. And it was, there were really beautiful things that came out of it.
My mom's death with my sister, and my mom's caregiver was just like, it's just, there's no way to describe. It was very scary, but it was also very beautiful. And your mother was living on a cottage just like what, 20 feet away from your home so you could see her very frequently? Yeah.
But I was thinking not so much of like, why me, but how is it possible that these two deaths and your cancer could coincide like that? Yes, it was crazy. I mean, it was crazy. I think that's why I started writing initially because I probably needed a way to organize or like harness all of the feelings, the bewilderment.
You're Jewish, but you don't practice, right? Well, we do Shabbat, and the kids were about Mitzvah and Henry Lee Bar Mitzvah, but I think it's not a religious affiliation as much as a cultural one and, you know, we love the rituals. My parents were both, my dad was a staunch atheist and my mom, I don't think, believed in the afterlife. And so, yeah, I think just my sister being together with me for 12 days up until my mom died, I think that was our, we sort of felt like we had sat shiva.
That was our shiva. I hope that's not blasphemy to say, but we kind of, we sat together for 12 days. We had never spent that much time together since before she left for college, we realized. And it was very beautiful and we looked at pictures of her and read things that she'd written and I was writing a lot and we were laughing a lot and that was our way of honoring her, I think.
Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on our show, it's just really been delightful to talk with you. Thank you so much, Terry. This is a dream come true. Amanda Pete stars in the new movie, Fantasy Life.
She spoke with Terry Gross. The new Apple TV series, Margo's Got Money Troubles, is based on the 2024 novel by Rufy Thorpe. The show stars Elle Fanning, Michelle Pfeiffer and Nick Offerman. Our TV critic David Bien Cooley has this review.
Margo's Got Money Troubles is created for television by David E. Kelly, who wrote or co-wrote several of the eight episodes. Kelly's impressive TV career goes all the way back to L.A. Law, Allie McBeal, Pickett Fences and Boston Legal.
But more recently, he's made a specialty of adapting other writers' novels for TV. Those include Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufy Thorpe, but also Kelly's adaptations of the novels Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, both of which starred Nicole Kidman. She's in Margo too, playing a lawyer with a colorful background, but she's only one of many talented jewels in this show's crown. Others include Kelly's wife, Michelle Pfeiffer, currently starring in The Madison, Nick Offerman from Parks and Recreation, Devs and The Last of Us, and veteran stars Greg Knier and Marcia Gayharten.
Appearing with all of them in the title role is Elle Fanning, who was so great as a comic Catherine the Great in the TV series called The Great. Here, she plays Margo Millet, a promising first-year student at California Community College. Her eventually odious literature professor praises her writing, as an affair with her, gets her pregnant, then ghosts her, all within the show's opening episode. Margo decides she wants to have the baby anyway, which upsets her mother Cheyenne, a flamboyant woman, played by Michelle Pfeiffer.
You know me well enough, when I get scared. God, when I got pregnant with you, I was terrified. You kept me! One night stand from a guy who picked you up at Hooters, I mean, what would possess you?
I thought he was the one. Your dad. You didn't even know his name. I guess I'm gonna have to tell Dad, by the way, if I decide to keep it.
Promise that I keep him in a loop on the big stuff. Yeah, when was the last time you talked to him? A while. Closer to never than recently.
The dad, played by Nick Offerman, eventually shows up on Margo's doorstep. He's a former pro wrestler named Jinx, and his exploits inside the ring might sound like comic relief or a broad caricature. But like Margo's mother and Margo herself, these characters have depth and darkness and can be serious as well as amusing. When Jinx returns to reunite with Margo after hearing of her pregnancy, he confesses that he's come straight from rehab after years of drug abuse.
How bad did it get? You know, I've had multiple surgeries on my spine over the years. Not taking the pain pills wasn't an option. Taking them is prescribed wasn't an option.
Wording them, abusing them, taking a lot at once. And then it was heroin, but I'm determined. You know I love you, do you know that Dad? The money troubles in the title mount up for Margo after her baby is born, and her unusual solution for paying the bills is to open an OnlyFans account.
Some of the offerings and interactions on that site can be quite sexual and quite lucrative. Margo keeps it PG-rated, first by writing playful prose, then by appearing in still photos, and finally by producing and starring in saucy sci-fi themed videos. Her goal is to keep her source of income secret and completely apart from her private life. But that goal fails.
And because Margo's got money troubles is as realistic as it is fanciful, the ramifications of her actions are real and sometimes painful. She experiences shaming, regret, even legal troubles, which I mention only because in a single courtroom scene playing an eccentric judge, actor Paul McCrain almost steals the show from all these other powerful players. As a judge in a David Kelly drama, he's as much fun as Ray Wollstone was in picket fences. Even the characters you expect to be peripheral or one-dimensional end up surprising you in this miniseries, and the dynamics of friends and family are equally complicated.
Margo and Cheyenne yell at each other a lot, but they also demonstrate a delightful mother-daughter bond. During a road trip to Vegas in a convertible, they sing along with a bandon as the car stereo blares a vintage song. A song that some would poignantly describes them both. Margo's got money troubles, includes instances of casual nudity, but they never seem gratuitous.
Fanning throws herself into this role in a way that's both vulnerable and empowering, and it's an enthralling performance to witness. Nicole Kidman doesn't show up until halfway through, but wow is she worth the wait. And when she and Pfeiffer finally get to share the screen, Margo's got money troubles is pure gold. There are so many strong performances here, and so many rich characters that it's riveting from start to finish.
And in between those two points is one wild and brazen emotional ride. David Bienkulli is Fresh Ears' TV critic. Coming up, Harvard professor at Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison. She spent 30 years within Morrison's pros and says, what if we've been missing the point of her work all along?
This is Fresh Ears' weekend. Writer Toni Morrison died in 2019, and something interesting has happened since. The tributes haven't slowed down. They've accelerated.
Publishers have reissued her novels. I come across her quotes on social media almost every day, and there's a real conversation happening right now about her legacy, what it means, and whether the reverence around her has gotten so massive that it's actually getting the way of the work itself. My next guest today, author and Harvard professor Namwali Serpell, has been reading Morrison since she was a teenager and teaching her for nearly two decades. And she's watched the critical conversations circle the same territory.
Morrison's identity, her biography, her iconic status, while the genius of what Morrison was actually doing on the page hasn't really been examined. That gap is what has become her new book on Morrison, which moves through all 11 of her novels from the Bluest Eye to God Help the Child, as well as Morrison's Criticism, Plays, and Poetry. Namwali Serpell is a professor of English at Harvard University, and her own novels, The Old Drift and the Farrows, have won the Clark Award and been finalists for the National Book Critic Circle. Namwali, welcome to Fresh Air.
Thank you so much. Namwali, the word difficult. It has been used to describe both Morrison as a person and as a writer, and you write early in this book that quote, I have been called difficult more times in my life than I can count, but I only began to understand to discover the meanings and uses of my own difficulty because of Toni Morrison. What did Morrison show you?
It's very interesting to look back at the way that an author was received at their time from the perspective of the 21st century when we are surrounded by this kind of sense of Toni Morrison, Nobel laureate. When you look at the earlier articles and interviews and reviews of her work, you find this notion of her difficulty appearing in all kinds of ways, sort of cropping up often in personal ways, describing her as a difficult personality, that she's someone who is impatient with others, and it's actually come back into the contemporary discourse recently with some social media posts about her supposed meanness, quote unquote. And I really was very curious about this because I felt I also have experienced this double personal, political, and literary difficulty as a kind of accusation. And what I found is that Morrison had a similar kind of surprise.
There were moments in her career where she would be described as difficult or be kind of confronted with the difficulty of her works. And she sort of felt like she had been misread or misunderstood because what was really happening was a refusal of the reader to be open to what she was presenting. It's almost as though her personality or her persona or the projections that we put on a black woman writer, a black woman genius, we're getting in the way of people actually thinking about the work. So there's this wonderful moment in a vogue profile where someone complains about the difficulty of understanding her work because he's just not familiar with African-American culture.
And she remembers saying, well, you must have had a hell of a time with a Beowulf then. And there's a sense like, well, you know, difficulty in art is supposed to be there. So why is it being translated as this personality flaw? Well, I wanted to interrogate that a little bit more because, I mean, we know that Morrison was fully credentialed.
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?
That's exactly right. I think there's an assumption of what needs to be explained or what needs to be translated. Even what sorts of ideas or messages are comforting to an audience that is very particular to being a black writer, to being an African writer, to being an African-American writer, when she first starts working at Random House, one of her first projects was an anthology of contemporary African literature. And she's reading a lot of African literature really for the first time, which is interesting given the fact that one of her credentials is that she went to Howard University, that she went to Howard in the late 40s, early 50s, right?
So the syllabus then was still being decolonized, as we like to say now. And she really wasn't encountering African literature until she was living in New York working in publishing. And she said that reading someone like Chinwa Chebe, reading Bessie Head, reading Kamra Lai, she encountered writing by Africans that did not assume that you needed to explain your culture to the white audience that you were writing for. And this was something that felt very different to her from African-American literature, which if you think about just the birth of the tradition and the slave narrative was pitched to white audiences.
And because literacy had been denied to black readers, there weren't really black readers to read those slave narratives. So the tradition starts in a very different place. And she felt that reading African literature and seeing this new framework, it kind of gave her this sense of freedom. I don't actually have to explain.
I don't actually have to translate all the elements of my culture. I want to ask you a little bit more about this misreading, though, from maybe just from the larger literary circles or media. So 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? Oh, goodness. I mean, it's like a punch in the stomach whenever I read that. The first time I read it, my jaw dropped.
I just, my mouth fell open. I just thought, how could you possibly talk about anyone in terms like that? A black woman in terms like that? And a black woman of Toni Morrison's stature and genius?
It just felt, I mean, it just feels, I don't know, I don't know how to put it except just incredibly racist. When I read that sort of thing, and I show it to my students because I think there is an assumption that for Morrison to win the Nobel Prize, to be this widely acclaimed, canonized author, means that she would have escaped this kind of racist rhetoric. And I think it's very important for people to understand what she actually had to confront, what she actually had to deal with, and how much more difficult it would have been for her to achieve what she did, given those obstacles, given that this is the voice of the New York Times, the liberal-minded New York Times doing this big profile of this black woman writer who's just won a major award is on her third novel. And this is the kind of rhetoric that's being used, right?
It's kind of remarkable. I want to talk about you a little bit as a writer and what brought you to this work. You describe yourself in this book as mixed race, born in Zambia, African American in the most hyphenated sense, and you note that you and Morrison share something, what you call the strange privilege of zooming out from or boomeranging around race. What does that mean?
And how do you think it's kind of shaped the way you read her? So when I was thinking about why I feel so drawn to Morrison in terms of the way she talks about racial politics, I was struck by the fact that we have very, very different upbringings. And my blackness as Zambian, my blackness as an American, we're very different from hers growing up in Lorraine, Ohio, and being someone who, as it turns out, never actually went to Africa, even though Africa is invoked a lot in her work. And what I realized is that as she perceived in the work of someone like Chinua Chibin, blackness is so central to the way that I conceive of the world that there is a kind of, it's my default position because growing up in Zambia, you know, this is a majority black country.
I'm surrounded by black people. I have a kind of awareness that black and brown people are the majority of the world. And so the sense that we are somehow a minority, which is very much the rhetoric in the United States was really strange to me. And Morrison somehow managed to have that same powerful sense of centrality and black centrality and black as the default.
She says, when I say people, I mean black people. And some people when they hear that feel rejected or that she's marginalizing non-black people. But it's just, I think it's just like, that's her default mode. She returns to this again and again in her writing.
What is distinctive is that it's not the border between black and white, but the differences within blackness itself. There's a moment in Song of Solomon where the character of Pilate says, you think dark is just one color, but it ain't, there are five or six kinds of black. So Morrison seemed to be very interested in those distinctions within blackness, which brings us to Sula, which was published in 1973. And so for listeners who haven't read it, can you tell us what this novel is about briefly and then how Sula herself kind of embodies that insider, outsider idea?
Yeah, so Pilate says, black may as well be a rainbow, which is a beautiful way of talking about the many internal varieties and differences within blackness, not just the color, but also the culture. Sula is a beautiful story of friendship. It's really about the relationship between Nell Wright and Sula May Peace, who meet as young girls and fallen friends is the phrase I like to use about it. And as they grow up in this fictional community, the bottom in the fictional town of Medallion Ohio, you find them negotiating their relationships with the community, but also their relationship with each other as very different kinds of people, right?
Nell Wright is very, she comes from a very orderly household, a very respectable household, whereas Sula comes from a kind of wayward ramshackle environment. This novel ends in one of the most devastating lines, Morrison, has ever written, I mean, I guess it depends on your perspective, but from my perspective, Nell finally understands decades later, as an old woman, that what she has been mourning all of this time was not her late husband. It was her friendship with Sula. And I actually want you to read from your book, A Revelation That You Had About This.
There's this kind of incredible building in the last chapter of the novel toward this moment of revelation where Nell finally realizes, as she says, we was girls together, oh Lord, Sula, girl, girl, girl, girl, girl. And the cry that she releases rises up in these circles of sorrow. And when that sentence comes into my life, whether I'm reading it to teach, whether I'm rereading it to write, whether I'm reading it out loud, even just now, tears always spring to my eyes. It's just such an incredible evocation of what it feels like to lose the love of your life, which is your friend.
Noamali, around the time that your book has come out, there's just been lots of discourse and discussion about Toni Morrison and her work, The New York Times produced a podcast and a piece called Don't Make a Saint out of Toni Morrison, Wesley Morris. Their argument was that sanctification puts her too far away to touch, too far away to actually read, which is also what you are saying, that she's being misread. But at the same time, there's a book called On Morrison Risk Becoming Part of That Problem. That's a really good question.
I, in my book, make a similar argument to the discussion that was on The New York Times podcast, but rather than thinking about her as a saint, I am thinking about her and the way she's been turned into a monument. And I find it helpful to think about Morrison's relationship to monuments as a way of reframing how we think about her, because she was very skeptical of monuments in certain kinds of ways. And there's, for example, I visited Ohio and I had the wonderful opportunity to go to Lorraine where Morrison was born and grew up. And in Lorraine, the public library has a room dedicated to her.
This was how Morrison wanted to be honored by a room in a library filled with books where people could come and read, which isn't the same as having a statue or having, you know, a plaque attached to it to a building. They renamed the building at Princeton, Morrison Hall, and she sort of very riley said that there's a kind of inevitability to that. She really liked the fact of this. But at the same time, I think it's very clear to me that what Morrison wanted most of all was for people to read and to read her that that's actually what was so important.
Namwali Sirpell, thank you so much for this conversation and thank you for this book. Thank you so much for having me and thank you for these wonderful questions. Namwali Sirpell is a professor of English at Harvard University. Her own novels, The Old Drift and The Furloughs, have won the Clark Award and been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle.
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