Best Of: Actor Amanda Peet / Re-examining Toni Morrison

What we're living through, I think, is really the two parties taking opposite sides on whether we want to keep making this type of social progress or whether we want to go back in time.

“This is the MPR's coach podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcast.”

From WHY and Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend, I'm Tanya Mosley. Today, a man to peat. She's in the new film "Fantasy Life" and the series "Your Friends and Neighbors." Peat 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 shrewd jobs."

In this case, it was three shoes. Also, we'll talk about Tony Morrison, with Harvard professor Namwali Sarpel. She says, "No matter how many times she returns to Morrison's work, she finds something new." She 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. and Kooley reviews the new Apple TV series "Margo's Got Money Troubles."

That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend.

“This is Fresh Air Weekend, I'm Tanya Mosley. Terry Gross 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 Koope, 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 male 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 the 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 O, 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 coast 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 like in suspense, even though you had a second lump that was found,

that was benign and your diagnosis turned out to be, it was like stage zero. I have stage one, luminal B, high-risk one, labular 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 to hear you. And I'm really sorry about your parents.

Thank you very much. So we'll talk about that in New Yorker essay and your parents and your breast cancer all coinciding later. Okay, but I want to start with you work. So I want to play a scene from fantasy life, and you play a day-end cone and 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 a 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've just, I'm feeling a little discouraged. Oh, you mean acting wise?

Yeah. Let's process. Thank you. Sure. Um, basically I feel like nothing's happening.

And nothing's gonna happen. Well, I mean, can you say more? I ran into Bob Hempel at the gym the other day and he didn't even recognize me again.

That's one and Ubie. He is Alzheimer's Diane. What? We're breaking. Oh, God.

That was having a hard time.

Jesus. I'm so sorry. I don't mean, all right. What else? Ah.

I don't know.

“Listen, it's gonna take a little time, babe.”

We're reintroducing you to everyone. Just thought it would move a little faster. 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. Like I just want auditions. If I could say, hey, check out this hilarious pilot Diane wrote. Okay. Am I too old?

What? Absolutely not. I was looking at the mirror. And I just, it doesn't seem right. And yet, I look at other women who did stuff, you know,

the decade ago and it doesn't seem right. Okay, I know.

I just, here's what's not gonna happen.

You're not gonna touch your face. You are gorgeous, Diane. You're a real ass woman. It's stunning. Could you just give me one second?

Yeah. Yeah. Of course, put 'em on. That's a great scene. I love the suggestion.

“Wait, you can create content, a podcast.”

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 roles. 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. Considerably older than you are.

But if you want to live a life, you're gonna be older, even if you're not yet. And like, you're what in your early 50s. I mean, there's like 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 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 face lift 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 face lift and changing my face.

It goes straight to thoughts about death. And what's the kind of thing? 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. 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 face. No, no, no. But that's a good answer. Something like that. Even if it's just in a spiritual way,

a literal way that you would get ill from having somehow lacked gratitude for having health at this point? Yeah, you know, I understand. Tell me what you think of this. Here's my fear with actors who have faced work done.

Your face is such an important tool. And you have such really nuanced facial expressions in your acting.

You're 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 in 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. Oh. And I found that to be really depressing. 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 face lift.”

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 die 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. I hate a continuum because it's so messy

and I want to just be able to be purist 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 battered around in my head and in my household, on my life. 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 star in with John 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, "That's crazy you got into Princeton,

“and you're not going to go, you have to go."”

So you've gotten her, like, re-admitted 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 John Hamm character.

So here is your character, and John Hamm's character, talking about your daughter who's just moved in with him. How's he new roommate? I let you know when she starts talking to me.

Who are you? You know I've been better. You know why she came to you, right? Because I'm your father. Because you're the vacation parent.

The fun one. Okay, are you mad? Because she's pissed at you, or because she came to me. Seriously?

You were always at work. I was the one who had to hold the line. You may be emerged for a couple of hours and weekends,

You never said no to her.

Ooh. 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 for something, you'd be like, "Would you mom, too?" Yeah, because I was backing you up.

You were passing the book. Oh, please. I gave everything I had to those kids, and somehow I'm the... Well, if the shoe fits,

come on. Girls push back. Yes, they're mothers. It's a thing. It'll pass.

Yes, you're just thrilled. You 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 slamming doors and rolling her eyes at me.”

You know? The scene from your friends and neighbors season two episode three, and your friends and neighbors is streaming on Apple TV. So, you 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 Perry Menopause, 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 Chopper, you know, I have a male boss, Joe Runner, 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, your children or teenagers know, are you going through crises with them, or are they like fight back?

Oh, yeah. Some of those scenes with my adolescent daughter is about 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 first born.

So, I definitely put too much pressure on her, but I could really relate to it. I could really relate to Mel's desperation and her this feeling that there is no other pathway. There's no other algorithm if you're not doing Princeton.

It's this or nothing. You know, 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. You know, I wanted to have pictures taken, and I wanted to, you know, start going out, looking for an agent, and they just basically said,

like, 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.

Like, 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 coast.

And the title was my season of ad event. I can understand why you were on ad event. So, as I said earlier, it turned out to be treatable with an activity in radiation, even though it's a very dangerous kind of cancer that you have.

And so, you're a cancer-free right now, which is beautiful. Yes. A lot of people go through the wide meat 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 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 a human receptor positive in her two-negative. So, my cancer is luminalbe high risk-line 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 wide meat thing. Maybe it's because I'm Jewish.

I'm just sort of always waiting for the other Jewish ones.

In this case, it was three shoes, but it was more just like,

but I was like, okay, roll our sleeves up. All hands on deck.

You know, my sister was incredible.

My husband, who's a doctor.

“My sister's a doctor in Philly, actually,”

and her husband, who's that chop in Philly, they were sort of like, we had almost like a team, we felt like, and a team around me, and there were really beautiful things that came out of it. Even my mom's death with my sister,

and my mom's caregiver was just like, it's just, it's, there's no way to describe. It was very scary, but it was also very beautiful. And your mother's 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, how is it possible that these two deaths, and you know, 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 mincefoot, and had really bar mincefoot, but I think it's not a religious affiliation,

as much as a cultural one, and, you know, we love the rituals. But 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 blasphemous to say, but 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 Rufi Thorpe. The show stars El Fanning, Michelle Fyfer, and Nick Offerman. Our TV critic David B. and Kully has this review.

Margo's Got Money Troubles is created for television by David E. Kelly, who wrote her co-wrote several of the eight episodes. Kelly's impressive TV career goes all the way back to LA, LA, Allemic Beal, Picket 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 Rufi 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 Fyfer, currently starring in the Madison. Nick Offerman, from Parks and Recreation, Devs, and the Last of Us, and Veteran Stars, Greg Canier, and Marcia Gayhart. Appearing with all of them in the title role is El Fanning, who was so great as a comic Catherine the Great in the TV series called The Great.

Here, she plays Margo Millett, a promising first year student at a California Community College.

Her eventually odious literature professor, praises her writing, has 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 Fyfer.

You know me well enough when I get scared.

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. You're dead. You didn't even know his name.

“I guess I'm going to have to tell dad, by the way, if I decide to keep it.”

Promise that I keep me in the loop on the big stuff. Yeah, when was the last time you talked to him?

I'm on the wild, 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 for 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 he get?

“You know, if I had multiple surgeries on my spine over the years,”

not taking the pain pills wasn't an option. Taking him as prescribed wasn't an option. Horting him, abusing him, taking a lot of ones. And then it was heroin. But I am determined.

And desperate, not to go back to that place. 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 only fans 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 the reactions are real, and sometimes painful. She experiences shaming, regret, even legal troubles, which I mentioned 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 Walston was in picket fences. Even the characters you expect to be peripheral are one-dimensional, end up surprising you in this many series. 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 abandoned as the car stereo blares of vintage song, a song that someone poignantly describes them both. And just with the drums of the night I won't be blindless for the night.

Let's call the angels of the morning angels. Margo's got money troubles,

includes instances of casual nudity, but they never seem gratuitous.

Fanting 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, she worth the weight. And when Cheyenne fiver 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 B. and Kooley is Fresh Air's TV critic.

Coming up, Harvard professor Namwali Surpel on Toni Morrison. She spent 30 years within Morrison's prose and says, "What have we been missing the point of her work all along?" This is Fresh Air Weekend.

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. 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 Surpel, 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 blueist eye to God help the child as well as Morrison's criticism, plays, and poetry. Namwali Surpel is a professor of English at Harvard University and her own novels, the old drift and the furrows,

have won the Clark Award and been finalists for the National Book Critics 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 Tony Morrison." And 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 Tony 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. It's 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 and it's supposed to mean this quote and quote. 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. That 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 was 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 bail, then.”

Right. And there's a sense like, well, difficulty and 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.

She's a Nobel Laureate, but she's 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.

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,

“but 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 Chenwa Chibi, reading Bessie Head, reading Kameralai, 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 in 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 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,”

and 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 one 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 Xambia, 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 upbrings. And my blackness as Xambian, my blackness as an American, we've very different from hers growing up in Loreno-Hio,

And what I realized is that as she perceived in the work of someone like Chinua Chibi,

“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 Xambia, 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, but 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 pilot says, you think dark is just one color, but it ain't. They're 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 outside her idea?”

Yes, so pilots as 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 fall in 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 Medallino, Ohio, you find them negotiating their relationships with the community, but also their relationship with each other.

Very different kinds of people, right? Nell Wright is very, she comes from a very orderly household, a very respectable household, where 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 to award this moment of revelation. We're now 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 re-reading it to write, whether I'm reading it out loud, even just now, tears always bring 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. Namwali, 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 St out of Toni Morrison" was Lee 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.

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 a plaque attached to it to a building.

It was named building at Princeton, Morrison Hall, and she's sort of very rightly 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's actually what was so important. Molly Surpel, 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 Surpel is a professor of English at Harvard University. Her own novels, the old drift and the furrows, have won the Clark Award and been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle. She began to produce by Theresa Madden. Freshers executive producer is Sam Brader, our technical director and engineer, is Audrey Bintham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Scherock, and Maria Boltonato, Lauren Crinsle, O'Nignazerit,

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