The Source of Self-Regard - Toni Morrison Page 0,135

the other way around.

QUESTION: Ms. Morrison, earlier you said you had no intention of becoming a writer when you started to write. Could you explain what you meant by this?

MORRISON: I was in a place where I didn’t belong, and I wasn’t going to be there very long so I didn’t want to make it any nicer than it was. And I didn’t want to meet anybody, and I didn’t like anybody and they didn’t like me either; and that was fine with me; and I was lonely. I was miserable. My children were small, and so I wrote this story. I had written a little story before, in the time I could spare to work it up in the evening. (You know children go to bed, if you train them, at seven. Wake up at four but go to bed at seven.) And so after I put them to bed, I would write, and I liked it. I liked thinking about it. I liked making that kind of order out of something that was disorderly in my mind. And also I sensed that there was an enormous indifference to these people, to me, to you, to black girls. It was as if these people had no life, no existence in anybody’s mind at all except peripherally. And when I got into it, it just seemed like writing was absolutely the most important thing in the world. I took forever to write that first book: almost five years for just a little book. Because I liked doing it so much, I would just do a little bit, you know, and think about that. I was a textbook editor at that time. I was not even trying to be a writer, and I didn’t let anybody know that I was writing this book because I thought they would fire me, which they would have. Maybe not right away, but they didn’t want me to do that. They felt betrayed anyway. If you’re an editor, what you’re supposed to do is acquire books, not produce them. There is a light adversarial relationship between publishers and authors that I think probably works effectively. But that’s why I was very quiet about writing. I don’t know what made me write it. I think I just wanted to finish the story so that I could have a good time reading it. But the process was what made me think that I should do it again, and I knew that that was the way I wanted to live. I felt very coherent when I was writing that book. But I still didn’t call myself a writer. And it was only with my third book, Song of Solomon, that I finally said—not at my own initiative I’m embarrassed to tell you but at somebody else’s initiative—“This is what I do.” I had written three books. It was only after I finished Song of Solomon that I thought, “Maybe this is what I do only.” Because before that I always said that I was an editor who also wrote books or a teacher who also wrote. I never said I was a writer. Never. And it’s not only because of all the things you might think. It’s also because most writers really and truly have to give themselves permission to win. That’s very difficult, particularly for women. You have to give yourself permission, even when you’re doing it. Writing every day, sending books off, you still have to give yourself permission. I know writers whose mothers are writers, who still had to go through a long process with somebody else—a man or editor or friend or something—to finally reach a point where they could say, “It’s all right. It’s okay.” The community says it’s okay. Your husband says it’s okay. Your children say it’s okay. Your mother says it’s okay. Eventually everybody says it’s okay, and then you have all the okays. It happened to me: even I found a moment after I’d written the third book when I could actually say it. So you go through passport and customs and somebody asks, “What do you do?” And you print it out: WRITE.

The Source of Self-Regard

I WANT TO TALK about two books in a way in which I understand a kind of progression to have taken place in my work, to talk a little bit about Beloved and a little bit about a new novel, and to suggest to you some of the obstacles that I created