Toni Morrison Is Toni Morrison's Biggest Fan | Zero to Well-Read Podcast

Added: 2026-05-24

[00:00:00]I think she absolutely took pleasure in her own work from very early on. There's an interview with her about The Bluest Eye where she mentions the fact that she spoils the novel on the first page. And she said, you know, my my hope was that if the if the reader didn't go on to find out what happened because they already knew what happened, that they would go on to to read it to find out why it happened or how it happened. And she said, "And if they didn't care about that, um at least they would be compelled by the beautiful prose." And there's this other moment where she's I think in I think it's Charlie Rose and and she talks about how I think the song Song of Solomon, she says something like I mean, I always loved it. I always love She He was like, "Do you feel like you finally achieved this now now that you've won these awards?" And she was like, "No, I always I always liked my work." She assumed that she would have like 200 readers, maybe. She's like she's writing she's writing back to Faulkner. She's writing to Dickinson.

[00:00:53]You know, she's thinking about that long tradition, but she's not thinking about like a specific target audience other than herself. You know?