transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:00] From WHYY in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Tonya Mosley. Today, Amanda Peet. She's in the new film, Fantasy Life, and the series, Your Friends & Neighbors. Peet 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.
Speaker 2:
[00:21] 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 shoe to drop. So in this case, it was three shoes.
Speaker 1:
[00:32] Also, we'll talk about Toni Morrison with Harvard professor, Namwali Serpell. 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.
Speaker 3:
[00:45] When that sentence comes into my life, tears always spring to my eyes.
Speaker 1:
[00:52] And David Bianculli 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 Tonya Mosley. Terry Gross has our first interview, and here she is.
Speaker 4:
[01:07] My guest is actor and writer Amanda Peet. She first became known for her roles in the 2000s, in films like The Whole Nine Yards, Igby Goes Down, Syriana, and the Nancy Meyers film Something's Gotta Give, always bringing intelligence and wit to her performances. She also co-starred on television in 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 & Neighbors, which recently started its second season. The show is about Coop, played by Jon 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 Peet 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. Peet also stars in the new film, Fantasy Life, which won the audience award at the South by Southwest Film Festival. Amanda Peet 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 Peet is also a great writer. She was co-creator and showrunner of Netflix series, The Chair, starring Sandra Oh. 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 Peet, welcome to Fresh Air.
Speaker 2:
[02:43] Thank you so much, Terry. It's an honor to talk to you.
Speaker 4:
[02:46] 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, was it like stage zero?
Speaker 2:
[03:06] I have stage one, luminal B, high-risk one, lobular breast cancer or had it, I should say.
Speaker 4:
[03:15] Yes, and most importantly, you are cancer-free now?
Speaker 2:
[03:21] Cancer-free and extremely lucky.
Speaker 4:
[03:23] Congratulations. I'm really happy for you. Thank you. And I'm really sorry about your parents.
Speaker 2:
[03:29] Thank you very much.
Speaker 4:
[03:31] So we'll talk about that New Yorker essay and your parents and your breast cancer all coinciding later.
Speaker 2:
[03:39] Okay.
Speaker 4:
[03:40] But I wanna start with your work. So I want to play a scene from Fantasy Life. And you play Diane Cohn, an actor who 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.
Speaker 2:
[04:08] I'm feeling a little discouraged.
Speaker 1:
[04:13] Oh, you mean acting-wise? Yeah. Let's process.
Speaker 2:
[04:18] Thank you.
Speaker 1:
[04:19] Sure.
Speaker 2:
[04:20] Um, basically I feel like nothing's happening. And nothing's gonna happen.
Speaker 1:
[04:29] Well, I mean, can you say more?
Speaker 2:
[04:35] I ran into Bob Hemble at the gym the other day and he didn't even recognize me, Kim. How is that possible? I won an Ubi.
Speaker 1:
[04:43] He has Alzheimer's, Diane.
Speaker 2:
[04:45] What?
Speaker 1:
[04:46] Heartbreaking.
Speaker 2:
[04:47] Oh, God.
Speaker 1:
[04:49] Family's having a hard time.
Speaker 2:
[04:50] Jesus. I'm so sorry. I mean...
Speaker 1:
[04:53] All right.
Speaker 2:
[04:55] What else? Ah. I don't know.
Speaker 1:
[05:00] Listen, it's gonna take a little time, babe. We're reintroducing you to everyone.
Speaker 2:
[05:06] I just thought it would move a little faster.
Speaker 1:
[05:07] 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.
Speaker 2:
[05:16] I think I just want auditions.
Speaker 1:
[05:17] If I could say, hey, check out this hilarious pilot Diane wrote.
Speaker 2:
[05:21] Kim. Am I too old?
Speaker 1:
[05:26] What? Absolutely not.
Speaker 2:
[05:27] I look in the mirror and I just... It doesn't seem right. And yet I look at other women who did stuff, you know, a decade ago, and it doesn't seem right.
Speaker 1:
[05:38] But I just... Here's what's not going to happen. You're not going to touch your face. You are gorgeous, Diane.
Speaker 2:
[05:43] You're a real a** woman.
Speaker 1:
[05:46] Stunning. Could you just give me one second?
Speaker 2:
[05:52] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[05:53] Yeah, of course. Put them on.
Speaker 4:
[05:58] That's a great scene. I love the suggestion.
Speaker 2:
[06:00] Wait.
Speaker 4:
[06:01] You can create content. Podcast.
Speaker 2:
[06:04] Way too close to home.
Speaker 4:
[06:06] Is it?
Speaker 2:
[06:07] Oh, my God. I mean, listening to it, it's really just triggering.
Speaker 4:
[06:14] What was the period in your life where you were feeling like, Diane, that you were like over the hill, that you look too old, you weren't getting roles?
Speaker 2:
[06:25] I mean, definitely when Togetherness was canceled. At that point, I thought, okay, well, that's that. That's it. But, you know, actors think that a lot. So it just has a whole new level of doom, I think, when you're older and wrinkly.
Speaker 4:
[06:50] 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 going to be older even if you're not yet, and you're what, in your early 50s? I mean, there's so many people of that age. It's a demographic. You can sell your movies to those people. Why would you leave them out? It just makes no sense. Make movies they want to go to.
Speaker 2:
[07:21] Yeah. Which I thought when I read the script was one of those.
Speaker 4:
[07:25] It was, for sure. Yeah. And do you also relate to the whole idea of like, does this mean I need face work done?
Speaker 2:
[07:34] I mean, I probably think about getting a facelift or something 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-
Speaker 4:
[08:03] What's the connection?
Speaker 2:
[08:05] I have almost like this 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. It's almost like recently I was thinking about my dad loved that ancient fable appointment in Samara. Do you know that?
Speaker 4:
[08:31] I don't. I know the title.
Speaker 2:
[08:33] It's a merchant servant in 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. Death says, no, I didn't mean to scare him. I was just startled because I have an appointment with him tonight in Samara.
Speaker 4:
[09:04] Oh.
Speaker 2:
[09:06] Sorry, that was a really long-winded answer to your facelift question.
Speaker 4:
[09:09] No, but that's a good answer.
Speaker 2:
[09:11] 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.
Speaker 4:
[09:25] Yeah. No, I understand. Tell me what you think of this. Here's my fear with actors who have facework done. Your face is such an important tool and you have such really nuanced facial expressions in your acting. 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.
Speaker 2:
[09:51] Well, but let me tell you this.
Speaker 4:
[09:53] Yes.
Speaker 2:
[09:54] We had a little premiere for Fantasy Life and afterwards there was a little party. 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 opened her arms and said, I love, and I thought she was going to say, your performance because we were at the premiere party. Instead, she said, I love your wrinkles.
Speaker 4:
[10:22] Oh.
Speaker 2:
[10:26] I found that to be really depressing, actually. 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.
Speaker 4:
[10:47] Can I reinterpret that for you? Okay.
Speaker 2:
[10:50] Please do.
Speaker 4:
[10:50] 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 work done. So where are you now just asking over and over what to do?
Speaker 2:
[11:05] I just don't know where the line is because I get facials and I dye my hair, I go to the gym. I guess that's not the same, but 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.
Speaker 4:
[11:32] In terms of relating to the character that you play in Fantasy Life, do you relate to the depression?
Speaker 2:
[11:41] 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. I really loved the part of Fantasy Life that dealt with mental illness, but more average, expectable mental illness. Like usually we see, as Matthew Shearer always points out, like the Joker with all his pills or Girl Interrupted, or people who are stark raving mad. But in this movie, these are just regular folks who sometimes get taken down. I found that to be really beautiful and rare. So that also spoke to me separately from the fact that she feels she's a husband, which also spoke to me.
Speaker 1:
[12:36] We're listening to Terry's conversation with Amanda Peet. 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 & Neighbors. We'll hear more of their conversation after a short break. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air Weekend.
Speaker 4:
[12:59] Let me move on to Your Friends & Neighbors, which is the Apple TV series that you star in with Jon Hamm. You play a divorced 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 end. 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.
Speaker 2:
[14:10] How's your new roommate?
Speaker 3:
[14:12] I'll let you know when she starts talking to me.
Speaker 4:
[14:16] How are you? You know I've been better.
Speaker 2:
[14:20] You know why she came to you, right?
Speaker 4:
[14:23] Because I'm her father.
Speaker 2:
[14:25] Because you're the vacation parent. The fun one.
Speaker 4:
[14:29] Okay.
Speaker 3:
[14:29] Are you mad because she's pissed at you or because she came to me? Seriously?
Speaker 2:
[14:33] You were always at work. I was the one who had to hold the line. You 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 for something, you'd be like, what did mom say?
Speaker 4:
[15:00] Yeah, because I was backing you up.
Speaker 2:
[15:01] You were passing the buck.
Speaker 3:
[15:03] Oh, please.
Speaker 2:
[15:05] I gave everything I had to those kids, and somehow I'm the...
Speaker 4:
[15:09] Well, if the shoe fits.
Speaker 3:
[15:12] Come on. Girls push back against their mothers.
Speaker 1:
[15:16] It's the thing.
Speaker 4:
[15:18] It'll pass.
Speaker 2:
[15:20] I guess you're just thrilled you get her all to yourself. Well, it's not the worst.
Speaker 3:
[15:26] 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.
Speaker 4:
[15:41] The scene from Your Friends & Neighbors, season 2, episode 3, and Your Friends & Neighbors is streaming on Apple TV. So we know we were talking about available roles for women who are middle-aged or older. In this series, I mean, your character is dealing with perimenopause, anxiety, rage, sexual changes. So I think TV and movies are starting to catch up with real life.
Speaker 2:
[16:14] 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 blown away by that.
Speaker 4:
[16:32] So in terms of relating to your characters, like your children are teenagers now. Are you going through crises with them? Were they like fight back?
Speaker 2:
[16:42] Oh, yeah. Some of those scenes with my adolescent daughter, Isabel, 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, that kind of absurd attachment to that status stuff, the name.
Speaker 4:
[17:36] And you took a different path than your parents. They weren't overjoyed that you wanted to be an actor.
Speaker 2:
[17:42] 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 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.
Speaker 4:
[18:10] 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 lumpectomy 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.
Speaker 2:
[18:44] Yes.
Speaker 4:
[18:45] 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 hospice, and before all the tests came back, you thought you might be dying too, because it's a very aggressive form of cancer.
Speaker 2:
[19:04] Well, to be honest, I was extremely lucky that I was hormone receptor positive and HER2 negative. So my cancer is Luminol B high-risk 1 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'm just sort of always waiting for the other shoe to drop. So 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. My husband, who's a doctor, my sister's a doctor in Philly actually, and her husband who's at shop in Philly. They were sort of like, we had almost like a team, I felt like, and a team around me. 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, there's no way to describe. It was very scary, but it was also very beautiful.
Speaker 4:
[20:32] Your mother was living in a cottage just like what, 20 feet away from your home so you could see her very frequently.
Speaker 2:
[20:39] Yeah.
Speaker 4:
[20:41] 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?
Speaker 2:
[20:51] 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.
Speaker 4:
[21:15] You're Jewish, but you don't practice, right?
Speaker 2:
[21:18] Well, we do Shabbat and the kids were Bat 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, 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, we... 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 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.
Speaker 4:
[22:32] Well, I want to thank you so much for coming on our show. It's just really been delightful to talk with you.
Speaker 2:
[22:38] Thank you so much, Terry. This is a dream come true.
Speaker 1:
[22:41] Amanda Peet 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 Bianculli, has this review.
Speaker 5:
[23:11] 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 LA Law, Ally McBeal, 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 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 Kinnear and Marsha Gay-Harton. 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 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 Pfeiffer.
Speaker 1:
[24:41] You know me well enough when I get scared.
Speaker 5:
[24:46] When I got pregnant with you, I was terrified.
Speaker 3:
[24:48] You kept me, a one-night stand from a guy who picked you up at Hooters.
Speaker 1:
[24:52] I mean, what would possess you?
Speaker 4:
[24:58] I thought he was the one.
Speaker 5:
[25:00] Your dad.
Speaker 1:
[25:01] You didn't even know his name. Well, I guess I'm going to have to tell dad, by the way, if I decide to keep it. Promise that I keep him in the loop on the big stuff.
Speaker 5:
[25:11] Yeah, when was the last time you talked to him?
Speaker 1:
[25:15] Not in a while. Closer to never than recently.
Speaker 5:
[25:20] 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.
Speaker 2:
[25:52] How bad did it get?
Speaker 5:
[25:56] You know, I've had multiple surgeries on my spine over the years.
Speaker 2:
[26:01] Not taking the pain pills wasn't an option.
Speaker 3:
[26:06] Taking them as prescribed wasn't an option. Hoarding them, abusing them, taking a lot at once.
Speaker 1:
[26:14] Uh...
Speaker 3:
[26:15] and then it was heroin. But I am determined.
Speaker 4:
[26:26] I'm desperate not to go back to that place.
Speaker 2:
[26:35] You know I love you.
Speaker 1:
[26:40] Do you know that, dad?
Speaker 5:
[26:42] 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 McCrane 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 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 bandan as the car stereo blares a vintage song. A song that somewhat poignantly describes them both.
Speaker 1:
[28:20] Okay, here comes our part.
Speaker 5:
[28:47] 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.
Speaker 1:
[29:28] David Bianculli is Fresh Air's TV critic. Coming up, Harvard professor, Namwali Serpell on Toni Morrison. She spent 30 years within Morrison's prose and says, What if we've been missing the point of her work all along? This is Fresh Air 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 in 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 Furrows, have won the Clark Award and been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle. Namwali, welcome to Fresh Air.
Speaker 3:
[31:04] Thank you so much.
Speaker 1:
[31:06] 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?
Speaker 3:
[31:32] 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. 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 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 Beowulf then. And there's a sense like, well, you know, difficulty in art is supposed to be there, so why does it keep being translated as this personality flaw?
Speaker 1:
[33:53] 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?
Speaker 3:
[34:35] 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. 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 Chinua Achebe, reading Bessie Head, reading Kamara 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.
Speaker 1:
[36:31] 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?
Speaker 3:
[37:19] 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. 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 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, 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, 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.
Speaker 1:
[38:53] 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?
Speaker 3:
[39:23] 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 Chebein, 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, 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.
Speaker 1:
[41:06] 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 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 embodies that insider-outsider idea?
Speaker 3:
[41:50] Yes, so, you know, 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 Pease, 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 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.
Speaker 1:
[43:00] 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.
Speaker 3:
[43:35] 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.
Speaker 1:
[44:33] 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 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, does a book called On Morrison risk becoming part of that problem?
Speaker 3:
[45:14] 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. They renamed the building at Princeton Morrison Hall, and she's sort of very wryly 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.
Speaker 1:
[46:54] Namwali Serpell, thank you so much for this conversation and thank you for this book.
Speaker 3:
[46:59] Thank you so much for having me, and thank you for these wonderful questions.
Speaker 1:
[47:03] Namwali Serpell 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. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Fresh Air's executive producer is Sam Brigger. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Onique Nazareth, Thea Challener, Susan Nkundee, Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez-Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly Sivinesper. With Terry Gross, I'm Tonya Mosley.