NP - Toni Morrison on love, loss and modernity

[David Morris]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/9395051/Toni-Morrison-on-love-loss-and-modernity.html

Morrison has written 10 novels and won a multitude of highly respected
awards.Her best-seller Belovedwon the Pulitzer Prize and was voted by
The New York Times the best work of American fiction in the past 25
years. Her 1977 novel Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics
Circle Award. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970,
when she was 39 years old and at the time, working at Random House as
an editor. Because her literary success came later in life, when did
she begin to trust her instincts – was it immediate?

“Oh, I trust something else,” she says, thinking it through. “Which is
the intelligence to examine my instincts.” In 1958, Morrison married
an architect, Harold Morrison, when they were both studying at Howard
University in Washington DC. When they split in 1964, she was pregnant
and after their divorce, she was left to care for their two young sons
– Harold and Slade. She had by then received her Masters in Literature
at Cornell University and became a single, working mother living in
Syracuse (having taken a job editing textbooks at Random House),
raising two children on her own. She never remarried. “I don’t think I
did any of that very well,” she has said of that time. “I did it ad
hoc, like any working mother does.” But not every working mother wakes
up every day at four in the morning to write. This is how she wrote
The Bluest Eye – turning it from a short story she had started five
years earlier into a novel. Morrison has never discussed her reasons
for leaving her husband but has hinted in the past about how he wished
for a more subservient wife. (“He didn’t need me making judgments
about him,” she said, “which I did. A lot.”) Today, it’s clear she
doesn’t see the divorce as a life-changing event.