On DifficultyThere are many ways to be difficult in this world. You can be demanding, inconvenient, stubborn, complicated, troublesome, baffling, illegible. Black womanhood is one place where all these forms of difficulty overlap. I have always known this; 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.
Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything from literature to politics to criticism to ethics to the responsibilities of making art. But the facts remain: She is difficult to read. She is difficult to teach. Notwithstanding the voluminous train of profiles, reviews, and scholarly analysis that she drags behind her, she is difficult to write about. More to the point, she is our only truly canonical black, female writer—and her work is highly complex. This, it seems, is difficult to swallow.
The very fact of Morrison—a black woman and a genius—has been, to some people, simply an affront. In 1979, she was interviewed for two major profiles, one in
The New York Times and one in
Vogue. At that point in her career, she was the author of three novels, her most recent,
Song of Solomon, having won the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1977.
One might expect an aura of celebration, but the Times profile instead had this oddly truculent tone:
She is, at 48, a big, handsome woman with beginning-to-gray hair. She is often breathless, often running, often (I was to learn) late. . . . Her defensiveness was palpable. I would soon learn that she is a woman of many moods. Not just ordinary moods: abrupt, seismic shifts, as if the energy within were caught between opposite poles—the need to express and the need to defend. She will often put on an act. In conversation, she might suddenly “get down” and be very chicken-and-ribs, sucking her teeth, poking a finger into her scalp and scratching—a strange, primitive gesture that makes her hairdo rock back and forth on her scalp like a wig. It’s not difficult to get the impression that she’s putting you on, at times, taking pleasure in watching you try to figure her out.
Putting aside the casual racism of the time (and the Times), what strikes me is the interviewer’s palpable resentment about the myriad ways in which Morrison was difficult: late, defensive, moody, abrupt, performative, “strange,” “primitive,” manipulative, implicitly sadistic. What seems to have irked the interviewer most of all was her impression that Morrison actively enjoyed being difficult.
In the other profile, in
Vogue, Morrison spoke of a white American reader who had “told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books—it was so removed from his experience.” She had responded: “Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf !” The
Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, went on to comment: “Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. ‘I find myself being more and more difficult,’ she says. ‘It’s something I really relish.’ ” Even Morrison’s literary difficulty and the pleasure she took in it was translated here into personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn’t you be?
One reason for Morrison’s air of pique was surely the strain of trying to balance the demands of multiple careers simultaneously. She was an editor, a professor, a writer, a critic, and a public intellectual. I have worked in these worlds as well, but not for nearly as long and rarely at the same time. To bolster my spirits, I often recite her words about how these professions are really all one thing: “I read books. I teach books. I write books. I think about books. It’s one job.”
But extending many branches is sometimes a way of distracting yourself from the exigency of the core vocation. The commitment to writing over all else is often viewed by detractors as selfish; when gender is factored into the equation, the charge can carry the stigma of illegitimacy. “For a woman to say, ‘I am a writer’ is difficult,” Morrison noted succinctly.
She struggled to accommodate these forms of often underpaid literary labor with the unpaid domestic labor of raising two sons as a single mother: “It was very difficult writing and rearing children because they deserve all your time, and you don’t have it.” This occupational difficulty was exacerbated not only by the fact that she was unique in her fields but also by the fact that she often chose to go it alone.
For example, she didn’t tell anyone at her first job in trade publishing that she was writing a novel until
The Bluest Eye came out at another house. And it is notable that not one of Morrison’s sole-authored books has an acknowledgments page.
While autonomy was indispensable to Morrison’s success in her professional life, it was also a source of trouble within it. Her longtime editor, Robert Gottlieb, who is the person who gave her permission to be a writer when she grew up, as she put it, once said: “Toni appears to be such a formidable person, and is such a formidable person, that people assume that working with her could be difficult. It’s exactly the opposite.” But his view seems to have been the exception that proves the rule.
Dana A. Williams’s recent book
Toni at Random, a fascinating overview of Morrison’s own editorial work, divulges the clashes Morrison had with her (mostly white) colleagues and her (mostly black) authors over the years. Williams generously refers to some of Morrison’s more cutting remarks as
signifying, a black art form of insult that prizes accuracy over tact. But there’s no mistaking Morrison’s arch tone in her correspondence with her authors.
She wrote to one who had accused her of racism: “I will probably always be befuddled about what you imagine this publishing company to be and about your reasons for ascribing sinister motives to a copyediting mistake.” She teased a sculptor venturing into poetry for the first time, noting drily, “This is a commercial house historically unenchanted with 500 slim volumes of profound poetry that languish in stockrooms,” and writing more sharply in a follow-up letter draft: “If you wanted an anonymous, plain, uneventful recessive jacket you should never have come to this publisher. The only time that works is when the poet is very well known—as a poet. You are not.”
When it came to playing well with others as a critic, we need only consider the series of angry letters to the editor in
The New York Times about Morrison’s review in 1971 of an anthology,
To Be a Black Woman, which was edited by two men and which she had faulted for its sexism. And when it came to Morrison as a collaborator, there are the various slings and arrows of outrageous misunderstanding between her and the white producers of her play
Dreaming Emmett. As troublesome as it may have been for her professionally, she seemed genuinely to delight in the difficulty of other black women artists such as the black jazz pianist and composer Mary Lou Williams; for Morrison, it was a sign that they had insisted on being taken seriously. Being taken seriously is of course what most artists want, though for obvious reasons, it does not always need such insistence. Part of my project in this book is to show you how to read Morrison with the seriousness that she deserves. To do so requires that we account for the knot—or bind—of gender and race that she and I share.
It is not an easy one to untangle. As Morrison wrote in a 1971
New York Times op-ed, in order to recognize feminism’s elisions and delusions about race, “one must look very closely at the black woman herself—a difficult, inevitably doomed proposition, for if anything is true of black women, it is how consistently they have (deliberately, I suspect) defied classification.”
Let me begin by looking very closely at Morrison herself, at how her own deliberate difficulty—personal, political, and literary—defied classification . . . and made for brilliance. Difficult, doomed propositions are our forte, after all.
Copyright © 2026 by Namwali Serpell. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
