Word: morrisons
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Looking back over her 66 years, Morrison says, "Being able to laugh got me through," and she does so far more often in private conversations than her dignified and rather somber public image would suggest. She jokes about her childhood in Lorain, Ohio. "I was the one with the anonymous birth order. There was my older sister, firstborn; me, void; my younger brother, first son; and another son, the family baby. Feeling left out, and trying to attract attention, I became the noisiest of them...
...credits her parents with the drive and self-confidence that took her through college at Howard University, an M.A. from Cornell, a teaching post at Howard and editing jobs that eventually landed her in Manhattan. Jason Epstein, now a Random House vice president and executive editor, was Morrison's boss in those days, and he has remained a friend ever since. "She was a wonderful colleague," he says, "always bright and apt and funny. I used to love to go sit in her office, just for the pleasure of it; it was full of plants, I remember. It was clear...
...Morrison laughs at a subsequent event that has, in terms of mass recognition, affected her life more dramatically than did the Nobel Prize: the selection, in December 1996, of her 1977 novel Song of Solomon as the second offering of the Oprah Book Club. "I'd never heard of such a thing," she says, "and when someone called, all excited, with the news, all I could think was, 'Who's going to buy a book because of Oprah?'" The answer came fairly quickly and astonishingly. "A million copies of that book sold," she says, again shaking her head. "And sales...
...Morrison naturally welcomes the commercial windfalls such recognition brings, but she is not terribly comfortable with being recognized in that way. She faces her upcoming publicity tour for Paradise with a certain dread, although she feels she owes the effort to her publisher, which has a large investment in the novel. "I get cranky and depressed on the road," she says. As a Nobel laureate, she has a little more cachet than struggling first novelists, so she has been able to set certain limits on how she is displayed. "I've refused to do the morning TV shows. I just...
Even without the upcoming tour, Morrison's life seems hectic. She rents an apartment near Princeton University in New Jersey, where since 1989 she has held a university chair in the humanities; another apartment in lower Manhattan; and a stone house in Rockland County, N.Y. Plus, she is having rebuilt the house she owned on the Hudson River just north of New York City, which burned to the ground on Christmas Day 1993. Three residences? Or four, counting the house in progress? "I was a child of the Depression," she shrugs and laughs. "I have bad dreams about eviction...