Fran Lebowitz, Danez Smith, and Pam Houston reflect on the impact Toni Morrison had on their lives. 

Toni Morrison (Photo © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders)

I met Toni in 1978. The Academy of American Poets sent me a letter. They had a reading series where they put two writers together and the guy asked me, “Do you know who Toni Morrison is?” She wasn’t that well known then. I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Do you like her work?” I said, “I love her work!” Then he asked if I wanted to read with her, and I said, “That’s ridiculous! I can hardly think of a writer I have less in common with.” But we became best friends instantly. I mean instantly. Right afterward, Toni said, “We should go on the road together!” I always knew how old Toni was. She was exactly twenty years older than me.

Here’s a thing that most people don’t know about Toni: Toni was one of the most fun people I’ve ever known. And I am an expert on fun. When Toni won the Nobel Prize, she took a bunch of people with her, including me, and she called us the Nobelettes. When I got to Stockholm, there was a message at the front desk: call Toni immediately. I said, “Okay, I’ll call from my room,” and they said no, you have to call her immediately. They were very excited that she was there. So I called from the desk and Toni said, “Fran, I need your help.” She had two things. “You have to help me with my speech, and I don’t know which gloves to wear.” I went to her room and it was just a sea of clothes and gloves. I mean clothes everywhere. The Nobel Prize ball, which you may never attend, is white tie, and, at least at the time, women wore opera gloves. The gloves were the first thing, the most important thing. Toni loved clothes. Manolo Blahnik was a friend of mine, so I arranged for her to get some shoes from him for the ball. I don’t think he knew her writing, but he loved her. Sue Newhouse once gave Toni a Judith Leiber bag—do you know what those are? You can look it up on your device. She made these extremely expensive bags, bejeweled, in the shape of raspberries or the Queen of England. And this was something that Toni just adored. She said, “Why don’t other people think of this?” I said, “Well, Toni, these things cost thousands of dollars!” But the best thing to give Toni was dessert.

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Toni Morrison. Photo: Angela Radulescu.

We are deeply sad to report that Toni Morrison died yesterday at age eighty-eight. Over the course of eleven novels and several essay collections, children’s books, and plays, she reshaped the American literary landscape and influenced just about every English-language writer currently working. The Paris Review was lucky enough to conduct an Art of Fiction interview with Morrison on the eve of her 1993 Nobel Prize win.

Born to a family of talented musicians, Morrison came late to the realization that she wanted to be a writer, but in her interview, she is clear about her intentions: “All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books.” For twenty years, Morrison worked as an editor at Random House, where she published Gayl Jones, Nettie P. Jones, and Toni Cade Bambara. Once she finally did begin writing, she kept relatively quiet about it; when her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970, her coworkers learned of the book’s existence from a review in the New York Times. “It was by the time I was writing Song of Solomon, the third book, that I began to think that this was the central part of my life,” she says. “Not to say that other women haven’t said it all along, but for a woman to say, I am a writer, is difficult … It isn’t so difficult anymore, but it certainly was for me and for women of my generation or my class or my race.” Read More