Toni Morrison’s Life “Not Interesting,” Says Novelist

Readers who were looking forward to one day enjoying Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s memoir will have to find another role model to read about. The author of Beloved and The Bluest Eye has announced she won’t be writing that story, because she doesn’t find her life interesting enough. From The Guardian:

Morrison, one of America's most celebrated novelists and the first black woman to win the Nobel prize for literature, was speaking to students at Oberlin College, Ohio, near the city of Lorain, where she was born in 1931. According to local press, she was asked if she intended to write an autobiography about her childhood in the area, and admitted that she had gone so far as to sign a contract for her next book to be a memoir.

"But then I cancelled it," she said. "My publisher asked me to do it, but there's a point at which your life is not interesting, at least to me. I'd rather write fiction."

Though Morrison might be bored by the details, it would seem there’s enough material in her life for several wonderful books. Morrison, however, doesn’t see it that way:

"People say to write about what you know," she told students in Oberlin. "I’m here to tell you, no one wants to read that, ’cause you don’t know anything. So write about something you don’t know. And don’t be scared, ever."

The good news? Morrison will debut a new novel in May. The publisher tells us that Home (Knopf) is Morrison’s “profound take on our history with this twentieth-century tale of redemption: a taut and tortured story about one man’s desperate search for himself in a world disfigured by war.”