From Gimlet Media, this is The Not. I'm Brittany Lewis.

On August 5th, 2019, the world lost one of the best of us in Tony Morrison. I got the

news as I was coming into work and I spent the rest of that day trying to understand

the shape and depth of a loss that huge. But after the initial shock war off, the first

emotion that I felt, it wasn't sadness or devastation, it was gratitude. I was happy just

to have been born during her lifetime. You know, that I got to witness and read her work.

I just felt lucky. That was the depth of her gift. Unfortunately, our show wasn't in

production at the time of Miss Morrison's passing. So we weren't able to memorialize

her with an episode of The Not. But our friends at the Cut on Tuesdays put together a beautiful

tribute to Miss Morrison's impact that week, featuring me and so many other black women

I admire. Like I'm not too so of Call Your Girlfriend and Glory Edom of the Well-Red Black

Girl Book Club. And we love this episode so much. We are sharing it with you today. So here

it is from our friends at The Cut, the episode called Growing Up with Tony Morrison.

From The Cut and Gimlett Media, this is The Cut on Tuesdays. I'm your host, Molly Fisher.

I started to write when I was in a lonely place and I was writing really for me and not for

publication and not for anybody. I was really talking, was a way of talking then. So I

talked to myself a lot.

This is Tony Morrison, talking to PBS back in 1977, which means it's Tony Morrison, before

she was fully established as Tony Morrison. She just published her first book seven years

before and listening to her talk, you can hear someone who's still getting started.

I certainly hope that I am a successful writer, but I know that if there were no publishing

companies left in the world, I would still do it.

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