Sula

Just a little.

Yeah, I mean, Sula I feel like is-

... you know, there's some ties there too, for sure.

Mm-hmm.

But then I'm also like, why is there always this tension like this between the women? It

kind of is making me reconsider Sula, right? Because if we're thinking about it, Terry McMillan would have been reading Sula.

That's interesting.

But I mean, I think there is a significant gap between the friendship between with Sula and the friendship, for example, in I think that it's doing something else because there's this grace that's provided, that they provide each other that doesn't exist.

They allow them a kind of humanity.

They allow them expansiveness.

If you start to change, there's this questioning of why are you, you're not who you used to be, which can happen in friendships.

But then there's this way that they're kind of competing.

It's interesting because I've actually brought a number of books here that I feel like should be on a syllabus, but I think we're going to do a lot more content around developing our own... kind of reading lists as adults, et cetera.

But I just, you know, I was looking at the books that I have and I was thinking like, if I had read Sula or Beloved by Toni Morrison as a student and had that opportunity to really look at it with a teacher in a classroom setting, that would have been so powerful.

Yeah, and I think that's the key point here you've just made is that reading Sula as an adult, which I did really within probably the last five or six years, If you are a lover of literature, obviously I know it's different when you're 15 than to now, but to have that opportunity to study it with a teacher in that setting, it's a whole different way of reading.

It really is.

And, you know, I was so privileged to study The Great Gatsby.

So my sons both go there for high school.

I read Sula twice.

So every year on the curriculum, it seemed like there was always one black book, right? Every year.

And so I remember reading, sophomore year reading Sula and being just so enamored by it and really not feeling like my teacher did it justice.

Yeah.

And then I read it again, right, in college with Farrah and was, you can imagine, a very different experience.

We read Evelyn Trouillot's novel, The Infamous Rosalie, which is about slavery and sentiment.

but right before the Haitian Revolution.

It didn't, it doesn't feel tragic.

This feels like sh- you know, I, I keep thinking of, um, Sula in, in Toni Morrison, at the end of the book she says, "I sure did live in this world."

Mm.

Yeah, yeah.

Mm

... like won the Nobel Prize yet, but she had, she had written Sula, Bluest Eye, Tar Baby, and Song of Solomon.

And she had published her short story Recitatif at this point.

And I don't know how much Toni Morrison you've read, but I could feel, I understood pretty quickly why Toni Morrison would want this book.

I was never handed a Toni Morrison book to read in high school.

I read Sula and Beloved and The Bluest Eye.

I read these things on my own.

Exactly.

No.

No, no, no, no. [laughs]

I actually think S- Sula is a pretty accessible, it's about a female friendship.

That one has got a lot of ways in.