13 Times Representation Mattered In Books

"I wanted to be an actress from the time I was little until I went off to college.

This little black girl is told that she can’t play Peter Pan. Spoiler alert, not only does she get the role, she blows everyone away."

“It was a really pretty world that somebody else created,” Tracy says. “I was just like, woah, anybody can do this...I think that’s the first time that I was like ‘I want to do this.’ I want to write a book one day that makes people feel the way this book has made me feel. It’s been on my list of favorite books since the second grade.”

She says she remembers "love, love LOVING that book and just rereading it and carrying it around until it was tattered because it was suddenly a whole family of my people. So I’ve definitely had different moments where I had an awakening and a point where I felt legitimizes, not only me as a human being, but as a writer."

But the representation problem is REAL, she says. "I didn’t see myself in so many of the books that we were reading in my classroom. Even the books that my mother got out of the library didn’t represent us or didn’t represent us positively. The books that were winning awards and getting into our classroom were oftentimes problematic."

"I remember that was one of the first books that I read that followed a middle class black family that was having these struggles but it wasn't the sort of glorified struggle of that we're used to seeing often in narratives about black families. I just remember reading it and thinking that these characters were just regular black people having problems. It’s a contemporary novel and something that’s happening now, not this epic, big historic book that we often see for fiction with black characters."

But he says that when he finally found Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name by Audre Lorde, “it was the first time I was able to see in the nonfiction memoir form, a black queer artist, poet, lover, really making her way through the world,” and it inspired him to cultivate his own voice. “I used to go to the library and find books about gay and queer experiences, wherever I could in the ‘gay’ section—it was like 'homosexual studies' in the library, and I would pull them onto my lap and I would sit on the floor cross legged and then I would get a history book to hide it in case anyone came near me. That was my experience trying to find myself in books.

“I grew up in Hawaii in this very multiracial society where kids of all these different backgrounds were always playing and getting along. So for me, at a real young age to discover these collections in the library of Morrie Turner’s cartoons and many years later I actually got to become his neighbor and we became really good friends! That was just everything to me.”

“It’s not my job to make people feel good about the world. No more than it’s Joan Didion’s job to feel food about the world. No more than it was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s job to make people feel good about the world. I make literature. And the notion that art should be judged by whether it makes you feel good or not, whether or not it makes you feel good about tomorrow is absurd. And infantile.”

PS: TNC says “If you don’t read Toni Morrison, you don’t understand American literature.”

Young adult novelist Brandy Colbert says she first really saw herself when she read Sula for a women’s lit class In college. "I can't believe I hadn’t read anything by Toni Morrison by that point, but I was so glad to be introduced to it. Sula is just a gorgeous story and is still one of my favorite books. And it had a realistic portrayal of black women that I think is just wonderful. I love it, I can’t say enough great things about it. And then I went on to read everything by Toni Morrison"