Wednesday, November 6, 1996
The grand ballroom of the Waldorf Astoria smells like perfume and coffee, and everyone is applauding.
At center stage, Toni Morrison receives a large bronze medal on a bright blue ribbon. Like the evening’s other winners, Morrison will also get ten thousand dollars and (fingers crossed) a sales bump.
It’s a perfect finale for the Forty-Sixth National Book Awards, the embodiment of their mission to “celebrate the best of American literature.”
“I want to tell two little stories,” Morrison says as the clapping fades. “The first, I heard third- or fourth-hand . . .”
As Morrison speaks, a green-eyed woman at table thirty-seven listens politely. Like Morrison, she’s an author, but she’s also one of five judges in a brand-new category: Young People’s Literature. That award already happened, so now she just sits, waiting for things to wrap up.
For the woman at table thirty-seven, grousing would be easy. She’s sold more books than Toni Morrison. In fact, she’s sold more books than all of the winners combined. Her second book is still moving a thousand copies a week—more than four million so far. Not bad, considering it came out twenty-five years ago.
But no one asked her to speak tonight.
That’s how it’s always been. Ignored. Pushed aside. Deleted. Her biggest hit doesn’t even have her name on it, for Pete’s sake.
The agent’s fault. Why did I listen to him?
No matter. Tonight is a victory, the payoff for decades of hustling.
Later, at the afterparty, she’ll need to be careful. Nothing about her college degrees, or her fascinating career as an adolescent psychologist. (Or was it psychotherapist? So hard to keep track.)
And no mention of the dead boy. Not in this crowd.
She knows how much damage a writer can do.