May 7th--I’m editing a book about two girls, so I'm reading books on friendship. I downloaded Recitatif a short story by Toni Morrison. It’s Morrison’s only short story and it’s about two girls of different races, put in the same foster situation, but the reader doesn’t know who is black and who is white. The story quite brilliantly plays on our desire to know race in order to contextualize. There’s an excellent forward by Zadie Smith. My favourite line: “We didn’t like each other all that much at first, but nobody else wanted to play with us because we weren’t real orphans with beautiful dead parents in the sky.”
