Margo Jefferson

KV

Both on the page and in life, you have seemingly infinite quotations at your fingertips—a lost art. Has memorization always been one of your faculties?

MJ

That's interesting. Well, I think one always starts with the most complimentary possibility: I do think that it's a faculty of mine. My mother read a lot to us, and she read very well, a lot of poetry. As a child, you're always picking up language, and this was very appealing. I was also playing the piano and very involved in music, so memorizing notes, and then words, gave me pleasure. Because a lot of what I memorize is, or was, music—listening over and over to records and loving the line readings and the performances so much that you start imitating them too.

KV

How do you consolidate the holdings of that mental library?

MJ

What I've been doing for years, which I really made use of for Constructing a Nervous System, was putting down all kinds of phrases—it might be some little sentence in the newspaper, or from a novel, or wherever—on a note card, and putting that in a file box. And I’ve found that, somehow or another, the order you put them in—or the disorder that you accept—keeps thoughts and associations going. So we might call it consolidation with a little bit of improvisation; what you find sends you to something else that you hadn't thought about. Now I don't do this as compulsively, as madly, as happily as I used to, but I do keep it up.

KV

Functionally, it seems a bit like a commonplace book. What kind of subheadings would you file these clippings under?

MJ

Yes, a commonplace book, that's exactly right. Sometimes the subheadings were very literal: “black women's memoirs,” “physical ailments,” “ailments - family.” Sometimes they were a little more psychologically specific. And things got more complicated, at some point, when I also started writing things down on my computer; should I print those out and add them to the folders too? Anyway, there’s something about the little note cards and organizing and writing down that is very satisfying. Maybe that's an old handwriting pleasure, when the hand and mind are cooperating.

KV

When did you start this practice?

MJ

In the early ’70s, when I had just moved to New York, I had a friend who was a bookbinder, so I would get these really nice notebooks—I think that's when I started doing it in earnest. And I would just, instead of keeping a journal, scribble different phrases, words, quotes in notebooks and look through them occasionally, because they would please me. It just occurred to me that, in the ’70s, when I was a working critic, there was such a pervasive assumption that if you were a serious writer, you were working with a novel, or at least thinking about a novel. With your generation, it seems to no longer be such a matter of life and death. But back then, I think that collecting all this material helped me feel like my mind might go somewhere else, that I might produce some other form or shape. I think it was a consolation in that way, because a part of me—well, I didn’t really want to write a novel, but I wanted to do something interesting, something that went deeper. And with journalism, as you know, so often you have to short-circuit the creative, associative parts of yourself; you've got to meet the deadlines, sometimes a magazine or a newspaper has a structure they want you to use. So this collecting habit was a way to counter that.

KV

The realization that you don’t want something, which you just voiced about the writing of novels, can be so powerful. It makes me think of the brief but memorable part of Negroland where you admit that you don't really want to have children, that you want a different kind of intellectual life. The strains of feminism that we each grew up with focused so much on choice, and thus on articulating your desires—but maybe figuring out what you don’t want is equally important.

MJ

Absolutely, and it can be very generative. I mean, there are many styles of being angry and of resisting, not just one mode. And yes, it was very exciting to realize, oh, I don't want to do this. I never wanted to do this. Whoa, okay. Now look how much space has just been cleared up in my head, in my life.

KV

I hadn’t realized quite how young you were when you wrote “Ripping Off Black Music,” as published in the January 1973 issue of Harper’s. Were you still in graduate school at the time?

MJ

I started writing it in 1970, when I was at Columbia Journalism School. You had to pick your concentration: broadcast, newspaper, and so on. Mine was magazine writing, and that was the first piece I wrote. And I remember being so thrilled when I came up with that 18th century title.

KV

So it was based on an assignment?

MJ

It was a piece I wrote for a class, yes. My teacher, Paul Brodeur, was a New Yorker writer. But this was just something I really wanted to write. I had somehow made it through the ’60s, but I was still very attuned to, and rattled by, all the clashes that were already happening in terms of Black music and white music, and soul music and rock, and I was angry at the ways in which the so-called best aspects of soul and R&B were being bootlegged and kidnapped for rock and roll. Above all, there was Elvis, but Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix, two of the musicians I came to focus on, both died in 1970 too. I was thrilled by Jimi Hendrix, because he really was mixed—white and black himself, and musically, he took from whatever. And I actually liked Janis Joplin, more—my Black nationalist self worried—than a Black person maybe should. She had real power. She absolutely did. As for myself, I had gone, between the years of 1964 and 1968 (when I was an undergraduate at Brandeis) from being a good integrationist to considering myself something of a Black Power advocate. So all of that was in it too. And of course, you could see them all performing constantly: Elvis and Janis and Jimi Hendrix and the British invasion, and the rapture of all this just stirred me up, as this person who was poised in both camps, in both worlds. You know, every summer before I went to my music camp—Interlochen, in northern Michigan—I would make sure that I knew enough “white songs” so that I could keep up while I was there. But then when I came back to Chicago, I’d have to catch up with all the Black music I’d missed in eight weeks. And this was not un-amusing to me. Always, there was the self-conscious layer; I also found, for instance, that I enjoyed the Beach Boys more than I thought I should. That kind of thing.

KV

Even reading that piece a half-century (!) later, you get the sense that you’d been thinking about it for a long time before it kind of exploded forth, laying out a pervasive dynamic that’s hard to unsee. What was the impact at the time?

MJ

It took a couple of years for it to be published, so the first responses, for almost two years, were from my classmates and the professor. And then Columbia used to have something called “field observation week,” where all of us little students would be sent, through our professors’ contacts, to different magazines or stations—a tourist version of an internship. We were of no use to them, but they did favors for their friends, and I got sent to Harper's. I met with Midge Decter, an editor married to Norman Podhoretz (and just as conservative) and my friend Helen, who was with me and a little bolder than I was, said I ought to mention my piece and send it to her when the week was over. So I did, and she wrote back that it was very well-written, but she didn’t think that rock-and-roll was a serious critical subject. A year or so later, Lewis Lapham took over, and again, another friend of mine ran into him and mentioned my piece and how it had been turned down by the previous editor, which probably provoked his interest. He said, “Tell her to send it to me,” and that time, they accepted it.  The responses went both ways. “Oh yes at last” and “Oh, you are so sour and grumpy.” Absolutely, I got both. “Isn’t this an old topic? An old grievance?” Why was I focusing on the bad?

KV

A sure sign that you’d hit your mark. Rewinding for a moment, how did you pick this magazine stream within the journalism school? It seems, in retrospect, like a fateful choice.

MJ

You know, I had never actively, passionately wanted to be a journalist, which, in those days, one tended to associate with newspapers. I had not worked on the high school newspaper; I had not worked on the college newspaper. So I was poised between thinking I’d get a PhD in some version of American Studies, or launching myself into the world as-is. I always knew that the only kind of journalist I was going to be was a critic. And when it came time to choose, I decided that it was better for the more adventurous part of my temperament to go into journalistic criticism.

KV

Did you have any lodestars, in terms of the kind of criticism you hoped to practice?

MJ

The first important connections I made were when I was just out of college, when I started realizing that my reading list was my own now, and would be forever. I could keep up with these old books I had, but I was inventing myself as an intellectual, as an aesthete, as whatever. The first criticism that really excited me came from novelists: it was Ralph Ellison who sent me to Constance Rourke, for example, who seems wispy now, but at the time, was important to writing on popular American culture. He sent me to Albert Murray too. And I read Virginia Woolf's fiction first, but in my early twenties— when it still wasn’t clear to me that I wanted to be a critic—I started digging out her essays, and that really made a difference. They showed me that criticism is literary, and that it engages these first-rate minds. And Baldwin is great, of course, but he was a cultural and political critic more than an arts critic—so in that way, he was a little separate. And I get so tired of George Orwell sometimes—don’t you?—but he was useful too. Just the other day, in one of my classes, I found myself reaching for his essay on the pleasures of bad poetry.

KV

And how did you think about matters of style?

MJ

I was always very aware of real writing style; I wouldn’t have cleaved onto the criticism of Woolf and Ellison otherwise. My sense of voice, of technique, of style, were the reasons I wanted to be a critic, as opposed to a journalist—so I could engage with all of those. There was a period when I thought, what you’ll do is you’ll write each piece, each book review, in the style of the writer, and that will be so exciting, and you’ll be in conversation with them. Well, you can do that sometimes, but often, it’s just parody, right? It sounds a bit silly but just the other day I read an interview with Zadie Smith where she shared a similarly shaped sentiment, something like, “You know, if you’re writing about Borges, you start thinking ‘Borgesly.’” And I thought, “My God, okay, it still exists: this desire to write in the mode of the person you’re intimately engaging with as a critic.” It can help loosen you up, at any rate. And she does it so well.

There aren’t any writers whose every word I follow, but—thinking back to the entries in my card files and notebooks—I’m ever more aware of what I need from a writer. And sometimes actually it’s from a musician—if I’m stuck, to help unstick me, or to help set a kind of tone, infuse a certain energy to get through a piece, or to its next version. Thelonious Monk always gives the mind some surprising twist.

KV

Something I love about your work is that, though you work in many different forms, they still come together as one art, and your identity as a reader is always present alongside your critical intelligence. I’m thinking, for instance, of your book on Michael Jackson, in which you elucidate his early family life through types—the authoritarian father, the shrinking sister—found in the Victorian novel. Do you consciously try to collapse or traverse genres in your work?

MJ

I was always aware that for me there’s no such thing as being a “pure” literary critic; before I was a literature student, I did music for years. I have dancers in my family, I love theater, and I thought for a few years that I myself would be an actress. So I myself was a sort of cultural hybrid, and this informed the way I liked to work. Also, girls of my generation were encouraged to read, but we also had music lessons, dance lessons, maybe art lessons—and as a result, a lot of us with “ambitions” were terrified that we were going to turn into dilettantes. My friend Helen, with whom I spent that week at Harper's, reminded me of this just a few weeks ago. She still remembered me talking about this all-consuming fear when we were graduate students at Columbia. I was 21 or 22 and obsessively thinking, “What? What? What? Who am I? Where am I?” Maybe I’d made some mistake; maybe I should have siloed myself into a firm discipline. But eventually, I started thinking about how I could make that turmoil itself into a kind of aesthetic, intellectual, and artistic approach.

KV

This line of inquiry reminds me of an injunction that appears frequently in your personal writing: to be brave. “About love and sex, she should have been adventurous, not wary,” as you memorably framed one of your predicaments at the outset of Negroland. And in your professional life, you diagnosed the “usual thwarted ambition—she’s good, quite good, at her profession. But she should have been outstanding.” So there’s that throughline of ambition, but also another, I think, of almost chivalric virtue. You’re constantly interrogating yourself about whether you’re pushing the boundary of your work, your genre, your life… or are you settling? I’m interested in how you’ve formulated those questions to yourself over the years—especially given that women writers of your generation were already on such terra incognita.

MJ

You first asked where I thought that came from. And I do think it’s a bit paradoxical. I think that the world of the rigorous Black bourgeoisie had space for a kind of propriety and perfect behavior that tends to play it safe— but was also home to a parallel tradition of taking risks. We had space for writing about Black history and Black culture in interesting new ways, for celebrating the first Black dancer or musician to enter a particular school or institution. So there was always this performative bravery that had to do with being honorable, as well as a strong cult of “achievement,” of achieving something as a successful Black person. Now the trick is how you jimmy the lock on that door. Because there were just a few—five, six, maybe seven— ways to achieve something “properly,” no more. That was inculcated in you too. So that's why that period in the ’60s, when we rocketed through antiwar protests and Black Power and the women's movement and gay rights, left such an impact on me. I learned to enjoy the world in unexpected, unprescribed ways—and to aspire to different kinds of achievement.

But you’re right: it was terra incognita in relation to my girlhood in Chicago. I was suddenly meeting all these people trying to work toward shared goals, bringing their own kinds of bravery to this city that we now shared. I suppose it was contagious. So I think that’s basically the key, when it comes to my sense of bravery—that and preventing boredom. I was always worried by the conventions of mainstream journalism, and by the fact of having chosen that route anyway. I always wondered if I really subscribed to all the proper rules, if I would once again be performing safety at these large publications, safety that looked, outwardly, like success. Of wallowing in the so-called bravery of being, in many places, the first Black woman critic. That’s fine, but how was I going to keep that distinction meaningful, to give my subsequent words in that role a charge, a power?

KV

Was that part of your identity at Newsweek, where you worked from 1973 to 1978, shortly after graduate school?

MJ

Absolutely, yes. I was the first woman as well as Black woman book critic there. Can you imagine?

KV

Just barely; it’s incredible what has transpired in a half-century. On a related note, do you remember when you started calling yourself a feminist?

MJ

In 1969. I came to New York after Brandeis and got the kind of job that women had gotten for decades, as a secretary at Planned Parenthood. There were three secretaries in our department, and one was a college classmate, Susie, who had joined a women’s group. Sometimes she brought me notes from those, and radical feminist essays. I didn’t join myself, because it was an all-white group. But the texts: Susie was thrilled, I was thrilled. And suddenly it became contagious: all our friends were talking about it, it was all around us in the media too—you could read Vivian Gornick, Kate Millet, and Gloria Steinem; you could read Shulamith Firestone, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, and Ti-Grace Atkinson. By the following year, when I was at Columbia, there wasn’t a woman worth talking to who wasn’t a feminist. So by 1970, the women’s movement was in full bloom. We’d ask each other, “Are you…?” It was thrilling to call oneself a feminist—and then shortly thereafter, a Black feminist.

KV

What helped you make the latter identification?

MJ

I started finding out about Black women who were involved in feminism, and then I started meeting them too. It took a few more years for our National Black Feminist Organization to start in 1973, but that was big. “Consciousness-raising” was largely an artifact of the ’60s, but I certainly met with many Black women in small groups throughout that decade. There was a Black woman named Frances Beal who published a famous essay (“Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female”) in one of the early, mostly white feminist anthologies from 1970 (Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from The Women's Liberation Movement), and this was really interesting. There was also the Toni Cade Bambara anthology from 1970, The Black Woman. I went to a few meetings of an organization that Frances was part of, and then became aware of Celestine Ware, who was a member of Shulamith Firestone’s New York Radical Feminists. And then I met Michele Wallace, daughter of the artist and activist Faith Ringgold, at Newsweek; she came on as a researcher in 1974 and we became fast friends. She was also writing for Ms. and the Voice at the time, and would go on to write an important book, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. So, you know, in all those ways, one entered that world.

KV

And by the end of that decade, in your thirties, you also started teaching, right?

MJ

Yes, I left Newsweek in ’78 and then I went to NYU, and then Columbia. It was too late to become a PhD candidate, but I was nevertheless drawn back to the university. I freelanced the whole time, but always felt a little financially unsettled. After many years of this arrangement, I joined the New York Times in 1993 as a book reviewer. They had become aware that they needed to pay a little more attention to women and people of color in their hiring. And by then I’d written for them for a long time, and they’d approached me a few times, before I decided to finally go ahead and say yes—partly because I wasn’t writing enough anymore. I thought, “Oh, dear, you need to push yourself, even when it feels uncomfortable, so just do it.”

KV

What was your role within the vast edifice of the Times? What were the kinds of books you sought to champion, and what do you look back on as some of your trademark pieces from that time?

MJ

My role when I first arrived was to be one of the book critics, along with people like Michiko Kakutani and Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. What I really wanted was to do more than just books, and within a couple of years, I was able to be the Sunday theater critic too. (But that was actually tricky, because it turned out there's a lot of bad theater!) With books, frankly, it’s a little cushy: you're basically picking the ones you're most interested in; you're not wholly responsible for a whole professional landscape. As for my mandate, I wanted to be as expansive in my choice of books and authors: from Nancy Mitford’s letters to new poetry, Howard Stern to Arthur Ashe. As with Newsweek, I was the first full-time Black woman arts reviewer. I ended up reviewing more nonfiction at the Times than I had in earlier stages of my career.

KV

The review essay, which springs more naturally from nonfiction, can be so generative.

MJ

Exactly, and you can find your way in in a slightly unexpected manner. Reviewing a biography of Scott Joplin, for instance, was also a way to talk about ragtime, and its place in American culture. So often I'd pick a nonfiction book that had double or triple purposes.

As for my subjects, most of the time, you could just pick what you wanted to write about, without justifying it. You might laugh at this: there was one book that I reviewed just for fun, which I hardly thought was controversial. It was a big, handsome, two-volume picture book of new girlhood embroidery. And several of my editors were like, what the hell is she doing? So self-indulgent. But, you know, I wanted to do an art book. In that vein, I also made sure I could review books by people like the Harlem Renaissance photographer James Vanderzee, and Richard Avedon, and so on. It was a little unusual; those kinds of books typically weren’t covered very often, except in something like a Christmas roundup. But I wanted to write about them, because Avedon’s autobiography, for instance, also offered a chance to look at, and think about, the people that he was photographing—James Baldwin, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (back when he was still Lewis Alcindor)—and the relations between the visual and the cultural, political, and social. I was always looking for ways to combine all those matters. Beyond this, I wanted to write more about performers and performance too—for instance, about Amos ‘n’ Andy, or Black Mountain College, or reviewing an exhibition about Duke Ellington or Lewis Armstrong alongside books about them—and I think some of these were stylistic surprises to my editors.

KV

Do you remember where you were when you won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1995? You were cited for writing “forcefully and originally without ever muscling out the author in question.”

MJ

Yes, I had been taken out to lunch by the executive editor, Joe Lelyveld, and the managing editor, Eugene Roberts. I knew Joe, who was responsible for my being hired there in the first place, but barely knew Eugene, so thought it was a little odd. But they took me to lunch one day in May and told me that I had just won the Pulitzer, and the announcement was coming out that day. When we went back to the office, they had staged this sort of event where I entered the newsroom framed by Joe and Eugene, and people stood up and clapped, which was very sweet. But I was quite shocked—both thrilled and rattled.

KV

What rattled you?

MJ

I'm a person who does like attention, but maybe I didn’t like how much formalized attention there suddenly was. And then there was the theatrical impact of that whole newsroom—this person might like me, that person didn’t, but they all had to applaud. And even the luncheon was so formal, so very official; I understood how to do it, but it did rattle me. And, to be a little more frank, I knew that the prize would also make very visible how willing I was to grow, or how likely I was to repeat myself. I knew there would be some critical backlash. “Well, she’s good, but she’s a Black woman. It was time for one of them to get the prize, wasn’t it?” Over the years, one had gotten used to that sort of thing, but now it would happen in an even more visible way. I knew I’d be watched carefully, that my next steps would be very deliberate. So yes, rewards can be challenging. Billie Jean King used to say that “pressure is a privilege.” I told that to my niece recently, when she was working on a piece she just choreographed, and she replied, “Yes, and sometimes pressure is just pressure.”

KV

Both things, I'm sure, are true. Did you start setting yourself new challenges immediately after that? Later that year was when you became the Sunday theater critic. (The paper noted that you had “expressed a desire to write about a wider range of cultural subjects.”)

MJ

That was right, yes. It was good because it opened up room for me to do a column later, and it allowed me to claim real intimacy with various forms of performance that I consumed more as an amateur. But still, I felt more at risk of being stalled, and once I started on the theater beat, I started writing less. I would write every other week instead of every week, whereas in the books section, I’d written every week. I really started to struggle with that. Some of my editors were struggling with it too, and not happy if I wasn’t productive enough. Looking back, I think all of that was a byproduct of the psyche, body, and soul trying to reconfigure in some way.

When I eventually moved from theater criticism to having columns of my own—“On Writers and Writing,” “Revisions”—is when I really got to do the work I wanted to do: more wide-ranging cultural analysis about race and gender; widening my aperture to include television and fashion; early forays into memoiristic material; and the latitude to muse on, to name just a handful of subjects, early 20th century Black vaudeville, Black women blues singers, D.H. Lawrence, Mae West, and what to read after 9/11.

KV

Had you yourself asked to reduce your column’s frequency?

MJ

The column was supposed to be every other week, because there’s only so much room for all the Times people who wanted to write them. I think my editors assumed that I would then do at least a couple of pieces in the interim weeks—and I did, sometimes, but only when I was pushed. I perhaps became a little more neurotically perfectionist during this time, and I got stubborn, because I didn’t like being pushed either. I thought I was doing very good work. So that was tricky. Once again, there was this incompatibility between my rhythms as a writer and those of a daily newspaper.

KV

On your earlier point, that you do enjoy some attention, I wanted to ask about the reception of Negroland, which came out almost ten years ago. Could you talk about the different kind or quality of attention you received for that book, because it was so much more personal than your previous work, and reached such a large audience?

MJ

Again, it was thrilling and rattling at the same time. There’s always a certain element of stage fright when I write and that fearful censorious part of me was deeply satisfied—because it ran wider and deeper than ever during the writing process, and it was more thoroughly vanquished upon publication. Even though it wasn’t a perfect book… she added, like good little girls do. But I knew I had done something significant; I had “had my vision.” I had really wanted to find a way to dramatize, critique, acknowledge the particular world that I came from and its history, and to examine the intricacies between an individual temperament and all of these layers of cultural requirements and demands. So: I was proud.

KV

When did you start to realize that, first, your upbringing in Chicago’s Black bourgeoisie was so distinctive and, second, that you wanted to write in a more personal register?

MJ

Register is a good word. I think once I had worked through those stages of really clashing with my background in the late ’60s and early ’70s—the Black Power and antiwar movements in college and then feminism in New York, all of which forced me to break myself into lots of different pieces and then rebuild them. But after that, immediately. I came to recognize that I am both deeply attached to and deeply critical of the world I came from—no longer the world I was in—and that it was worth trying to name.  In the early ’70s, I started talking about that world with my friends who were also from it, and we started seeing it as a social, cultural, political nest of complications. So long before Negroland finally came together, something in me was aware that it was unique. And in the little stories that I used to write—I wouldn’t call them fictional—I started trying to get down the rituals and characters of that world. That was the beginning.

KV

An indelible reference point, both for and within your book, is The Black Bourgeoisie by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, which was published in 1957, ten years after you were born. He argued (to borrow your own gloss on it) that, “The Talented Tenth is still black, and for all its class pretensions, it is merely bourgeois. Its members have scant financial or political power, so they delude themselves with compensatory boasts and rivalries.” Your own relationship with that book has evolved over time, from resistance to contending with it to—

MJ

—to basically embracing the whole thing, intimately.

KV

Yes. I’d love to hear more. Where did you first encounter it? And what changed in the following years?

MJ

When I encountered it first would have been in the late ’50s, right when it was published. My parents did not rail or rant, but I was very aware that they found this book, and its portrait of the Black bourgeoisie, almost incendiary. It had dealt some real blows to our pride, our sense of self, our habits of claiming privilege. You take your claims to privilege for granted and assume that others will too. I don’t remember my father talking about the book, but I can certainly remember my mother saying, in essence, “He’s so spiteful.” But then, in the same breath, she would go on to tell some anecdote about a friend that illustrated one of his points perfectly. Or she would tell my sister and I, “Don’t get so excited about coming out [as a debutante], that’s not what we do; and what exactly are Negros ‘coming out’ into now?” Again, perfectly in line with Frazier’s thought. So I got these mixed messages – but, definitely, there was this sense that he’d attacked us. A few years later, in the late sixties, when I went to college and got swept up in Black nationalism and started identifying as a leftist, I could take it. I could see that his critique was scathingly accurate. I could still feel a bit of that inherited humiliation, which had to do with having been so elaborately trained in that world. The Civil Rights and Black Power movements both justified Frazier’s critiques. And if you were in any way a leftist, his argument was unavoidable, even when he wasn't being quoted—which he sometimes wasn't, because he didn't seem stylistically radical. He didn't have the aura of the Black Panthers.

KV

He was in the academy.

MJ

Right, during a time when you were more likely to be told something like, “When the revolution comes your family, your parents are going to be put up against the wall and shot.” But Frazier was very precise; nothing was left unaddressed, unfocused, or unstated. And boy, did he know how to use contemptuous mockery. Have I read him since then? I’ve dipped into it; of course, it was crucial when I was writing Negroland. Today, I’m sort of proud of Frazier; he was working on a smaller scale, but I’ve come to feel like he was as important, and as interesting, as someone like Dubois.

KV

This is a bit of a digression, but you mentioned your mom’s remarks about debutantes. Previously, in Negroland, you wrote about how, when you and your sister graduated high school, you were each presented with a choice between coming out and a trip to Europe; you both picked the former. Now I’m wondering if your mom put her finger on the scale?

MJ

What I might have added was: it was a test. I felt that it was clear. Now, Denise got this same proposition three years before me, so by the time I came along, I just wasn't even tempted. She was like my mom’s finger on the scale. In any case, the question clearly meant, you're not going to turn down a trip to Europe, are you? Its own kind of cultural snobbery. You know, “Don't be provincial, darling.” Her tonal presentation conveyed that we knew better.

KV

While you often plumb your own youth in your writing, you also interact with a great number of young people in the university setting today. What informs your posture towards your students?

MJ

What really helps is having the benevolent separation, almost the barrier, of the material that we’re reading. On top of that, there is always room for minds and imaginations and spirits to bring the best to the classroom. Beyond the material, I am not interested in everything they say (and they are not interested in everything I say), but I am interested in what they say. I’m interested in the process. I do sometimes feel, “Oh, God, that’s so smart. I wish I’d said it first.” That’s good. It isn’t fun, but it’s good. So I suppose I start by assuming that this is going to be interesting, that they are going to surprise me. And since I don’t have children and didn’t want any, it’s always been of interest to me to observe the ways in which successive classes really are of another, and then another, generation. How they have grown up with a really different set of mythologies and ideologies and assumptions. Of course that’s very interesting and useful territory for me to have access to. And then there’s all the new material. It was one of my students who turned me on to Bojack Horseman, when they wrote a very good paper about it, and another one turned me on to the terrific young critic Andrea Long Chu – to give just a couple of examples.

KV

Did you have any mentors or notable editors, at the Times or Newsweek or elsewhere, who changed the course of your writing or drew out some element of your style?

MJ

No. I had some very good editors and then some, shall we say, unimaginative ones. There are a couple of people, when I think back, with whom I could have established some version of that relationship that was not violently intense. I was very resistant, and I don’t think that was entirely a good thing. But I was very aware, from the role I played in my family—the precocious but good little girl—that I was susceptible to being influenced, a little unduly and too emotionally, by people I admired. So as an adult I seem to have followed a pattern of staying away from that. That means I missed some opportunities, but I can see why I had to do it.

KV

A subconscious self-protection instinct.

MJ

It's really true.

KV

And I wanted to ask you about a lesser-known interlude, your Vogue years, from 1984 to ’89. You’ve told me you mostly worked from home, but what was the office like when you went in? What were you asked to do, and how was it to be a “Vogue girl” in ’80s New York?

MJ

So this was Grace Mirabella’s Vogue, before the Anna Wintour era. You would go into the office once a month for meetings, and there it all was, the clothes, the style… There were always a few young men, usually not long out of college, but it was really still a woman’s world. It made me realize what a man’s world I’d been in prior. Despite all of us women who were there at Newsweek, I had really never been in an all-female world. And I thought it was a lot of fun in terms of writing. My basic assignments were book reviews, but I also did some larger so-called think pieces, like one on masculinity right after Rock Hudson died and others on the downtown art scene and the rise of self-proclaimed “white trash” culture. All the hypocrisies and contradictions and temptations of how we consumed culture in that decade. Anyway, I had fun. I had a smart editor, Susie Bolotin, who had worked at the Times, maybe even the Voice. So we understood each other—I liked it, it tickled me. It really, really did tickle me to be there; my mother had a subscription for years. And I felt, in terms of my writing, that it helped loosen up certain formulas that I had somehow gathered under my byline at Newsweek.

KV

How would you describe the Vogue house style at the time?

MJ

It’s a little chatty, playful, little amusing asides that you put in parentheses, more em dashes… but also, in a way, more confining, and it assumed a narrower audience of people who shared certain cultural habits, attitudes, and interests, in contrast to Newsweek, where you were writing for a kind of generalized, somewhat impersonal upper-middle-class. Lightly ironic when you needed to be, and responsible, but not probing too deeply. And I’m not saying that Vogue was so deep, but there was this sense of a female culture unto itself. You could probe a little more, (albeit lightly), you could joke a little more. You could combine things that might seem a little shallow with a sudden shift into something more serious.

KV

You’ve lived in New York ever since that secretarial stint in 1969. Have you ever considered living anywhere else?

MJ

I had briefly considered a job offer that would have taken me out to San Francisco with Mother Jones, but I decided I didn’t want to go, partly also because I didn’t want to do as much editing as they wanted. But I grew up in Chicago; there weren’t so many other cities. Please. I know Boston somewhat, and I have family in LA, but I don’t drive. I can be very harsh about New York, and I’m not sentimental about it. But I did always, I suppose, buy into the idea of moving to the center. My sister Denise and I always wanted to come to New York to be, quote-unquote, artistic.

KV

She’s a few years older than you. Did you follow her to New York?

MJ

In a sense, yes, she was already here during my last few years of college, and I followed her vision of being in New York. She was a dancer. Denise got married before I moved here and moved down to South Carolina, and then realized that was impossible, and eventually made her way back to New York too. But certainly her original path was what I followed. 

KV

You’ve also been eloquent on the importance of solitude to your vocation. How do you cultivate the kind of solitude you need? Was there a period when you were younger where you found it difficult to protect it?

MJ

Let’s see, I’ve been writing professionally since 1971, and I’ve always lived alone. I knew immediately the ways in which that was not just useful, but necessary. When Denise and her three-year-old daughter moved to New York in the early ’70s, we lived about six or seven blocks from each other. She was in Chelsea, I was in the West Village, and we were very close. But it was also very clear to me, you know, watching Denise and Francesca, the ways in which living with someone else, even a grown-up, wouldn’t leave me enough room. I realized I was much moodier as an adult than I had thought of myself when I was as a child, or a teenager, or even in college. I didn’t realize until graduate school that I was subject to plunges and would need ways to restore myself. And furthermore, the ability, which you don’t usually have in a family, of being able to choose when you see people and how you see them – that was wonderful to me.

KV

It is to me, too. I’m struck by what you just said about having to realize that you were a moody person, because you’ve written so evocatively about the importance of being “spirited” in the milieu of your childhood—and as a performer, and thereafter. But, of course, you must have needed certain reserves to meet the world in that way.

MJ

Yes, and I probably still do meet the world in that way. Living alone taught me how to find those reserves, how to restore them, and how to draw on them— but it also showed me, for the first time, how to find ways of being that didn’t require that obliging capacity at all.

KV

You’ve said that you want “more writers to test the capacities, strategies and varieties of nonfiction, whatever their subject,” and your memoirs have innovative formatting, from the fonts to spacing. How hands-on do you get with designing your words on the page? 

MJ

I got much more involved with Constructing a Nervous System. Partly it was an extension of the fact that I work in so many pieces, so I wanted to convey that literally on the page. If I could do Negroland over again, I wouldn’t do the typical thing of putting all the photographs in the center together. I wish I hadn’t. Going forward, I think my treatment of those kinds of physical materials – be it a reproduction of a postcard or a photo – will matter even more. Also, it’s a lot of fun, playing around with fonts and spaces and what they signify. It was the kind of thing you could depend on when your writing spirit was flagging a bit. Oh, you know, let me play with putting this in another font, or breaking it into two sections, or putting something in the middle—so it’s an imaginative device. And it’s a little bit childlike, isn’t it? You can make yourself feel like you're playing.

KV

I’m trying not to say “Sebaldian,” as he feels sort of tired as a reference for any and all ludic formatting. I’m curious if you had other inspirations?

MJ

Yes, absolutely. The playwright Adrienne Kennedy’s People Who Led to My Plays—do you know it?

KV

No, I don’t.

MJ

It’s a kind of memoir, about growing up in a Black family in prewar Cleveland, but it’s constructed like one of her mother’s scrapbooks, or like a diary. Everything that she talks about—and often she does this just in a few lines— has some kind of associative or direct illustration. So it really is like a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman, based on all the materials of her personal culture. I reviewed that book when it came out in the ’80s, and it’s been very influential.

KV

Do you have more archives at home—more boxes, documents, memorabilia?

MJ

Yes, I do: lots. And they’re somewhat chaotic, but they are sitting there.

KV

And do you have the sense that there is a lot more ground to be tilled there?

MJ

Certainly there is ground there—I’m only not saying “a lot” because I don’t know yet. But there is untilled ground for sure. So much of what I’ve learned about myself has started with me thinking, “no, I've already done this.” But when I start looking through the raw material, it sends me in some other direction entirely. You don’t know which track is crucial until it’s over.