The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison, 1970
Historical fiction Contemporary fictionLiterary fiction
A Black girl in 1940s Ohio prays for blue eyes, while the people around her teach her what beauty and love cost.
Feels like unease and tenderness. About love, power and memory.
A page from the book
What love reveals about the person doing the loving.
Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye. Toni Morrison.Morrison was nearly 40 when her first novel appeared; in 1993 she became the first Black woman awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Bluest Eye like?
- Feels like unease and tenderness. About love, power and memory.
- What should I read after The Bluest Eye?
- If you liked The Bluest Eye, try An American Marriage (Tayari Jones), She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb) and The Song of Achilles (Madeline Miller).
A taste of the feed
What it costs to walk back into a house love has left.
Sometimes it’s exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I’ve lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn’t kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.
An American Marriage · Tayari Jones
The war between a father's absence and a mother's silence, told by a child.
I wanted my father to be at home laughing with Ma on Saturday afternoons, instead of with Mrs. Masicotte, who had yellowy white hair and a fat little body like Zahra’s. My father called Mrs. Masicotte by her first name, LuAnn; Ma called her, simply, “her.” “It’s her,” she’d tell Daddy whenever the telephone interrupted our dinner.
She’s Come Undone · Wally Lamb
To know someone so well that sight becomes optional.
I could recognize him by touch alone, by smell; I would know him blind, by the way his breaths came and his feet struck the earth. I would know him in death, at the end of the world.
The Song of Achilles · Madeline Miller
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