Calling Toni Morrison Friend

Miss Chloe: A Memoir of a Literary Friendship with Toni Morrison covers two decades of our friendship, with literature and language as our main currency. A major and monumental experience in my life as a writer — getting to know Toni Morrison was a dream.

Miss Chloe chronicles the shared experiences of heritage, of language, and of obsession with writing that surfaced during the years that Morrison and Verdelle were building a literary friendship, and exploring the possibilities of intellectual exchange across two generations of Black womanhood.

Toni Morrison sent in a nearly miraculous blurb for Verdelle’s first novel, The Good Negress, and then arranged a meeting with the young writer. This exchange took place during the last years of the 20th century, and represented the beginning of a relationship that was replete with surprise, good humor, and real demands. Not everything was peachy always, but in this way, relationships do mirror life.