Fresh Air - Best Of: Novelist Maggie O’Farrell / A personal history of the N-Word

Episode Date: June 6, 2026

Maggie O’Farrell wrote the novel ‘Hamnet’ and co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation. She has a new book called ‘Land,’ about a father and son mapping 19th-century Ireland after the devastation of the Great Famine. Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the latest by classics scholar Mary Beard.Also, we hear from historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor. She has spent much of her career tracing the N-word through slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and hip hop. For a long time she kept it a secret that her father was Richard Pryor, the man who put the word at the center of American comedy. "I was a scholar of the N-word — and so, obviously, is he." Her new book is ‘Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me.’ See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

From W. H.Y.Y. in Philadelphia, this is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. Today, novelist Maggie O'Farrell. She wrote the book Hamlet and co-wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation. She has a new book called Land, about a father and son mapping 19th century Ireland after the devastation of the great famine. Also, we'll hear from historian Elizabeth Storedore. She spent her career tracing the racial slur, the N-word, through slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and hip-hop. But what she didn't tell her students, even some of her colleagues, was that her father was the comedian who put that word at the center of American comedy, Richard Pryor. I mean, I was a scholar of the N-word, and so obviously is he. Her new book is Something We Said, Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word, and Me. And book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the latest by classic scholar Mary Beard. That's coming up on Fresh Air Weekend. This is Fresh Air Weekend. I'm Sam Brigger. My guest, author Maggie O'Farrell, is best known for her 2020 novel Hamlet. It was adapted into a movie last year, and Jesse Buckley's performance is Anya's Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's wife, won Buckley and Oscar. O'Farrell co-wrote the film screenplay with its director, Chloe Zhao. Hamlet is a fictionalized version of the story of William Shakespeare and his wife, Anyas Hathaway. It's about how they meet and fall in love, marry and have children.

Their young son, Hamlet, dies from the plague. The grief shakes the family and lead Shakespeare to write his play, Hamlet. O'Farrell's novel Hamlet won Britain's Women's Prize for Fiction. Maggie O'Farrell has a new novel called Land. It takes place in Ireland in the 1860s, beginning with Tomas and Liam, an Irish father and 10-year-old son, out in foul weather, mapping a peninsula as part of the British Ordinance Survey of Ireland. Tomas, somewhere between employed and indentured to British soldiers, is tasked with modernizing the maps of Ireland.

Something magical happens on the peninsula that forever changes the trajectory of their family and compels Tomas to move his family from the tight quarters of their city's one-room apartment to an abandoned cottage on the peninsula and begin an agrarian life. There are many abandoned cottages and houses and villages throughout Ireland, as the novel takes place only a decade or so after the country's great famine. The countryside has been emptied out with millions lost to the famine and to emigration. Tomas is in part mapping the erasure of those lives from the land. O'Farrell has written eight other novels, children's books and a memoir called I Am, I Am, I Am,

17 brushes with death, about, well, her brushes with death, nearly being murdered, nearly drowning, and her childhood encephalitis that left her with very, balance and spatial recognition challenges. Maggie O'Ferra, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me. It's lovely to be here. So can you tell us what the spark was for your new book land? Oh, well, I'd say it crept up on me very slowly. I've always really been interested in the life of my great, great-grandfather,

on whom, to us, the character is based. He worked for the Ordnance Survey in Ireland in the mid-19th century, just after the Great Famine had taken place. And I thought about him for years, and I thought about his son for years. His son was my great-grandfather, and he took a very different path in life initially from his father's. He became a Jesuit, which, as anyone knows anything about Catholicism

is not a job you just happen to fall into. It's something that you really, really commit yourself to, and it takes years to train. He was a Jesuit for a world, and then he left, quite astonishingly, hence my existence and the existence of all my cousins and siblings, and he came full circle and became a mapper like his father. So the two of them was always really interested me, but I could never really see a way forward to making it into a novel until I was on a train a few years ago on the way from Belfast to Dublin, and just suddenly,

and I wish this happened more often, Sam, but the very first line of the book just slid into my head, which is his father was ever a man, a few words. And it was really extraordinary. I've never had this experience before. As soon as I had that first line, I could suddenly see the path of the whole novel. I could see how I could do it. So, I mean, not to give too much away, but this book does really map the history of your family there. Well, it's based on the lives of what I could find out of the lives of my great-great-grandfather and my great-grandfather, which wasn't a huge amount, to be honest, but I've woven a novel around the scant details that we have about them. Your father used to read to you Irish Folktales as a kid. Only Irish Folktales. He would only ever be Irish folktiles.

And I sort of see magical elements in your books. There's hagg stones, these like special stones, magical stones. There are these magic wells. You have people who are closely tied to nature and tend to have sort of extra sensory perceptions. What did you take from those folk tales in writing your books? Well, my father would only ever read, as I said, only ever read. Irish mythology to us. And at the time it used to annoy us a bit because we used to beg him to try and read the

movements or Pippi Longstocking to us, but he could only have read Irish myth. But actually now I see that it forms, that that world and those people and the narrative rules inside these myths form part of my storytelling DNA in a way. And it was really important to me to try and transpose as much of that atmosphere of those tales to this novel. So in Irish mythology, the land itself is, it's like a character, it has opinions, it can change the direction

of its human compatriots. It can, trees can speak, it has opinions. It's actually a person that interacts in a say, or it's a, it's an entity that interacts with the plot. And I really wanted that to come across in the novel. And there are certain elements of the novel that are that lean heavily on Irish myth. There's a fish in the novel, which is quite important.

I did at one point come, I have a write in a studio at the bottom of the garden, and I did come up, and I said to my children, I think my novel's going to have a talking fish in it, which they were quite, I mean, they're teenagers now, they were a little bit skeptical about that. But the fish are very important in Irish mythology. And there's a wolfhound in the novel called Bran, and he's called After Finn McCool's dog.

You were born in Ireland, but I don't think you spent much time living there. Is that right? No, as you can probably tell by the way I speak, no, I left when I was really young. I was born in Derry, and then we moved to Wales when I was still quite young, and then Scotland. You said that you're wary of claiming Irish heritage. So where does the idea of Ireland fit into your identity? I wouldn't, I mean, maybe I said wary, but I think, you know, I can, I don't really, I can't listen to myself in my very British voice saying, a sentence, I'm Irish, just because it just sounds, it just sounds grating to my ear, and probably, I'm sure, to other people's too. So I think it's a strange thing, you know, I think anyone who doesn't grow up in the country they were born in or has maybe an accent at odds with their name, as I do, there's always a sense of a kind of ghost self that walks

along beside you. And you always have this awareness, I think, of what could I have been? Who would I have been if we had stayed? And I know that I would have sounded completely different and I might have been a different person. But I suppose I feel, I feel quite Irish in Britain and I feel, when I'm in Ireland, I feel quite British just the way I talk. Although my passport was Irish and always has been and I'm very proud of that. Did you have any hesitancy about writing this very Irish novel because of any of those feelings? I did, yes. I do, I suppose so.

Yeah, I don't ever, I hope nobody feels like I'm trespassing on anyone else's beliefs or, but it just felt, it just, it was a story that just wouldn't go away. And I don't know who else would have written about my great, great girlfriend. Yeah, it is based in your family history. Yeah, I didn't, I mean, yeah, when I was, I remember I was worried about it. I was talking to my husband and he said, to be honest, he said, you've got more right to write this than you have about 16th century England or Renaissance Florence. And I thought, oh, yeah, that's true actually. I thought about that way. So, you know, America is often called a country of immigrants. It's a lot more complicated than that. But I don't want to get into that. But I was wondering what you think it means for Ireland to be to have such a history of emigration of so many people leaving.

like how do you think that plays out an Irish identity? I've heard it said that Ireland's biggest export is not in fact Guinness, it's people. And I'm sure that's true. I think it's inevitable, you know. And I always think emigration is not, is usually at the heart of it a sad story, isn't it? And when I think about those people who left their homelands, not just Irish people everywhere, in the 19th century or whatever, it was such an extraordinary thing to do.

And I know some of them, it wasn't by choice, particularly in Ireland, but it's such an extraordinary thing to leave your homeland, knowing that the people you're saying goodbye to, you will, in all likelihood, never see them again. And in a lot of cases, you wouldn't be able to communicate with them again. If you happen to be literate, if your family happened or friends and family were literate, you could potentially write to them, but that wasn't always the case.

So, yeah, it begs belief, really, that you would say goodbye to your friends and family. And that was that. You wouldn't see them again. My guest is Maggie O'Farrell. Her new novel is called Land. Her 2020 book, Hamnet, was recently made into a film of the same name. We'll hear more of our conversation after a break. I'm Sam Brigger, and this is Fresh Air Weekend. So Maggie, your book Hamnet tells the story of,

of Agnes and William Shakespeare, the family they create, the death of their son Hamlet at the age of 11, we think, and the grief that they suffer, and then the play that Shakespeare writes Hamlet that comes out of that grief. As a young person, you were obsessed with the play, is that right? Yes, I studied at school when I was 16 for my Scotter tires, and I absolutely loved it.

I felt for it in a big way, and it really got under my skin. And I particularly love the character of Hamlet, who felt like sort of a brother to me in a sense. I think he appeals to a certain type of teenager. Well, it's kind of emo, isn't it, the play? Yeah, just that teenagers who wear a lot of eye makeup who hang about in graveyards. And that was definitely me at the time. How did your understanding of the play change? And Shakespeare changed when you learned that he had a son named Hamlet, that that was a name at the time that was interchangeable with Hamlet,

and that he wrote the play after the death of his son. I was very lucky in many ways that I had a particularly brilliant English literature teacher called Mr. Henderson. And he told us, as we were studying for the play when we were 16, that Shakespeare had a son who'd been called Hamlet and that he died, age 11, and that Shakespeare had gone on four years or so later to write the play Hamlet. And I was, even though I was a really long way off from being a writer and a parent, I this really struck me and I remember putting my finger over the L in Hamlet on my school copy and taking it off again thinking that's strange because it's the same name

and I knew that it was I knew that it was hugely significant that nobody would casually give a play and a prince and a ghost the name of his dead son I have to admit that I found the book very hard to read because I knew going in that Hamlet was going to die And it gave me this feeling of foreboding that I've often felt as a parent, this sort of constant vigilance that, you know, something is going to go wrong, that I need to be watching out for it. And even like now when my kids are in their teens and 20s, that feeling never really goes away. And I was just wondering, were you trying to create that feeling in the reader? I think the engine behind me writing Hamlet was a dissatisfaction with the way Hamnet himself had been treated by scholars and biographers of Shakespeare. You know, you read these incredible works of scholarship, these huge biographies about Shakespeare,

and Hamlet is lucky if he gets maybe one or two mentions. And they said he was born, and then they say that he died. And his death is all too often, for me anyway, wrapped up in statistics about, Elizabethan child mortality. Right, which it seems to try to soften the grief that people would feel. Yes, the implication is that because it was, you know, death, you were lucky, you know, I think it was one in, you had a one in five chance of reaching your fifth birthday in the 16th century in England. There was no shortage of things that could fell you, unfortunately.

But the implication is that somehow it was less upsetting because you just had to get used to it. And I just never, I never believed that. and there was one book in particular that had the sentence, it is impossible to know whether or not Shakespeare grieved when Hamlet died. And I was so furious about that. I threw it across the room because I just, I don't believe that anywhere in time, anywhere in the world, there's anything less than catastrophic to lose a child. I just don't believe it.

I mean, which is hard to imagine considering, like, who wrote better about grief than Shakespeare? Well, yes, you just want to direct them to say, have you read any of the plays? Have you listened? to, you know, Constance in King John, talk about her son and him dying. I mean, obviously, I think we all know that's nonsense. You don't have to be a parent to know that's nonsense. So I think I just wanted to, and I always felt that Hamlet, the boy, had been relegated to a footnote in his very famous father's story.

And I wanted to bring him out of the shadows and say to the people, to readers, you know, this child was important. He was loved, he was grieved. And without him, we would not have Hamlet, and we probably wouldn't have 12th night. You say that Hamnet is relegated to a footnote. Shakespeare's wife, Anne or Agnes, I guess the names were interchangeable as well. Maybe had a slightly longer footnote, but not any better, correct?

No, her footnotes are quite unkind, I think. Yeah, again, scholars tended, have always tended to only tell us one story about her, one narrative, which is that she was an older peasant woman who lured this boy genius into marriage and people have written things like he hated her and he ran the way to London to get away from her, he regretted their marriage. I mean, none of which there's any evidence for whatsoever.

I couldn't really understand where all this hostility towards her came from and why people are so determined in a way to give him a retrospective divorce. And actually I found a lot of evidence that they did love each other instead. So I wanted to again to write, to invite readers to forget everything they think they know about Anne Hathaway, which is always called. I don't know why, even though her name was Shakespeare for most of her life. And just to say actually maybe they did love each other. Maybe theirs was a partnership. So as I said, it was very hard for me to read Hamlet sort of thinking about myself as a parent.

Did you have similar feelings writing it as a parent yourself? I did find writing the scenes of Hamlet's death and the subsequent scene of his laying out for burial. Very hard to write. It's true I did. And I didn't write them in the house where my children live. I actually wrote them in a really old shed in the garden, which has since blown down in a gale. And I had to do it in sort of 10 or 15 minute intervals. So I would write it and then I would have a walk around the garden to kind of decompress and then I would go in again. And the two scenes probably took me about a fortnight to write.

And they were really hard. But I wanted them to be hard actually, partly because I felt his death had been so downplayed and overlooked and wrapped in statistics. I wanted it to give it the dignity I thought it deserved. May you were on the show in 2017 talking about your memoir, but I just had a couple. chapters I wanted to talk to you about, if that's okay, one in which you talk about your childhood encephalitis that almost killed you and left you with lifelong spatial challenges. One of the challenges that you dealt with was you were left with a stammer. You went to a speech therapist in your 30s, I think.

That seems to have helped a lot. And what did you learn from the therapy? Oh, so much. I started stammering as quite a young child and when I was little it manifested as the kind of classic repeated syllable and for a while

I think as a child I remember thinking maybe no one else can hear this because my family didn't react but then it because it wasn't long until someone at school made fun of me and I thought oh okay no they can hear it and by the time I was a teenager somehow it had kind of morphed

into this complete block So if someone asked me a question, I would almost, I think I was so, I didn't want that repeated syllable to happen. So I just kind of locked my throat. And so I did just, I would go completely silent and not be able to speak at all. And, you know, I think all stammerers have a collection of sounds that are problematic for them and them alone. That trigger the stammer. Yeah, there's usually a kind of problem letter or a pronunciation or diphton or a collection of letters that's problematic. One of mine was M, which is very tricky.

Which is great. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for that. So actually what you learn to do at a very young age is you learn about the flexibility of language. So if somebody around that time had asked me, what's your name? Because I couldn't launch off on a mm sound, I would launch off on a different sound and I would just try to rush into it. So I would say, you can call me Maggie and hope that I was able just to vault over the problematic, you know, I don't think I would be a writer

unless I was also a stammerer. It gives you a huge sensitivity to language and I think anyone, any child who does stammer or stutter is able to come up generally with maybe seven or eight synonyms for a word in almost instantaneously because you're always looking for the,

line of least verbal resistance. And in a conversation, even now, I still am thinking several interlocutions ahead and thinking, okay, well, if I want to avoid that sound or that word, which is really hard, even now I practice and practice and practice, any kind of public reading I have to do. And I have a special reading copy of my book, which I cross out words that are problematic, and I put notes to myself, or I remind myself when I need to breathe. So you don't try to avoid those words when you're writing? No, that's one of the absolute joys of writing, honestly. So being a writer is, yeah, obviously being a stammerer and a writer helps you because you are, you can perform these.

You've been performing grammatical and semantic gymnastics since you were tiny. But also just I cannot express, Sam, the joy of typing and watching all those words, just coming out with nothing to stop them. It's even now it gives me such a thrill. So I decided, and actually I was 40 when I thought I really need to go and get some speech therapy. And what happened was that I was on a program of live radio in Britain and someone asked me on air to read something in one of my books. And it was so terrible because I was unexpected. I wasn't prepared. And there was a moment of kind of absolute dead air where I couldn't get the words out. And the presenter was looking at me and the producers were looking at me.

Honestly, even now it's I still have. That's terrible. That's making me so. Yes, exactly. it was horrible and I came out of that interview and actually I remember thinking I don't have to say a name I can just say she and then I did it and it was okay I got through it but honestly I've never quite recovered from that Well, I'm sorry to spring a reading upon you today. No, it's fine, because I've got it all marked up. And I thought, okay, I really have to do something about it. So I did go to a speech therapist, and she said to me, you know, what's the worst thing?

And I said, well, it's the worst thing as if I stammer. And she said, but why? If you stammer, why is that so bad? Why is it so terrible that somebody knows? And she asked me to keep a stammering diary. And one of the weeks I went, I'd gone into a chemist to pick up a prescription. And they'd asked me my name, and I couldn't get it out. And the woman behind the count,

laughed and said, oh, you forgot your own name. And I came out feeling, I was so humiliated. And I told the speech therapist about this. And I said, this was a moment which I stammer really badly. And she said, you need to look that woman in the eye and you say, I have a stammer. And she said, I want you to practice it now. Say it to me. And so I said, I'm sorry, I have a stammer.

And she said, no, no, don't apologize. Just put it out there. And she said, if the woman in the prechemist can't cope with it, that's her problem. But you tell her, be upfront about it. And it was a I mean, it's such a simple piece of advice But I think as a child and as a teenager You become so used to hiding it

And so used to thinking I need to conceal this from people Because people might find out I have a stammer And you know, it took me until I was 41 For someone to say, it's okay Just tell people What does it mean though for you to have spent so much time Like hiding this part of yourself

Only to reveal it to thousands of people in a memory Well, well I never really talked about it before, written about it in fiction. I wrote about that illness. I gave it to someone else. I gave it to a character and someone else in one of my books called The Distance Between Us, which I suppose was I kind of start into thinking about it or analysing it. But I think I realised that it isn't something.

You know, as you get older, I think you realise that you can't really leave these selves behind that they all travel along inside you, like those Matojska dolls. So I spoke, yeah, I think your attitude to these things changes all the time, doesn't it? The way, wherever you are on the continuum of your life, you look at things differently. Well, Maggie O'Farrell, thank you so much for coming on today. That's my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me again. Maggie O'Farrell's new book is called Land.

She also wrote the novel Hamlet, which was made into a film of the same name. Mary Beard taught classics for most of her life at Cambridge, but her career is also included, popular television shows and books that reach a wide audience. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says Beard's latest book, Talking Classics, illuminates a lot about the ancient world and our own. Wine comes in at the mouth and love comes in at the eye. That's a line from a Yates poem, appropriately entitled A Drinking Song.

Love did indeed come in at the eye for the distinguished classic scholar Mary Beard. In her new book called Talking Classics, Beard, who grew up middle class in an English village, recalls being taken as a child by her mother for her first visit to London in 1960. They wandered through the British Museum and stopped to see the mummies. Beard, however, became curious about a display case featuring everyday objects, including a 4,000-year-old piece of bread. Beard's mother tried to lift her up for a closer look, but as Beard confesses, in the droll way that has endeared her to millions of readers and television audiences,

the attempt failed because I was a heavy and wiggly child. Along came a kindly curator who drew keys out of his pocket, unlocked the case, and held the ancient piece of bread in front of little Mary Beard's eyes. As Beard says, that experience was what the ancient Greeks would have called a moment of Thoma, meaning wonder or wonderment. I don't think it's fanciful to say that Mary Beard has spent her life unlocking the deep past and encouraging Thoma in the rest of us. Most of talking classics is drawn from four lectures Beard gave at the University of Chicago in 2023. If the word lectures makes you want to head for an exit door, you don't know Mary Beard's style. This is a public intellectual who uses terms like slime bag to describe Medea's husband

and who advises everyone to dial down the pious reverence. when considering the ancient world. Beard also has little love for the exclusionary side of studying the classics, or for those conservative traditionalists, she dubs the column crowd, who want to erect classical architecture in contemporary cities because of the authority it appears to exude. One of the many hard questions Beard considers in this book is whether classical architecture and statuary are irredeemably tainted by the uses to which they've been put by, say, Mussolini or today's far-right racist groups. Beard reminds us that there's also radical disruptive power in the classics. Among the revolutionaries she names with more than a foothold

in classics are Carl Marx, Nelson Mandela, Eldridge Cleaver, and Bobby Seal. The overarching question about the ancient world that structures beard's slim little book and her life's work is one that she says was very nearly drummed out of me when I was a student. What on earth was it like to be there? I'd say it's also the question that powers the geyser of contemporary reimaginings of the ancient world. Among them, novels like the Song of Achilles and Circe, both by Madeline Miller, as well as the forthcoming Christopher Nolan film, The Odyssey. As much as she treasures connection with the deep past, Beard cautions us that the classical world is also unthinkingly alien, sometimes almost incomprehensible. It goes right down to everyday ideas about the body, the self, and to such basic questions as, Who am I? Don't forget, Beard says, that most people in antiquity would have no clue what they looked like, except from their wavering reflection in a pool of water, or from a dull outline on a piece of

polished bronze or silver. No wonder so many ancient jokes hinged on issues of mistaken identity. The payoff, to put it bluntly, of studying classics, and more broadly of a humanity's education, is, according to Beard, best encapsulated in a phrase she gleaned from a colleague who said, Classics teaches you to read difficult things. Beard goes on to elaborate that, in a global environment of fact-dodging, misreporting, conspiracy theories, fake news and outright lies. Skills in reading difficult things are those that the world most needs. Like that ancient hunk of Egyptian bread that fascinated Mary Beard as a child, Talking Classics offers readers plenty to chew on.

Maureen Corrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. She reviewed Talking Classics by Mary Beard. Coming up, we hear from Elizabeth Storedore Pryor, a history professor at Smith College, and the daughter of legendary comedian Richard Pryor. This is Fresh Air Weekend. Our co-host, Tanya Mosley, has the next interview. Here she is.

About a decade ago, my guest, Elizabeth Storder Pryor, was on the road as one of the country's leading scholars of the most charged racial slur in American English, the N-word. A history professor at Smith College, Pryor was giving lectures on the N-word and the use of it during slavery, Jim Crow, the civil rights movement, and the hip-hop generation. But every night, after the lectures ended, she'd have this weird reoccurring dream about her father, saying something to her that she couldn't quite understand. Her father is the late Richard Pryor, the legendary comedian who in the 70s took this divisive word and made it the engine of his stand-up.

Here he is in 1968 and his first comedy album with a bit about a black superhero. I always thought, why I never have a hero, a black hero, man? I always wanted to go to movies and see a black hero. I figured out maybe someday on television, I'll have it, man, like you see it on television that come out. Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-la. Look up in the sky! It's a crow! It's the bat!

And yet for all of Richard Pryor's influence on American comedy and music and culture, his daughter Elizabeth never told a single audience in her academic circles that Pryor was her father. Her new book, Something We Said, Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word and Me, is part memoir, part history of a word that her father late in his career swore he never say again, and that his daughter has been trying to understand ever since. Elizabeth, welcome to fresh air. Hi, thank you so much for having me. You're a leading scholar in the N-word.

Your father is probably one of the most famous people ever to use the word in his stand-up. And here you are living this life, not telling anyone that he was your father. I actually want you to read an excerpt from the book the first time you told folks it was at a Smith Talk and it was 2016, so not that long ago. have you read that passage. Sure. I started with a joke. Out of nowhere, an eager student in my class asked, have you seen blazing saddles? Then I leaned forward with a pst, which was funny because my father, who happens to be Richard Pryor, co-wrote the movie. The audience roared. It was the first time I'd ever said publicly that I was Richard Pryor's daughter. I wasn't just revealing a family connection, My father was an essential part of the work I was doing.

He used his platform to influence public discourse about American racism, and he used the N-word to do it. Thank you for reading that. Why did it take you so long, Elizabeth, to tell folks your dad's Richard Pryor? I mean, that's a great question. I think I was the last person to know that this connection mattered. I kept, you know, feeling that feeling of coincidence. And the end of his life had been really hard and painful.

I kind of wanted to keep it to myself. I didn't want to hear those recurring overtures that people made. You know, they became overly intimate and asking me about the relationship that was fraught and complicated. So I kept it close to the chest. I was also wondering, to be a child of a famous person and someone, as famous as Richard Pryor, there has to also be an identity issue, too, right? You're your own person in academia, and he is known as a comedian. Was there ever that tension for you of wanting to make a name for yourself? I felt like if I was going to own my father, it had to be

organic and real. Like, I didn't feel comfortable just bragging about it, even though I should have. I mean, there's a lot to brag about there. But it just wasn't. my nature. I wanted it to make sense if I was talking about him. And it's this, this is what this journey was all about. It ended up making sense. I mean, I was a scholar of the N-word. And so obviously is he. What had been your relationship with the N-word? Had you ever used it? Had you heard it in your life? What was your relationship to it? I mean, I had super complicated relationship to it. My mother was white. My father was obviously black. and Richard Pryor. He used it on stage. One of the first meaningful conversations I ever had

with him as a little girl, he told me, don't let nobody ever call you that. And then he used it. And then his friends used it. And I was trying to figure that out, you know. So, and then I would hear different reactions of people in my life using it. Like, for example, like kids on the school yard. But the teachers didn't tell them to, you know, they didn't get in trouble the way they did with other swear words. And yet to me, this was the worst swear word because my father said, don't let anybody ever call you that. This is something you better knock somebody out if they use with you. And you've got to not only protect yourself, but other black people too. He's telling you, don't let anybody ever call you that. And yet there is the, some might say,

the hypocrisy or the contradiction that then he uses the word. in a subversive way. I mean, I think it's really important to emphasize that when I'm saying that he used the word, that it was in the subversive way, that it was the language of protest, and that he was building on a black tradition of protests, that black people had used this word kind of as a, you know, a slap in the face to white racism. You know, we know how to take our punches and our knocks, and we're not afraid of this thing that you're trying to demean us as. And so bringing that use, the way that black people perceived

of the N-word onto stage was really powerful in the 1970s. People weren't really doing that, but always as a form of resistance in protest, not in the way that, you know, white racists had traditionally used the word. I should also say for the audience, we're saying the N-word, but that was not a phrase that was even used back then. You know, we're doing, that because we can't say the word on air and we, you know, we don't generally say the word. But it's really interesting how that phrase, the N-word, has become the way that we can describe it, which is fairly new, right? I mean, yeah, I had a really funny conversation with my daughter who was born in 1998. And when she was in college, she went to a college about a half an hour from the

college where I teach Smith College. And she would come over and we'd do homework together. So I had a bunch of things pinned on the wall for this research. And one of them was when did people first started saying the phrase the N word? And she said to me, Mom, what do you mean when did people first start using the phrase the N word? And I was like, what do you mean? When did people start? Because, and I asked my students too, and they never dawned on them that this wasn't something, I didn't grow up with that. It's that people either said the N word or they didn't, but they didn't say the phrase, the N word, right? But my children grew up in an era. where there is a surrogate phrase to replace it.

And that puts you in different relationship with that word and the meaning of that word. So it was really interesting, and I discovered that, you know, the big turning point was the O.J. Simpson trial, really. I mean, black activists had been using the phrase, the N-word in the late 80s and early 90s, but the O.J. Simpson trial and some pretrial motions is what put that phrase on the map.

Yeah, it became then part of the lexicon to use. That phrase. So when I watched the news clippings from them, there are newscasters, white newscasters on the news, just saying the N word, the actual word before that. ABC News, you know, just saying it. Your father, he was born in Peoria. He was raised in a brothel.

His mother worked in the brothel. He watched his father beat his mother. He was abused. His mother left when he was 10. And he put that all together in a way that like no one had ever seen before, where we were laughing, almost to keep from crying. When did you first come to see or understand that your father had these broken parts of him? Honestly, I think it was partially in the problem. I knew it. Of course. I've heard, I've heard. I've heard. the comedy, you know, people would tell me, you know, your father was raised in a brothel. I don't remember him ever saying that to me. I mean, I certainly wasn't introduced to my great grandmother, you know, this is, this is mama, she's a madam, she runs a brothel, right? This is my great grandmother. You know, she, you know, cooked great food and was mean. Like, that's,

that's what I knew about her. Um, but I do think in part it was the process of writing this book. Like, there was something about my memories that had been locked in childhood. I don't know if this makes sense to people, but I had only ever come in contact with them as like the 11-year-old. And it was as a woman, as a professor, as a mother myself, that I came to this to understand, like, holy moly, like, it's not the sex work. Because, like, I think there are a lot of people who are raised around sex work and, you know, have their stories to tell as children. But it was the vulnerability of that for him.

that he didn't know how to navigate it, and the brilliance of being able to tell those stories to people and make them funny. And not just funny, like, laugh at me, but also universal. Like, people could relate, like, oh, about parenting. Like, he described his father as an 11 o'clock inward, because you had to be home by 11 o'clock, even though the party didn't start till 1130.

You know, like, these are, you know, everybody could relate to that. But he was describing a very harsh and scary man when he did it. There's this tender moment where you were 11 years old and there's this poem that you written for his 38th birthday. He asked you to read it to the family. Can I have you read it now? Sure. My daddy is the famous Richard Pryor. Yes, how famous, how famous.

Of course I love him and I'll always be proud. but I really get sick of all the crowds. I think he spends all his day long, trying to help someone who started out wrong. He never seems happy, though always so sad. Now they remember him that he's cool and he's bad. He's got the money to do what he wants. Some people want the money to do what they want.

They hurt him, they slap him, inside out, but that doesn't matter because he's Richard Pryor, no doubt. It doesn't matter. It's the money. that counts. This is a story so sad and so true. He has trouble picking his friends, and that makes him blue, my daddy. That's my guest, Elizabeth Pryor, reading a poem. She wrote for her dad, Richard Pryor, when she was 11 years old. He was so moved by it, he carried it in his pocket for weeks. You now is a woman reading this and knowing the totality of who he was now

through this new lens. Why do you think he was so moved from it, aside from the fact that you were his daughter? I don't know. I'm thinking that, I haven't really thought about this before, but I feel like my father had a superpower of really being able to see people,

really being able to see them, and understand them, you know, and I feel like maybe he felt seen too. And that was important to him as a person who could see. There's a pivotal moment in your father's career where he visits Africa, the continent. He goes to several places, Kenya and Nairobi, and this is 1982, that he comes back and he decides to get on stage and talk about this experience and told the world what he decided

regarding the use of the N-word. Let's listen. And I was sitting in a hotel and a voice said to me, said, look around. what do you see? And I see all colors of people doing everything, you know. And the voice said, do you see any n-a-uh? And I said, no. And I said, you know why? Because there aren't any.

And it hit me like a shot. I was sitting there. Yeah, I've been in three weeks. I haven't even said it. I haven't even thought it. And it made me say, oh, my God, I've been wrong. I've been wrong. I got to regroup. I mean, I said, I ain't going to never call another black man. You know, because we never was no. That's a word that's used to describe our own wretchedness.

And we perpetuated now, because it's dead. That was Richard Pryor in 1982. And, oh, gosh, Elizabeth, he built his career on that word. And here he is on this stage saying, I have grown. I have learned something new. What did that moment mean for you? Oh, I remember being so proud of it. I felt like we were finally, like, aligned in this particular way. Because for me, as a biracial person, the N-word, I always knew it wasn't my word.

Certainly the way black people used it with each other, and I logged for that. Not that the word is so great, but there's something happening when black people are using it together. That is great. Did you ever try? I did. I did. I did with my black friends, and they were like, do not do that anymore. You do not have the flow.

You must stop. But I felt, yeah, I was proud of it. I felt proud of it. Did you guys ever talk about it? We didn't talk about my feelings about it, but my father did tell me. Right. He made a point of telling me. So in that way, I think.

it was important for him, but not necessarily about what it meant when he was on stage doing it, because that felt like it was for all black people to me. You know, he started to get sick around the time that hip hop really was making its ascension. But, you know, it was being used. The word was becoming part of the vernacular. What do you think he would think about the next generation in the way that it was used? I mean, because he also didn't get a chance to see, say, someone like Kendrick Lamar win a Pulitzer Prize. which is a whole other level of acknowledgement to the purpose of the use of the word beyond it just being a filler word, you know?

Right. I mean, I'm not going to pretend to know what my father would think, but I will say that one of the things I admire about that moment when he disavows the word is he said, this is for me. I'm not telling you what to do. you know, this is for me. And I think there is a piece where he understood that the word had a function in black culture. He does talk about, though, as an artist, like losing control of what the word was doing. Like, he was trying to do something good by doing that. And then it did take on a life of its own. How has teaching this word changed for you now that you've gone through this?

this process. Teaching the word is still incredibly difficult, I have to say. The conversations are always hard, but I feel like it's important because my students walk away knowing that this is not a conversation, like I said, about free speech. It's really about how we interact, how we want to bring as many people as we can to the table. And if we do that, that means that we're going to be thinking about who we're saying, sitting at the table with and how things will impact them. Elizabeth Storder Pryor,

thank you so much for this conversation and thank you for this book. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure. Elizabeth Storder Pryor's new book is something we said. Richard Pryor, a notorious word and me. She spoke with Tanya Mosley. Fresh Air Weekend is produced by Teresa Madden. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorock,

Amri Baldenado, Lauren Crenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challoner, Susan Yucundi, Anna Bauman, and Nico Gonzalez Whistler. Our digital media producer is Molly C.B. Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm Sam Brigger.