Gloria Naylor is the author of four novels, including The Women of Brewster Place, which was a Finalist for the 1983 National Book Award; Linden Hills; Mama Day; and Bailey's Cafe. Widely acclaimed for her vivid explorations of the experiences of African-American women in the 1980s and 90s, Naylor has explained that she decided to become a writer "because I felt that my presence as a black woman and my perspective as a woman in general had been unrepresented in American literature." After working as a missionary, she studied literature at Brooklyn College and Yale University, where she earned her M.A. in 1983, the same year that The Women of Brewster Place was published.

The novel, which details the shared oppressions and strengths of seven black women, grew out of Naylor's desire to reflect the diversity of the black female experience in America -- a diversity, she believed, that neither the black nor the white critical establishment had yet recognized. In her review of the novel, Deirdre Donahue observed that Naylor "is not afraid to grapple with life's big subjects: sex, birth, love, death, grief. Her women feel deeply, and she unflinchingly transcribes their emotions...Vibrating and undisguised emotion, The Women of Brewster Place springs from the same roots that produced the blues. Like them, her book sings of sorrows proudly borne by black women in America."

How did you become interested in writing?
I had the good luck to be born into the kind of family where the association was made very early with books. My mother made the library a very accessible place for my sisters and me; she told us, "Once you can print your name, you can get a library card and all of these books can be yours for two weeks." Being a dreamer, the library became a refuge for me, in a sense, from the world at large. I began with the "A's" in the children's section and simply read my way through to the "Z's." I read indiscriminately around the house too, until I was about 12 or 13, when my teachers began to direct my reading and introduced me to the English classics.

I was a shy child and rarely spoke, so my mother gave me a diary when I was about 12 years old and told me that since I had a hard time talking about my feelings, I should put my thoughts down on paper. I started associating the written word with the unspoken emotion, and my writing began there. At first I simply wrote down my own thoughts, because you first have to feel that you have a voice before you go on. That book she bought me in Woolworth's got filled up in about three months. Then I used the extra paper in the back of my loose-leaf, and began "Twilight Zone"-type vignettes -- that was a new television series in those years -- because that kind of "other reality" always appealed to me.

How did you come to write The Women of Brewster Place?
The novel began with my using, in an odd way, the sort of confessional writing that I began with in my diary. I was going to Brooklyn College at that point, and because of a relationship, I was going through a personal moment of pain; I just felt I was going to die. So I said to myself, what could make another woman hurt the way I'm hurting? That's when I invented "Lucielia" Louise Turner. It wasn't my situation, but I imagined a woman who loses her husband, loses her unborn child and loses her toddler. I imagined the funeral of her two-year-old and imagined what "Lucielia" was like after that -- simply giving up her life, an odd kind of suicide -- and I created for this woman what I wanted for myself at that moment: a sort of earth mother to kick down the door and take me in her arms and rock me. And I wrote the thing seamlessly and cried. Then I forgot about it, to be honest, because it was like a fictive journal entry, until I pulled it out for a creative writing course. The idea hit me slowly that maybe I could write about other women.

How did you go about creating the other characters who populate the novel?
I wanted to write a book that would reflect the diversity and the richness of the black female experience in America -- and no one woman could do that for me, and no one geographical location could do that for me. That's when the idea got born that Brewster Place would be a microcosm of American society, that on that street would come all of these different women, and what they would share would be that wall. I varied the characters as much as I possibly could. I varied their skin color -- they move from alabaster to ebony -- varied their religious beliefs, their political beliefs, their social classes. As they grew, of course, they developed snatches of the personalities of people I have known. That's inevitable. One of the characters has the name of my grandmother, "Lucielia", and one has the name of a favorite great-aunt, "Mae Johnson".

To what extent were you interested in writing a novel about families?
I myself am from a very large extended family and a very close nuclear family; the family unit was a real part of my shaping. I think that when it works right, the family is one of the better inventions of mankind. Although that was not my main text, it was definitely a subtext. There's a whole strata of families in this novel, I think. One is the family that encompasses the block, another is this family of women who are neighbors. Then there are non-conventional families like Lorraine and Theresa; nuclear families in trouble like "Ciel's"; and single parent families like "Cora Lee's". In her case I wanted to broaden the myopic view that we often have of why unmarried women like "Cora Lee" continue to have babies. I wanted to show how we indoctrinate little girls very early with baby dolls, and take this kind of bucolic Christmas setting and turn it into a nightmare.

How did you hope the structure of the novel would reinforce your themes?
I wanted the structure to help readers understand that women have always served as a support system for other women, either helping them through physical or psychic danger. But even within a community of women, we can have biases and prejudices. You see that entire structure break down when the lesbians, "Lorraine" and "Theresa", come into the story. Theirs is the only chapter without a specific name; just "The Two." And that was done consciously, to say that what we fear and don't understand we tend to depersonalize. People often use words that are meant to be adjectives -- like "homeless" or "black" -- and turn them into nouns. Often, gay women have thought that I was making some comment about lesbianism because a lesbian is raped in the novel, but I hope it is painfully clear that she's raped because she's a woman, not because she's a lesbian.

At what point did you determine that this first novel would introduce a quartet of interrelated novels?
That happened while I was finishing up Brewster Place. I still have that old notebook from Brooklyn College where I wrote snatches of sentences for the next book, Linden Hills. I was determined not to be a one-book writer. It had happened too often in the African-American literary tradition, and I could see why; so I said to myself that I would write these four novels and think of them as a base, and then go on and build a career. I had to refer to myself publicly as a writer, or else people would have thought I was crazy, but inside, for ten years, I felt as if I was just arriving. The beauty for me was when Bailey's Cafe got published and the quartet was done, and I said, wow, now I'm a writer; now it can't be taken away.

To what extent have you been influenced by the African-American literary tradition?
It would have been impossible for me to have been a writer without that, because I would have had no story to tell. I like to say that I cut my teeth on the English classics, because I learned the power of language early on, learned that a novel should tell a story, and learned that passion is acceptable. But in all of my early reading, I was never given anything to read that had been written by black Americans, and I believed for years that black people didn't write books. No one ever said that to me -- as a matter of fact, in 1950, the same year I was born, Gwendolyn Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize -- but books by black authors weren't on my high school curriculum and their books weren't in my library. I read nothing that reflected me.

It wasn't until much later, when I was in college, that I discovered the rich literary heritage of African-Americans and discovered what I had not had in the previous twenty-something years of my life. But ironically, at Brooklyn College in those years the work of black women writers wasn't taught, not even in the African-American literature courses. So I discovered Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and Ntozake Shange myself. Then I got into the room where I belonged, with all of these foremothers, and I said, well, maybe I can tell my story too.

In researching for this Study Guide the critical response to your work, I was struck over and again by an underlying assumption that your goal as a writer must necessarly be to illuminate the entire African American experience. Is that reaction commonplace?
To tell his or her story is the desire of any artist. But some critics still look at the artistic creation of an African-American for some social statement, and that will remain almost inevitable as long as the very idea of being black -- or being white -- is a political statement in America. That's what I embody with my history, just walking on the street, and maybe it's even asking too much of a critic to look beyond that to see an artist plowing away. Also, what's universal is a belief that white male literature is literature, so everything else has to have an adjective attached to it: "women's" literature, "black" literature, "Chicano" literature. It wasn't until 1985, when I travelled to India with a United States Information Agency tour, that I realized that once I stepped outside this country, people saw me as an American writer, not as a women's writer or a black writer. My experience, in their eyes, was the American experience.

What matters most to you in conveying that experience?
I care about language -- I want my language to be beautiful -- and about telling the truth as I see it with my characters' lives. I believe these stories have been entrusted to me, and I want to present my characters with the complexity of human beings. I believe that a lot of the problems we have in our society can be eradicated -- and I have seen them eradicated -- if people get to know other people and start looking beyond the boxes we are so comfortable placing others in. It's a sticky business, though, getting to know people.

Readers who want to learn more about Gloria Naylor are encouraged to seek out some that books that have shaped her writing life:
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, Simone de Beauvoir
Native Son, Richard Wright
The Old Testament
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare
Bailey's Cafe (1992)
Mama Day (1989)
Linden Hills (1986)
The Women of Brewster Place (1983)

-- Interview by Diane Osen