You don’t quite realize it when you sit down to write how gratuitously masochistic it can be. You sit down and really, what you have to work with is the history and memorialized record of your own self and all that compounds it; the trauma, the insecurity, the doubt, the rejection. The writing, in an… View More

Please Irene, I am not some deity. “Fearlessness” int he face of race would presume that I have confronted it in such a way that I myself have beat it and passed it. Far from true. You have ruined nothing; literature itself, the words on the page may be black and white, but nothing else… View More

Irene, darling, you’ve got to let go. Stop beating yourself up. That was the old Irene. You’re beautiful and you threw everything I wanted away, because you thought I wanted you to. I didn’t want you to do that. I only wanted you to pass maybe on the weekend or so, so that I could… View More

Maybe I’m wrong…? Maybe I just don’t get the point? I have just read Alice Dunbar-Nelson‘s review of Passing… and I am shocked, puzzled, and deeply unsettled. How can she, one of my idols, a person whose work I admire and look up to come to such a different conclusion? To her, this book fully… View More

Thank you for reaching out to me and for expanding on your motivations and feelings. I don’t want to deny your experience, but I would not say that you have led a “false life”, or at least I think it is important to see that within this society there is no way for us to… View More

I’m dead now. I live in a black void of white light. All the others around me, I have to pass for them and get them to believe who I want them to think I am. Always. I am always trying to pass, fearing someone will know the truth but I keep getting by here…. View More

I’m an old woman now. I’ve done and seen so much. I’m afraid to die. I don’t know what’s waiting for me… I’ve done some vile things. After Clare died, after I killed her I mean, Brian fell in a dark depression. I think he really was having an affair with Clare. He left me… View More

I am the best of you because you gave me a freedom other characters in your novel don’t have. You freed me from the need to wish for normative heterosexual relationships. You freed me from attaching importance to the convention of a nuclear family ruled by a man. And you freed me from thinking I… View More

Thank you for expressing your thoughts. What you said struck a chord in me because for a long time I didn’t think about the political implications of what I chose to do, and by the time I started thinking about them it seemed too late, for I felt trapped in the false life I had… View More

It took me some days to find words after I have finally read W.E.B. Du Bois’s review of Passing. It has been lying on my desk for over a week now and I read it again and again. Mr. Du Bois has in parts very precisely described what I have been thinking about ever since… View More