They say to write the books you want to read; they say to write what you know; well I did and now I don’t seem to be left alone about it. Of course “Passing” discusses the issue of its namesake, the pressures that come from bi- or multi-racial existence. This is of course something that I live on a day to day—some even speculated that later in my life, after returning from my Guggenheim, I would make that very decision as Clare does and disappear into that inscrutable sea of white, into the back of a taxi cab, out of the eye of Harlem and it’s society. But, most importantly, I have done what good writers do: implant the real into fiction. Clare and Irene are, in fact, types—complex, sometimes inscrutable ones—but types none the less who are two half of the same person.Neither one nor the other is me, and certainly neither one nor the other is a “tragic mulatto.” If anything, they are the smallest isolated fragments of myself, removed and left to live and breathe on their own in a world of passing: of course they don’t thrive, but is can that be classified, truly, as tragic? And wouldn’t it be selling myself short to keep that company? As if the arbitrary binary of color from my mother and father weren’t enough to navigate as if they were real, audiences now ask me if the characters I wrote are really just myself. It would seem that those who latch onto black and white autobiography as opposed to literary movement, scholarship, research, and theory could really not have understood the novella at all. So let’s put this one to rest, shall we?

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