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The Site of Memory
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.
The Site of Memory describes Toni Morrison’s work of literary archaeology. She offers insights into how she arrives at a text through the act of imagination bound up with memory and shows how she explores two worlds – the actual and the possible – via the nimbus of emotion surrounding the journey of an image: from picture to meaning to text.
Exploring the radical possibilities of literature and the limits of history, Morrison finds a truth deeper than documentation in the silences and omissions in African American narratives of the past. Fiction, for Morrison, is a practice of ethical restoration: a means to recover what history has neglected through the ‘flooding’ of a rush of imagination. In The Site of Memory, ancestral presence, emotion and imagination converge.
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
The Site of Memory describes Toni Morrison’s work of literary archaeology. She offers insights into how she arrives at a text through the act of imagination bound up with memory and shows how she explores two worlds – the actual and the possible – via the nimbus of emotion surrounding the journey of an image: from picture to meaning to text.
Exploring the radical possibilities of literature and the limits of history, Morrison finds a truth deeper than documentation in the silences and omissions in African American narratives of the past. Fiction, for Morrison, is a practice of ethical restoration: a means to recover what history has neglected through the ‘flooding’ of a rush of imagination. In The Site of Memory, ancestral presence, emotion and imagination converge.
If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.
32 pages, Paperback
Published January 25, 2026
2 people are currently reading
71 people want to read
About the author
Toni Morrison
245 books23.8k followersChloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
Born and raised in Lorain, Ohio, Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. Morrison earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955. In 1957 she returned to Howard University, was married, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. Morrison became the first black female editor for fiction at Random House in New York City in the late 1960s. She developed her own reputation as an author in the 1970s and '80s. Her novel Beloved was made into a film in 1998. Morrison's works are praised for addressing the harsh consequences of racism in the United States and the Black American experience.
The National Endowment for the Humanities selected Morrison for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities, in 1996. She was honored with the National Book Foundation's Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters the same year. President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2016. Morrison was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame in 2020.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 26, 2025
This booklet taught me more about the importance of fiction for brown & black writers than many other books could.
Toni Morrison does not accept the label of “magical realism” - and it got me thinking: what makes something magical or fantasy? If you, eg, believe in god, in miracles, in the impossible being possible - in prayer, then all of these things aren’t magical but the truth. Therefore she does not make a distinction between non fiction and fiction, but fiction and truth.
“I consider my single gravest responsibility is not to lie”
Toni Morrison does not accept the label of “magical realism” - and it got me thinking: what makes something magical or fantasy? If you, eg, believe in god, in miracles, in the impossible being possible - in prayer, then all of these things aren’t magical but the truth. Therefore she does not make a distinction between non fiction and fiction, but fiction and truth.
“I consider my single gravest responsibility is not to lie”
Review of advance copy
Picked this up as I thought it would be a good introduction to Toni Morrison as a writer, but it also told me so much as to who she is as a person (and I’m happy to say I’m very much a fan of both her writing and her character).
Glad I read through this essay - only 32 pages but Morrison is so succinct and measured as she opens up facets of her writing process, her imagination, and the history of black authorship. Looking forward to reading more of Morrison this year!
‘By now I know how to get to that place where something is working. I didn't always know: I thought every thought I had was interesting - because it was mine.’
‘As determined as these black writers were to persuade the reader of the evil of slavery, they also complimented him by assuming his nobility of heart and his high-mindedness.
They tried to summon up his finer nature in order to encourage him to employ it. They knew that their readers were the people who could make a difference in terminating slavery.’
‘If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.’
Glad I read through this essay - only 32 pages but Morrison is so succinct and measured as she opens up facets of her writing process, her imagination, and the history of black authorship. Looking forward to reading more of Morrison this year!
‘By now I know how to get to that place where something is working. I didn't always know: I thought every thought I had was interesting - because it was mine.’
‘As determined as these black writers were to persuade the reader of the evil of slavery, they also complimented him by assuming his nobility of heart and his high-mindedness.
They tried to summon up his finer nature in order to encourage him to employ it. They knew that their readers were the people who could make a difference in terminating slavery.’
‘If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.’
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews