Something We Said

“A moving reflection on family, belonging, and language’s power to wound and heal.” —Kirkus Review “In SOMETHING WE SAID, Liz Pryor does what I assumed was the impossible, and that’s conjure distinct and unexplored pathways to explore a word that’s both my favorite and America’s least and most honest, through a dexterous and deeply vulnerable symphony of memoir, critique, and celebrity micro biography of said word’s most famous user.” —Damon Young, New York Times Bestselling Author of What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Blacker: A Memoir in Essays “Half memoir and half racial history, Elizabeth Pryor explores how the n-word shaped both the public and private worlds of her father, Richard Pryor, and how it defined her own sense of identity as his biracial daughter… . Moving, courageous, and intellectually rich, this is a work that reminds us we are far from finished reckoning with the word that has both haunted and defined American life.” —Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times bestselling author of Tears We Cannot Stop

Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is a professor of history at Smith College where she teaches courses on race, slavery, and her father, comedic legend Richard Pryor. She is the award-winning author of the article “The Etymology of [N-Word]: Resistance, Language, and the Politics of Freedom in the Antebellum North” and the 2016 book Colored Travelers: Mobility and the Fight for Citizenship Before the Civil War. Her viral TED talk on why it’s hard to talk about the n-word has been viewed more than two million times.