03/30/2023
It’s the call that every author dreams of. It arrived out of the blue in the middle of the bleak early months of the pandemic, when the world was on lockdown. I was working so intensely on a barrage of overlapping book deadlines that I nearly missed the call, and then when we finally spoke, it took a minute to adjust to hearing one of the most recognized voices in the world coming through my phone— Oprah herself.
And she was saying the most glorious and generous affirmations, that the ancestors are singing, that you are highly favored (in the beautiful language of the black church), that this is the book humanity needs right now, and I was processing what this meant to hear these words from her, anticipating this would change my life but not knowing exactly how, just floored that I had hit the literary lottery, joined a rarefied club, and that she had chosen a book I’d given every cell of my body to research and fully exhausted myself to complete.
Astonishingly, she sent copies of Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents to 500 national leaders — from senators and mayors to university presidents. It thrilled me immensely that the very first podcast she curated was about this book. This podcast was a feat of technical brilliance and creativity at that stage of the pandemic. It ended up winning a Webby, considered the Oscars of the Internet, in the category of Arts and Culture.
Caste was the 86th book that Oprah selected for her book club, and now I am thrilled to have just received the 100th book in this legendary lineage, Hello Beautiful by .
Congratulations to Ann for being chosen at this landmark moment and congratulations and unending gratitude to Oprah for conceiving of this club, for inspiring people to read, for achieving this milestone and for choosing us all.
