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Now that she's in her mid-80s, celebrated author Toni Morrison feels aches, pains and regret.

She tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "When I'm not creating or focusing on something I can imagine or invent, I think I go back over my life — I don't recommend this, by the way — and you pick up, 'Oh, what did you do that for? Why didn't you understand this?' Not just with children, as a parent, but with other people, with friends. ... It's not profound regret; it's just a wiping up of tiny little messes that you didn't recognize as mess when they were going on."

Morrison, the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in literature, says writing provides a "big protection" from her thoughts.

Her latest novel, God Help the Child, follows an African-American woman who has no idea why she has given birth to such a dark-skinned baby. The mother, named Sweetness, is embarrassed by her daughter's darkness and wants to distance herself. The daughter, meanwhile, is scarred by not having her mother's love.

Morrison says she wanted to separate color from race in her latest creation.

"Distinguishing color — light, black, in between — as the marker for race is really an error: It's socially constructed, it's culturally enforced and it has some advantages for certain people," she says. "But this is really skin privilege — the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color."

The novel explores those childhood wounds that leave a lasting mark into adulthood, and Morrison says it got her thinking about her own two sons. When they were young, she says she felt "able and competent" and she never thought she would "hurt them in any way."

"Afterwards, I remember every error, every word that I spoke that was wrong or incontinent, every form of when I did not protect them properly," she says. "Now that I'm 84, I remember everything as a mistake — and I regret everything. Now, mind you, one of them is now deceased, one of them is very successful, so I don't have any reason for this except perhaps age and regret."

Interview Highlights

On her own experience of the hierarchy of color

I lived in a little working-class town [Lorain, Ohio,] that had no black neighborhoods at all, one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from east Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church and there were four elementary schools. We were all pretty much ... very, very poor. ...

God Help the Child

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I'm not at all a person who has been reared or raised in a community in which these racial lines were that pronounced. Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name and they would figure out how to call us [a name], but it was so light; it was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain. ... I thought the whole world was like Lorain.

On her parents' approach to race

[My father] was very, very serious in his hatred of white people. What mitigated it was my mother, who was exactly the opposite, who never rejected or accepted anybody based on race or color or religion or any of that. Everybody was an individual whom she approved of or disapproved of based on her perception of them as individuals. ...

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, Ga., as a child. I think seeing two black businessmen, not vagrants, hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

On the importance of names and nicknames in her books

There's a whole history, I think, in naming. In the beginning of black people being in this country, they lost their names. They were given names by their masters and so they didn't have names and they began to call one another, decades later, by nicknames.

I don't think I knew any of my father's friends, male friends, by their real name. I remember them only by their nicknames. Also there was an honesty sometimes — the names were humiliating, deliberately so. Somebody would pick out your flaw. If you were little, they would call you "Shorty," and if you were angry they would call you "The Devil." I remember a man in the neighborhood who was called "Jim the Devil." Always those three words. "Have you seen Jim the Devil?" ...

It's a very personal identification; trying to move away maybe from the history of having no name, and then personalizing it. On one hand, to give you a name that's embarrassing in order to make you confront it, deal with it now, and then later on [to give you] more charming names, moving away from humiliating names.

On her mother's singing influencing the musicality of her writing

I didn't do it consciously or deliberately, but if it's there then I am positive that that's part of it. Part of it, for me, is the sound. I'm a radio child with the ear up against the gauze, where you hear stories, you know those little stories they used to play on the radio for 15 minutes. ... It was such a cooperative thing. If they said ... "It's storming," you had to see it yourself. If they said "red," you had to identify the shade. So the sound of my mother, the sound of the radio and the fact that they forced us, happily, to tell stories — that was the entertainment in the pre-television days.

The grown-ups told stories, the same stories, over and over again. ... They were usually horrible stories, by the way — ghost stories, peoples' heads got chopped off and so on. But that was so common a thing in our house. For me, the sound of the text is very important — so important that I read all of my books for the audiobooks so that the reader can hear what I hear.

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On her house burning down in 1993

I mourned a couple of things. First of all, I spent a lot of time being happy that my son was not hurt. The second thing was that I lost his and his brother's report cards, which I will never get back. The third thing was I am a little bit of — well, I'm not anymore, but I used to be a little plant thief. You know, if I were someplace where there was something growing, I would snip it off, take it home and plant it. And the one thing I'm obsessive about is jade. I had a pot, a jade bush, that was about 15 years old and it was huge and beautiful and it burnt in a snap. Of course, I lost manuscripts and books and some other things, but the hurt was the report cards and the hurt was the jade bush.

On old age

Some very, very close friends of mine are dead and others are far away, so you narrow down your acquaintances — the ones that mean a lot to you. I have my sister, who is a year and a half older, and of course my own son and grandchildren, but you're in a smaller world, personally. So there is this boredom or the absence of something to do.

I mean, I don't work — I keep telling people I'm unemployed. And I don't wash dishes and I don't wash clothes and I don't clean my house — somebody else does that. So there's this void. ...

What you can pull, if you're an irritable old lady, into that void is every misstep, wrong word: "Why didn't you visit? Why didn't you do this?" The opposite of that is when you get to a certain age and there's a void and you begin to remember every hurt somebody did to you. That never happens to me.

On having back pain and being in a wheelchair

There's something about being arthritic or [having a] backache or ... that makes you feel put upon. I remember my mother used to think if she lost her socks that they hated her. ...

"I did so much for you, body, why aren't you helping me now when I need you? I was so nice to you." ... I do feel like I'm under attack; it's a little way of dealing with it.

I don't take painkillers. I sometimes take [them] at night, but I don't have anything else that I do — that some people do — in order to avoid their pain or make it lower. I just have it and I know that I cannot stand up for more than six minutes and I cannot walk long distances.

"The writing is — I'm free from pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing."

- Toni Morrison

On writing

The writing is — I'm free from pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing. It is dangerous because I'm thinking up dangerous, difficult things, but it is also extremely safe for me to be in that place.

The prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, said Monday that his country is nearing a major trade agreement with the United States, according to an interview with The Wall Street Journal.

Abe told the Journal that he hopes to come to an understanding with President Barack Obama when he visits Washington at the end of the month as part of a 12-country summit.

"We think that an agreement between Japan and the U.S. is close, but we're hoping that even more progress will be made," Abe said.

The U.S. and Japan are the two most powerful countries involved in the 12-country Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that's been in negotiations for more than five years.

Negotiators from both countries met in Tokyo on Sunday and Monday in an effort to smooth out key differences before the summit.

Reuters reported that although the two countries make up a sixth of the group, their ability to come to terms will determine whether an agreement is signed:

Access to Japan's farm market and the U.S. car market remain obstacles to a bilateral deal between the two nations, vital to the success of a long-delayed Trans-Pacific Partnership pact. The world's biggest and third-biggest economies account for some 80 percent of the economic output of the 12-member TPP.

The U.S. is asking for Japan to double its rice imports while Japan is asking the United States to eliminate its 2.5 percent tax on auto parts imports.

"Negotiations can't work if one side makes no concessions, but there are various domestic restrictions," Japan Economy Minister Akira Amari told Japan's public broadcaster NHK. "Rice, in particular, is produced across Japan, so we are carefully negotiating while feeling a domestic sense of crisis."

Coming to an agreement as part of the TPP remains an important step for the prime minister as he continues to try to resurrect Japan's economy.

"Deflation continued for 15 years, and I can't say that it's ended for good, but we have created a situation that is no longer deflation," Abe told the Journal.

While in America, the prime minister will also give a speech to a joint session of Congress and visit Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

China is not a part of the TPP, adding value for both Japan and the U.S., as they continue to balance against that country's economic rise.

Shinzo Abe

trade agreement

Economy

Japan

The editor of BuzzFeed, the website that carries headlines ranging from "12 Reasons Everything Is Better When It Rains" to "EU Ministers To Hold Emergency Talks On Migrant Crisis," has acknowledged the deletion of more than 1,000 posts – three of them following complaints from advertisers – since he was hired in January 2012.

Editor in chief Ben Smith's memo to staff Saturday, obtained by the website Gawker, comes after his site was criticized for the recent deletion of two posts – one critical of the board game Monopoly and the other critical of the ad campaign launched by soap brand Dove. Their parent companies, Hasbro and Unilever, respectively, are BuzzFeed advertisers. Gawker first reported both those deletions.

Smith has maintained both those instances were for editorial reasons, but the deletions, and the scrutiny directed at the website, prompted an internal review last week of the practice at BuzzFeed.

The review, which was headed by Annie-Rose Strasser, BuzzFeed News deputy managing editor, found 1,112 posts deleted posts since January 2012. Here's the breakdown, according to Smith's memo: editorial decisions, 100; advertiser complaints, 3; copyright issues, 65; technical error, 263; duplicated already published work, 122; community user deletions, 140; on-edit staff deletions and unidentified bylines, 377.

Of the three posts deleted after complaints from advertisers, one, Smith said, was by Mark Duffy, a blogger and ad critic who wrote for the site under the byline "copyranter." In 2013, he accused an ad for Axe deodorant of advocating "worldwide mass rape." The ad agency complained, via BuzzFeed's chief revenue officer, that the "tone of his item was over the top."

"I agreed that this was way outside even our very loose standards of the time," Smith wrote in his memo to staff.

A second post was deleted after complaints from BuzzFeed's chief revenue officer. This one was by Tanner Ringerud, a former member of BuzzFeed's Creative department, who switched to editorial in 2013. His post that March mocked Microsoft's Internet Explorer. In his previous BuzzFeed job, Ringerud had worked on a Microsoft ad campaign. After the complaint, Smith said, "We agreed that it was inappropriate for Tanner to write about brands whose ad campaigns he'd worked on."

The third complaint, this one in January 2014, came from the head of BuzzFeed's creative division that writer Samir Mezrahi had taken a gif from a Pepsi ad created by BuzzFeed's creative team and turned it into a Vine without credit. Smith said he asked Mezrahi not to use advertising created by BuzzFeed's business side for editorial purposes.

"Four days later, he published a post titled 'These Brands Are Going To Bombard Your Twitter Feed On Super Bowl Sunday,' which was a mix of criticism and praise for a long list of brands on Twitter," Smith wrote in the memo. "I again heard a complaint from our business side about Pepsi, which was the first item in the list, and whose Twitter feed they were making content for during the Super Bowl."

Smith added that BuzzFeed decided that an editor writing about an ad produced by the site's creative team was "inappropriate." That post was deleted.

You can also read/listen to David's Folkenflik – and NPR's — past reporting on BuzzFeed here:

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9 Powerful Moments In The Day Of A Viral Web Editor At BuzzFeed

buzzfeed

The European Union is holding an emergency meeting Monday about the deadly capsizing of a boat crowded with would-be migrants in the Mediterranean Sea. With 28 survivors reported and 24 bodies recovered, only a fraction of the hundreds of people who were reportedly on board are accounted for.

The boat was about 120 miles south of the Italian island of Lampedusa when it capsized this weekend; it was roughly 60 miles from Libya. Estimates of the number of people who were on the 65-foot craft range from 700 to 950. The boat reportedly capsized after many of its passengers rushed to the same side.

From Rome, NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports:

"One survivor says there were 950 people on board, many locked in the hold by the human traffickers before departure. But Italian authorities say they cannot confirm the numbers on board.

"Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, who has long been seeking more help and resources from Italy's European partners, has called for an emergency meeting of EU government leaders."

Today's EU meeting in Luxembourg comes as some 1,500 migrants are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean so far this year; more than 10,000 have been rescued. The foreign ministers' discussions are sure to center on who will bear responsibility for patrolling immigration routes and helping those in danger. The EU has run one such program since last fall, when Italy discontinued its larger operation.

This weekend's disaster stands to eclipse a similar event late in 2013, when 500 migrants had crammed onto a boat that caught fire and sank near Sicily. Officials estimated that up to 300 people died.

"We've had one and a half years now to talk about that and discuss that – and plan for that," says the UN High Commission for Human Rights' Laurens Jolles. "And only now we hear the EU and governments are all starting to discuss that and say, 'It's unacceptable, we have to do something.'"

Many of the smuggling boats have launched from Libya, fueled by a combination of upheaval and a lack of border controls. The passengers are often from a range of North African countries.

"The disaster comes only a week after 400 others were reported dead in a similar capsize near Lampedusa," as Scott wrote for The Two-Way Sunday.

For a sign of the state of things in Libya, consider that a newspaper headline on Sunday touted the pending return of roadway traffic lights in Benghazi.

"We have what is possibly becoming a failed state at our doorstep. We have criminal gangs having a heyday organizing these trips in rickety boats," Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat tells the BBC. "We need to get the Libyan factions together to form some sort of government of almost national unity."

migrants

Lampedusa

Libya

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