Toni Morrison and Chloe Wofford: Did her Chloe personality do the writing, while her Toni personality took care of getting it published and publicized?

Even considering that Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize and other major awards; that she is an American, and especially an African-American, literary icon; that many readers identify with, or are sympathetic to, victims of slavery and other trauma; and that many readers find her writing to be poetic and brilliant, the number of people and articles eulogizing and expressing their adoration of her is remarkable.

It seems to me that she has been getting twice as much praise as other great writers who have died in recent years, and she is not twice as great as those other writers. But she may have had twice as great representation, which I speculate was arranged by her Toni personality.

Speaking as Chloe in interviews (see previous posts), she said that she did the writing, but that she published under the name of “Toni,” because the manuscript for her first novel was submitted to the publisher under her nickname, “Toni.” Chloe said that she tried to get her name on the novel corrected, but she was too late. And why didn’t she get her name corrected on subsequent novels? Because she was already known to the public as Toni.

In view of Chloe’s statements that her family has always continued to call her Chloe, and that Chloe was how she thought of herself when she did the writing, I think you have to be gullible to believe the reasons she gave for initially, and then continually, publishing as Toni.

My guess is that the name “Toni” was on that first manuscript, because it was her Toni personality who took care of getting Chloe’s writing published. And Toni was as brilliant at the publicity and business side of things as Chloe was at the writing. Toni was able to connect with the agents of superstardom, including: Oprah Winfrey (1), Robert Gottlieb, editor (2), Curtis Brown, literary agents (3, 4), and Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, photographer (5).

Toni may have thought that Chloe was a great writer, but that without the help and publicity that Toni arranged with Oprah Winfrey, etc., Chloe would never have gained the recognition she did. Toni felt that she was as good at what she did as Chloe was at what she did, and Toni wanted her contribution recognized. So she offered to make Chloe’s writing famous, but under the name “Toni.” And it was an offer that Chloe could not refuse.

Or maybe Chloe did not make any deal with Toni. Maybe Chloe was not in communication with Toni. Maybe Chloe could never really understand why her books were misnamed, so she just rationalized it as the result of having become known by her nickname after a mistake was made on her first book. And that suited Toni.

Indeed, the backstory of her getting the nickname “Toni” in large part because people at school could not pronounce “Chloe” sounds implausible. Sure, there may have been some people who mispronounced “Chloe” at first, but my guess is that sometimes she was going around in her Toni personality, who was asking to be called “Toni,” and then when people she had told to call her “Toni” met her Chloe personality, they would call her “Toni.” And Chloe, having no memory of Toni doing that, would think that people were calling her “Toni” only because they couldn’t pronounce “Chloe.”

Of course, I have no way of knowing the actual details of what happened. But I think that anyone who believes the story—that all the subsequent books had to be published under the wrong name due to a mistake with the first one—is gullible.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprah_Winfrey

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gottlieb

3. https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/toni-morrison

4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_Brown_(literary_agents)

5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Greenfield-Sanders

Added August 11: The main problem with my two-personality interpretation (see above) is that people with multiple personality hardly ever have only two personalities. So there were probably more than one "Toni" personality. And one of them may have done the final editing and revisions of Chloe's manuscripts.