Booksellers, Riffing: The Color Purple

By Lexie Smyth, Miwa Messer, Tammy Dahlgren / December 18, 2023 at 10:26 am

Booksellers love to talk about all-time favorites and their current must-reads, the books that changed them and the books they can’t wait for other readers to experience. Plenty of readers are planning to see the new movie version of The Color Purple when it opens on Christmas Day, so three of us jumped on a Zoom call to share our thoughts on this iconic book and more.

Tammy Dahlgren is a bookseller at our store in Marietta, Georgia, and she first read The Color Purple 28 years ago. Lexie Smith is a bookseller and the Fiction Category Manager in the Barnes & Noble home office. She first read The Color Purple almost 15 years ago, when she first started working in bookstores. Miwa Messer is a bookseller and producer/host of our podcast, Poured Over. She first read The Color Purple a little before Tammy did.

Hardcover $30.00

The Color Purple (B&N Exclusive Edition)

By Alice Walker
Foreword by Kiese Laymon

In Stock Online

Hardcover $30.00

No novel is more iconic than The Color Purple, and this exclusive edition in celebration of its 40th anniversary is stunning. Revisit the often tragic, always uplifting story of Celie and Nettie, separated sisters who carry on through letters. It delivers on so many emotional levels and is required reading for anyone.

When a book makes you feel like you’re in an actual place, and that you’re with real people the way this book does…There’s nothing like it. The Color Purple takes you into a completely different world, and yet, these characters feel as real to me as sitting here at my desk talking to you.

MM: Tammy, do you remember how you found The Color Purple?

TD: I was watching The Oprah Winfrey Show, and they were talking about the movie coming out at that time. I hadn’t read it at that point, but because Oprah and Whoopi and Ray Dawn Chong and all these people — Danny Glover — who were going to be in the movie, and that was a big deal on Oprah, I went to get the book and I read the book in two hours. I locked myself in the bathroom at home, and I read the book in about two hours.

MM: I love that. I remember thinking I’d never read anything like The Color Purple before, the dialogue and dialect, the epistolary structure. I don’t think I’d read a novel in letters before that I really connected to like that. It just made so much sense to me, even though like I grew up outside of Boston. Lexie, do you remember how you felt when you first read The Color Purple?

LS: You’re right about the epistolary form (sometimes I think that that can be really stiff) but because it’s written in the dialect and because Celie has such a distinct voice, I was hooked from the get-go. I needed to know who this woman was, because she has such a unique perspective on the world — I couldn’t put the book down because the voice had such a hold on me.

MM: The first time I read The Color Purple, I was 14 or 15 — and catch this: My dad had a copy of it. It was such a big book at the time that even my dad was reading it and I totally snagged it from him. It blew my mind wide open. And then I read it again when I was in my 20s. And then I reread it before we sat down to do this chat. Who’s your favorite character?

LS: Shug Avery is my favorite character in The Color Purple – you cannot help but love her larger than life personality and her infectious joie de vivre.

TD: Oh, actually, I liked Mister, to be honest. Alice Walker was obviously telling the story from more of Celie’s voice but Mister had a voice too, and his voice was the domineering man at that time. Not that I was agreeing with him, but I was trying to see it from a different side.

MM: Favorite moment?

LS: For me, the most powerful moment in The Color Purple is when she explains her belief that the best way to praise God is to “like what you like,” and that God is trying to please us – what a beautiful way to live.

TD: I loved Celie’s relationship with her sister, and how Nettie was allowing her to be a part of her world through the letters. I loved that that connection because Celie felt like she had nobody else in the world. She waited on these letters to come. She didn’t feel like she had anybody, but she was connected to her sister. Everything her sister was telling her that was going on in that tribe in Africa, she was experiencing it as well, along with her. That’s when I found the joy of reading as well.

MM: Tell me what the joy of reading feels like for you.

TD So for me — which is why I’ve been working at Barnes and Noble, as long as I have — the joy of reading is the sharing and the connection to the characters, and connections to other people outside of the characters. So if I read that book and we’re discussing this book, we all read it and we all have different points of view. That’s the joy because I can learn from what you got out of it, and what Lexie got out of it, and I can share with you what I got out of it. And we walk away with something joyful.

That’s the joy because I can learn from what you got out of it, and what Lexie got out of it, and I can share with you what I got out of it. And we walk away with something joyful.

MM: Lexie, what does the joy of reading mean for you?

LS: When a book makes you feel like you’re in an actual place, and that you’re with real people the way this book does…There’s nothing like it. The Color Purple takes you into a completely different world, and yet, these characters feel as real to me as sitting here at my desk talking to you.

MM: I really I love listening to both of you talk about your experience of reading this book. We build community when we share our reading experiences; we all have our own histories and our own stories. I’m also wondering how you talk about The Color Purple with someone who hasn’t read it?

LS: I think what is so special to me about this book is that it is about someone who has had a really difficult experience in life. But there’s the turn in the book, where Celie realizes that Nettie is still alive. And she and Suge have this conversation and Suge tells her that God is everything, not just some person in the sky, that God is love, and love is what it’s all about…that’s when realize that you can find the beautiful things in life, like the color purple, no matter how difficult your life is. It blew my mind.

TD: Mine was similar; I believe there was something in the book that says, God gets pissed, because he took all the time to make the color purple, and we don’t even recognize it.

MM: Are you as excited about the movie as folks out in the wider world are because there’s a lot of buzz coming for this new version of the movie?

TD: I am. One, I read the book. Two, I saw the first movie. Three. I went to the play.

MM: Oh, how was that?

TD: I saw it when they came to Atlanta before they went to Broadway. And it wasn’t a musical, it was the actual play. They were previewing it here in Atlanta. And it was amazing. I was hanging on the actors’ every word. I took a friend of the family with me, and it was hilarious. We’re at the point where Mister apologizes to Celie for everything he has done. My aunt, she’s a friend of the family, and she was eighty the time, she sat in the audience with me. And when he came out, and he says, I’m sorry, auntie says, too late! And the entire audience laughed so hard. The actors broke characterization and laughed at it as well. And I will always remember that. It was at that pivotal point where he realized what he had done, and he was trying to apologize to her. I just love those moments. That’s why I said he was one of my favorite characters, because he changed. I look for the changes in people, as well as in characters, because these characters, they become my friends.

MM: Yes! I think too, it’s really important to remember that novels are designed to show us how people change. I also think it’s great that this is a book that was very successfully turned into a film and will be a film again — and has also been a musical and has also been a stage play. All of the different ways that The Color Purple can come to life brings new people to the book. Lexie, how did you pick the text we used in our exclusive edition (which includes an intro by Kiese Laymon, who I love).

LS: I think if you read that introduction, it will tell you exactly why we picked this version. It’s also just the right time. This is a book that appeals to readers of different ages— and I think that a new generation is going to find it through the musical movie version. I’m so proud and so happy to have such an iconic edition of it with this beautiful introduction and a unique cover that harkens back to the original.

MM: Tammy, you clearly have a really deep connection to The Color Purple. I’m wondering what you’re hoping new readers take away from the book?

TD: I do hope that new readers enjoy it the way I did, so those characters become a part of their world, not just at the time that they’re reading, but so they will always refer back to them. Because it could be them. Although it’s fictional, it could be someone they know. Everybody is connected in some kind of way. I just want the reader to see that the connection that they have with any one of those characters.

MM: I love that. So can I also recommend another book to both of you because I think you will love it? The critic Salamishah Tillet wrote an amazing book called In Search of the Color Purple. And the subtitle is: The Story of an American Masterpiece. She’s interviewed Alice Walker multiple times, and spent a lot of time with her. You know, there were some folks that had lots of feelings about this book when it first came out in 1983. I read In Search of the Color Purple when it first came out a couple of years ago and I reread it as we were prepping for this conversation. If you are a fan of The Color Purple in any form — the book or one of the films or the musical or the stage play — I really recommend it. Salamishah Tillet is one of the smartest critics working today, and this presents the novel in the context of its history and its evolution to film and stage.

TD: Read the book! And enjoy the other mediums also, because [the book] enlightened you.

Hardcover $45.00

Purple Rising: Celebrating 40 Years of the Magic, Power, and Artistry of The Color Purple

By Lise Funderburg , Scott Sanders

In Stock Online

Hardcover $45.00

If ever there was a novel worth celebrating, it’s The Color Purple. Purple Rising gives us the backstory of the novel, a progress report on life since its publication and a celebration of Black joy through the stories that embody it.

Paperback $17.00

In Search of The Color Purple: The Story of an American Masterpiece

By Salamishah Tillet
Foreword by Gloria Steinem
Afterword Beverly Guy-Sheftall

In Stock Online

Paperback $17.00

The Color Purple is one of the most important pieces of literature ever written, and here, Salamishah Tillet goes back and explores the creation of the novel, its cultural impact and the history behind it. There’s no better way to celebrate such an indelible piece of the literary landscape.