Oprah and Jenna Bush Hager Bond Over Choosing "The Bluest Eye" For Book Clubs
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Jenna Bush Hager's most recent book club pick is The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, which Oprah also chose for her book club in 2000.
On the TODAY show, Oprah and Bush Hager discussed Morrison's enduring legacy.
“To be able to read Toni Morrison...is one of the greatest joys in life,” Oprah said.
When the world gets tough, as it certainly did this year, Oprah Winfrey and Jenna Bush Hager have the same impulse: They read books. Specifically, they read books by Toni Morrison.
"We both turned to books, including The Bluest Eye, for comfort," Bush Hager told Oprah during a discussion on the TODAY Show, part of her "Celebration of Toni Morrison" special. Oprah added, "To be able to read Toni Morrison...is one of the great joys of life."
In December 2020, Bush Hager announced that The Bluest Eye, Morrison's first novel, would be her latest Read With Jenna book club pick. Bush Hager first encountered The Bluest Eye in high school, and it changed her forever.
"It was a book that talked about adult subjects but the underlying themes of racism, otherness and feeling not good enough were things that my classmates were dealing with, particularly my classmates of color. It was the first book that really opened my eyes to how literature can create understanding and take you into worlds you don’t know," Bush Hager wrote for TODAY.
Two decades earlier, Oprah selected the same groundbreaking book for her own book club. While announcing the pick on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2000, Oprah said that if she could persuade the entire U.S. to read The Bluest Eye, she would feel accomplished enough to retire. “I feel like I would have done my job,” she said on-air, per Quartz.
First published in 1970, The Bluest Eye's 50th anniversary coincided with Bush Hager's announcement. The acclaimed novel follows the life of Pecola Breedlove, a 12-year-old Black girl who longs for blue eyes. Only then, she feels, will she be beautiful.
Speaking to Bush Hager in 2020, Oprah echoed the sentiment: The Bluest Eye fosters empathy and compassion, for yourself and others. "One of the things that I think she's able to do in this book is the same thing I've always tried to do in my work and one of the reasons why I started the book club, is to let people know that they are not alone," Oprah said on TODAY.
According to Oprah, Morrison's work helps us "follow our own pain, to reckon with it, and to transcend it." In an era characterized by grief, loss, turmoil, and isolation, there is no better author—and no better book—to read.
"When you read The Bluest Eye, you understand how people get stuck in the pain and burrowed down with it. I think that to be able to follow the pain and actually deal with the pain and then eventually transcend the pain, that is what her storytelling has been about," Oprah said.
The duo's conversation comes as a full-circle moment. They began 2020 with a stop on Oprah's 2020 Vision Tour in Fort Lauderdale, speaking about how their prominent book clubs "aren't competing" with one another. Now, in December, they've come together to celebrate their shared love for the same book—not compete.
"Somebody was asking me the other day, did I feel, since you were choosing the book, some sense of competition. Are you kidding me, honey child? I said. Are you kidding me? I want as many people to be exposed to all the books as possible," Oprah said.
In fact, if Bush Hager hadn't chosen The Bluest Eye, Oprah said she would have selected the novel again herself. "If you hadn't chosen it and I knew that the 50th anniversary was coming up, I would have done it again, because I love it that much," she said.
For more coverage about The Bluest Eye and Morrison's legacy, tune into the Read With Jenna special streaming on "TODAY," all day at 11:00 a.m, and at 8:00 p.m. ET and PT.
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