I’ve had the privilege of knowing Margo Jefferson since 2011, when I took her class The Critic as Artist as a student in Columbia University’s graduate writing program. I’d thought I knew all there was to know about Walter Benjamin—until she had us read Berlin Childhood around 1900, which introduced me to the idea that a writer’s life is worthy of detailed study; that it can illuminate their work when placed alongside it.

It was to my great surprise and delight when, in her 2015 memoir, Negroland, Margo placed her own life—her childhood among Chicago’s black elite and accomplished adulthood as a journalist (she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1995)—under the scan of her unrelenting eye. I had long admired Margo’s incisive and extremely attuned writing, her ability to elucidate the most subtle detail and make it sing. When her memoir was published, I had been out of grad school a couple of years, had moved away and hadn’t seen her in as long, though I had already torn through her first book, On Michael Jackson (2006), after reading everything of hers I could find online. Reading Negroland was like opening a portal into her mind, and just like Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood had, it offered new insights into a thinker I thought I already knew.