BOLLEN: Did you let the man in “Tristes Tropiques, ” whom you call SL, read the piece? You don’t mention his real name, but it’s still quite an intimate portrait.

ALS: People are so shocked by this, but I showed it to him because I love him. People have a copyright on their own life. I’m not a vindictive person. And he said, “It’s like a train. You can’t stop it. Just keep going.” So I did.

BOLLEN: There are some really interesting pieces that sit dissonantly side by side in the book. You have a formal, more traditional profile on the life of Richard Pryor followed by a fictional screed in the voice of Richard Pryor’s sister, as if she were Shakespeare’s sister. Was that looser, wilder second piece a response to the formalism of the first?

ALS: That’s a good question. I think that I live in writing. I don’t really see that many distinctions in the work. What I feel is there are certain demands that you have to satisfy in any piece of writing. When it’s just for me, it’s just for me, but if it’s a piece for a particular publication, I know what they’re going to ask for. I feel really spoiled because the places that I write for tend to want more of your sound. They know that there are certain journalistic demands, but they want your sound, too. I don’t make a lot of money, but I get to have freedom.

BOLLEN: I get the sense that Richard Pryor is something of the silent main character of the book—like Hamlet’s father or something. He haunts it.

ALS: He’s definitely a big figure in my life, because there were so few black men who were successful and who successfully conveyed black male fear—how America can make you feel crazy, and how America can create interesting levels of contradiction.

BOLLEN: Did you ever meet Pryor?

ALS: I didn’t want to, because it was in my imagination.

BOLLEN: Let me ask you about the title, White Girls. There is an expectation that a reader has from a black writer who titles a book “white girls” that there is going to be some critique of race. But you turn that expectation on its head by claiming the identification of a white girl. You are purposely trying to shift our categories or elide expectations.

ALS: Well, I was so well loved by my mother that if people have any expectations of me I really don’t notice because I’m hardest on myself. I’m also interested in the levels of my own thinking. As I said, I never feel that kind of pressure. I feel that I talk about it a lot in the book, when I do feel it or when I feel like I’m being asked—because I’m black or gay—to do something. But I never think from a category. I always think from the reaction or the thought. I remember that one editor who caused me to put my fiction away made a comment about “Richard Pryor’s Sister.” He said, “Well, for this kind of person, she wouldn’t be reading the books you mention.” He said that. When I told SL that, he said, “Can I give that editor several phone numbers?” It made me know that the racism that my fictional character is attacking and which Pryor was attacking is a very real thing. I think it’s cultural racism more than anything by now, which dovetails with actual racism, but the cultural racism to me is even more shocking.