As Coates puts it: “Kenyatta had a more linear solution: ‘I think you should spend more time writing.’”Ĭoates’s commitment to the work and life of a writer binds and informs the entirety-the essays, their introductions, and the epilogue-of We Were Eight Years in Power. He considers alternate careers, but Kenyatta, his partner, disagrees. He has been working as a journalist and wants to continue his writing, but the pursuit hasn’t allowed him to contribute financially to the household he shares with his partner and their young son.

In the opening, Coates describes himself as he sits in an unemployment office in 2007. The structure of We Were Eight Years in Power underscores the degree to which a writer’s sense of self informs their material: the book features a Coates essay from each of the years President Obama was in office, and each essay (all of which first appeared in The Atlantic) is introduced by a new piece in which Coates reflects on his thoughts and feelings as a writer, critic, and citizen at the time.

And so it happened that in an attempt to analyze, in Cosby’s movement, the lure of the simplistic, I myself fell prey to it. But the messier one was truer-indeed, the messier one might well have lent explanatory power to the simple story I chose to tell. Better to tell a neater story, I reasoned, than attempt the messier one and have to contend with editors I did not then know. I had never written for such a prestigious national publication. He now sees his decision to keep the essay focused on Cosby’s lecture tour-a tour in which Cosby criticized and was generally condescending to young black men-as a weakness borne primarily of the point he was at in his writing career: He had been assigned by The Atlantic to write a profile of Bill Cosby, and though this was before rape allegations ended Cosby’s career, Coates admits he had heard rumors. IN THE INTRODUCTION to the new book by Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, Coates describes his dissatisfaction with the essay he is introducing.

Coates we were eight years in power