“When I started writing I had to do it before my children woke up, so I got up at 4am,” she explains. “And after they went to college I stayed in this rhythm, because I’m smartest at this time of day. Whatever juice there is creatively drains in the afternoon.” Her daily routine has remained unchanged for decades. “I usually get up before the sun. Although the weather’s been so hideous that these days I’m getting up with the sun, if it ever shows up,” and she’s laughing, again.

God Help The Child is a fierce, haunting tale of our inability as adults to free ourselves from the hurt of the past, and when I tell her I think it’s a book that will scare mothers, she laughs. “My dear, I brought up two boys, and you know, I really don’t think I could do that over again.” (Nearly five years ago Morrison experienced the single greatest sadness of her life: the death of her second-born son, Slade, to pancreatic cancer.) Asked if a daughter would have been different, she pauses. “Yes.”

Why? “Well, unless she was a real little bitch, I think we would have got along,” she says, with a low chuckle that doesn’t diminish her total conviction. “But raising boys, well, they’re a whole other gender, which is hard to understand.”

And so whose experience, whose pain, did she use when depicting the fraught mother-daughter relationship in God Help The Child? “Nobody else’s words,” she says. “But I’ve always been a writer of what we call ‘skin privilege’ within the black community. Skin ranking was a reasonable ranking system, because if you were lighter you weren’t harassed so much, people didn’t treat you so badly. The darker you were, the greater the inconvenience.”

Skin privilege has been a recurring theme for Morrison, but in her most recent novel, it’s used to beautifully unpick the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship. “In God Help The Child we have a mother whose family can pass for white, who has this really, really black child, and she doesn’t like it.”

And what sort of daughter was she? “Well, I don’t know what kind of daughter I would have been, but I was very obedient, because at the time there was no other thing for me to be,” she says. “[My parents] were very strict. And so I was very obedient, right through university, because I was dependent on them, and they were proud of me. There was very little agitation or confrontation – until I had children, and that’s when the friction started. Your mother telling you how to raise your children, that will always do it.”

Toni Morrison’s powerful quotes will lift you up when you need it most