Quiet As It's Kept draws on and extends recent psychoanalytic and psychiatric work of shame and trauma theorists to offer an in-depth analysis of Toni Morrison's representation of painful and shameful race matters in her fiction. Providing a frank and sustained look at the troubling, if not distressing, aspects of Morrison's fiction that other critics have studiously avoided or minimized in their commentaries, this book challenges established views of Morrison, showing her to be an author who forces readers into uncomfortable confrontations with matters of race. In Quiet As It's Kept, J. Brooks Bouson explores these issues in Morrison's works The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise.