‘Something We Said’: When words hurt, is a father’s love the balm?

Sticks and stones may break my bones.

You know the rest of that childhood rhyme, and you know it’s not true: words have meaning, and they can cut like a knife. And yet, though sticks and stones and words are weapons, as in the new memoir, “Something We Said” by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, they can also hold people together.

The college lecture was supposed to have been about the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act.

It was supposed to have been a lively discourse and discussion but without intention, it quickly veered sideways. When a white student quoted a movie line featuring the “n-word,” the room went quiet and Professor Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor panicked.

She’d grown up hearing that word, and seeing it, and she’d experienced the painful feelings attached to it. She knew who wrote that movie line. It was her father, Richard Pryor.

In her first few years, Pryor spent most of her time in a white world, hearing her mother’s tales of her larger-than-life father, and trying to grasp meaning in her father’s albums, peppered as they were with a word that was off-limits to her. 

When she was six, she met her father for the first time. She began to visit him regularly. 

It was fun at her Dad’s house; though he was sometimes moody, he taught her to fish and play dominoes. She became close with her siblings, fearful of her great-grandmother, and confused about a word that her father’s uncles threw around like a beach ball. It was a forbidden word at her mother’s house, but her father used it. Differently. Often. 

The word hurt. She knew first-hand that it did.

“The word became a degrading slur that shackled all Black people together into a single, inescapable tribe,” she says.

So why was it okay if certain people said it?

Knowing that, in the years since Richard Pryor’s accident and his death from multiple sclerosis, he’s become somewhat of a legend is a very satisfying thing, isn’t it? So is reading about him, especially from the viewpoint of one of his seven children. But his is not the only story you get inside “Something We Said.”

Wrapped around the life of Richard Pryor is the life of a word that straddles a line between danger and provocation, a word that author Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor refuses to say or even print. As she tells readers about her father and her loving-but-difficult relationship with him, she warily circles that word, as if it might bite. You may cringe, but she weighs it carefully, helping readers see it as a chameleon before always bringing us back to her father, his work, and his life before and after her and that word.

It’s a push-pull balance that holds readers fast, and keeps them there. It’s perfect for fans of this genre, or Richard Pryor, or of language — and it’s going to make you think. If you want a good memoir this week, one that may send you to your old album collection, “Something We Said” is rock-solid.

“Something We Said: Richard Pryor, A Notorious Word, and Me” | by Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor | c.2026, Simon & Schuster $29.00 | 304 pages