Jefferson’s memoir Negroland won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography, partly because of its ability to be personal and critical at the same time. Jefferson says, “I’d spent my writing life as a critic. My initial feeling was that those kinds of tones and voices had to go; this was memoir. But then, I realized, no, that was as much a fixed part of my identity as other things. I realized I had to include the critic who is diagnosing, who is assessing, who is judging against a kind of backdrop that is aesthetic, cultural, political.”