Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor is alleging in the new memoir that her mother, Maxine Silverman, allegedly used a racial slur against her during an argument when she was 12.
The moment sits inside Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me, a book that explores Stordeur Pryor’s life as Richard Pryor’s daughter.
Speaking with PEOPLE, she says the memory hurt deeply, but she never doubted her mother’s love.
“Even with what my mom said… she loved me,” Stordeur Pryor says. “I’ve always known that my family has.”
What she has not fully had, she says, is the conversation she wants with family members who lived around that truth. She wonders what it would be like to ask cousins, “Did you know that I was Black?” and “Were you told to behave in a particular way around it?”
Stordeur Pryor also writes about the gift her mother left in cardboard boxes: Richard’s clippings, Christmas cards, notes and a poem to his daughter. “She was an archivist in her heart,” she says.
Her memoir is out now!
