First-time Author Kathryn Stockett Persevered and Finally Triumphed
Kathryn Stockett's mega-bestselling novel, The Help, which depicts a young white writer's attempt to document the lives of African-American maids in Jackson, MS in 1962, has generated nearly as much controversy as book sales. Some critics, including Erin Aubry Kaplan in Ms., have objected to Stockett's rendering of the speech of her African-American characters in heavy dialect, while white characters' southern accents are not similarly depicted.
Others are irked that Stockett--who, like her fictional writer Eugenia Skeeter Phelan, is white and was born in Mississippi--has enjoyed such huge commercial success while African-American authors who've explored the same subject material--such as mystery novelist Barbara Neely--aren't having their debut novel made into a movie by Steven Spielberg. (It's a controversy that brings to mind the angry reaction of many to William Styron's 1967 novel The Confessions of Nat Turner.) But, as this New York Times article details, probably just as many others across racial lines have praised the novel for its sensitivity and frankness in exposing the troubled, conflicted relationship of black women and their white employers in the segregated South.
For midlife aspiring writers, however, there's another thing to admire about The Help--the author's fortitude in overcoming repeated rejection and long odds to get her novel published at all. When Stockett, who is now 40, started writing the The Help in 2001, she already had a first novel in her drawer that her writing coach had described, in Stockett's words, as "awful." She began writingThe Help partly as therapy to help her cope with a bout of homesickness that she experienced in the depressing aftermath of the Sept.11 attacks. As she told the Times, she tried to comfort herself "by writing in the voices of the people I missed." One of those people was Demetrie, who had worked as a maid for Stockett's family when the author was a child. As Stockett recounts in an interview on the Penguin Books website:
At first I wasn't nervous writing in the voice of Aibileen and Minny because I didn't think anybody would ever read the story except me. I wrote it because I wanted to go back to that place with Demetrie. I wanted to hear her voice again.
But when other people started reading it, I was very worried about what I'd written and the line I'd crossed. And the truth is, I'm still nervous. I'll never know what it really felt like to be in the shoes of those black women who worked in the white homes of the South during the 1960's and I hope no one thinks I presume to know that. But I had to try. I wanted the story to be told. I hope I got some of it right.
Since Stockett was too young to remember 1962, the time in which her novel takes place, she fueled her imagination by interviewing people who had lived in the segregation era and by doing library research.
It sounds crazy, but I would go to the Eudora Welty Library in Jackson and look at old phone books. The back section of the phone book captures so much about the mundane life in a certain time, which somehow becomes interesting fifty years later. The fancy department stores, the abundance of printing shops, and the fact that there were no female doctors or dentists, all helped me visualize the time. In the residential listings, most families just listed the husband's name, with no mention of the wife.
I also read the Clarion Ledger newspapers for facts and dates. Once I'd done my homework, I'd go talk to my Grandaddy Stockett, who, at ninety-eight, still has a remarkable memory. That's where the real stories came from, like Cat-bite, who's in the book, and the farmers who sold vegetables and cream from their carts everyday, walking through the Jackson neighborhoods.
After Stockett met the artistic challenge of recreating a long-gone world, she ran up against another obstacle. Over a five-year-period, she sent her novel to 60 literary agents and was rejected again and again. As she recounted in a Time magazine interview:
I have a record of 45 rejections, but there was one despondent summer where I blasted out about 15 letters without keeping records. I thought, What's the use? I'm just going to get a big fat no. So the official record is 45, but really it's probably more like 60 rejections. And then finally Susan Ramer at Don Congdon agreed to take it on. I couldn't even believe she was excited about the book.
After that long wait, amazingly, Ramer sold The Help to editor Amy Einhorn, who purchased it as the first novel for her eponymous imprint at G.S. Putnam. As Einhorn explained in an interview for writer Laura Munson's blog:
I don't think anyone could have predicted that the book would sell over a million copies and counting in hardcover. But I knew when I read it that it was something special. It was the first novel I bought at the imprint. I had been here for a few months and hadn't bought any fiction. For a while I started to think perhaps I was being too critical of my submissions but then I read THE HELP. I always say it was kind of like when I was single and I would go on a string of bad dates and I'd start to doubt myself, thinking perhaps I was being too picky, but then when I met my husband I thought, "oh, that's what it's supposed to be like." That's what it was like when I read THE HELP - I knew.
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