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‘The Help,’ a bestseller for more than year, is being made into a film
by Lonnae O’Neal Parker
Kathryn Stockett sounds ex- hausted when she comes on the line.
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Reached by phone in a Green- wood, Miss., bookstore, she’s fuzzily apologetic, she’s asking someone for water — it’s been one event, one interview, one somebody-wanting-to-talk-to- her-about-the-phenomenal-suc- cess-of-her-debut-novel, “The Help,” after another. The book hit the New York Times bestseller list in March 2009 and has been there since. Inspired by a maid who served her family for generations, it’s set in early-1960s Jackson and is about intimacies, secrets, shared loves and stoked hatreds be- tween black maids and the white women whose houses (and chil- dren’s behinds) they scrub. It is the No. 3 novel in Wash-
ington and has been on the local bestseller list for 56 weeks. Hav- ing sold 1.8 million copies, Stockett has accomplished a dream feat for any writer, let alone a first-timer. And she won the prestigious South African Boeke Prize. But that’s just for starters. The story is being made into a movie by writer and director Tate Taylor, who grew up down the street from Stockett. It stars Sissy Spacek, Allison Janney, Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Bryce Dallas Howard and is set in Greenwood, where Stockett, 41, has been with her 7-year-old daughter for three weeks, visit- ing the set, working on her sec- ond book, and giving interview after interview. It has been a stunning, life-altering, strato- spherically successful year. So she’s tired. But it’s a very good tired. The soft-spoken Stockett
doesn’t think she has changed, but the world has shifted around her and, “I don’t know, I’m a lit- tle more overwhelmed by every- thing.”
Although her time is shorter
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now, “I’m still a mom and, I hope, a wife in some sense,” she says wryly. But “the power has shifted in some ways.” Her hus- band did very well in technology sales in New York. “He was trav- eling all over the world, and I was staying home. Now, we’ve moved to Atlanta, his clients are down the street and I’m trav- eling the world.”
And although she doesn’t get recognized on the street, “I get to talk to authors that I’ve admired so much all my life,” she says. Author Karin Slaughter, who
B B COMEDY B
KLMNO Reading
The sweet smell — and fatigue — of a first-time novelist’s success
ly quiet existence. . . . I had a nanny who would take my daughter out a couple of hours a day, and I’d just kind of sit at my desk and write and hear these voices that I had really left be- hind. In New York City, they don’t really talk the way they do in Mississippi. It was like going home a couple hours every day.” Her deep evocation of place, of
textures, and words that drip with dialect has been part of “The Help” phenomenon, says Wilda Williams, a fiction editor for the trade publication Library Journal. It “continues to reso- nate for many readers, especially for white readers who grew up in the segregated South, because it is the only recent novel that ac- curately captures the complicat- ed and contradictory relation- ships between blacks and whites in the South,” she says. “Southern friends who have read the book have told me the novel vividly depicts the deep love that black caretakers and their charges often shared, but it also made them realize in retro- spect how demeaning life must have been for their ‘help.’ Of course, the issues of prejudice and racism touch all of us, so Stockett’s novel also has broad appeal to readers outside the South.”
Williams, an Alabama native, has a wait-and-see attitude about the movie. “With the ex- ception of ‘To Kill a Mocking- bird,’ Hollywood never gets the South right,” she says. Former National Urban
KEM LEE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
“I’d just kind of sit at my desk and write and hear these voices that I had really left behind. In New York City, they don’t really talk the way
they do in Mississippi.” — Kathryn Stockett
writes horror, reached out, and Stockett has become friends with Pulitzer-winning Missis- sippi playwright Beth Henley. “Now I can talk to her, e-mail her and say, ‘Oh, my God, can you be- lieve this is happening?’ That’s an incredible feeling, to talk to another writer who has already made it, and get some pointers to how this crazy life works.” Stockett, who grew up in Jack- son and graduated with a degree in English and creative writing from the University of Alabama, had been working on the busi- ness side of a New York maga-
zine before 9/11. Afterward, she said, she wanted to do some- thing creative, so she took a month off to write about her Southern recollections, and, es- pecially, channel the voice of De- metrie, the black maid who had worked for her family for dec- ades and helped raise her father and uncle before her. A woman she loved fiercely and whom she saw out of uniform only once, in her coffin. Those memories be- came the first chapter of the book.
She quit her job after getting pregnant and says, “I had a real-
League president and Clinton adviser Vernon Jordan called Stockett to say that as a young chauffeur for the mayor of Atlan- ta, he could relate to her charac- ters. But the past year has also featured critics, for her use of black dialect and for a white woman telling — and making money from — black stories. It’s a criticism that “makes me
cringe,” Stockett told NPR in De- cember. “I agree” that black voices are
undervalued, Stockett says. But she set out to write one story, a piece of fiction with voices that sounded to her ears like music, that were close to her heart. “I don’t think I got it right by any means,” she says. “I wish I could change little nuances.” “People say, ‘Oh, my God, I
can’t believe she would try to represent black women that way.’ Demetrie didn’t go past sixth grade. She lived in a shack. I wasn’t trying to represent a whole race or people,” she says. It can sound almost like a plea. That’s been a daunting part of this phenomenal year for Stock- ett, a lesser ghost of Mississippi. This white woman, who never really liked to talk much, is sud- denly being asked about history and cultural anthropology, to address and redress, when she really just wanted to write let- ters from home. So it has also been a time of figuring out her role, which, by the way, can make her relationship with her own help dicey. “I have a Hispanic housekeep-
er now, and I don’t speak Span- ish, so there’s not a whole lot of intimacy there. I have a nanny from Georgia, and she’s white and she brings her daughter.” They are great friends and work well together, but neither rela- tionship exists in the same fraught cocoon as those “help” relationships in the Old South. In writing a book that tried to imagine what the world looked like from the help’s side, Stockett says, she is now keenly aware of how she treats her own. “I think about the fact that my Hispanic nanny has to leave her own child at home to come clean up after mine. I tell her to bring her kids,” Stockett says.
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“I think as a Southern white woman, it’s just this instinct that we feel guilty when someone else comes in our house doing our chores, cleaning my kitchen. . . . We try to treat our help with al- most kid gloves, maybe, cause we’re reflecting on how they were treated in the past.” Stockett returns to Atlanta on
Monday, but she doesn’t want to go. Her next book is set in the Mississippi Delta, and she’d much rather stay close. She’d rather “sit back and observe,” take it all in silently. Kind of like the black maids
GHI If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. S087 2x9
who raised generations of white children and whose deeply imagined stories have struck a national chord, and in one year, totally changed Kathryn Stock- ett’s life.
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SUNDAY, AUGUST 15, 2010
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