Although I truly enjoyed Kathryn Stockett’s wildly popular novel The Help, I have to admit that her seemingly instant success bugged me. I mean, who writes a first novel that seems incapable of sinking below the fourth slot on the New York Times bestseller list AND gets made into a movie by Spielberg? Some reviewers were as bothered by Stockett’s use of heavy dialect and ability to cash in on a dark chapter in African American history (Stockett is a white Southerner) as they were by her white heroine Skeeter’s decision to begin her writing career by editing and transcribing the stories of African American maids. Was the story really Kathryn or Skeeter’s to tell?
Stockett claims writing the novel helped her deal with homesickness in the wake of 9/11, and, although she did more conventional research as well, she also revealed that Grandaddy Stockett (98!) supplied many of the family stories that allowed Kathryn to understand an era before her time. It seems to me that all great writing is an ability to inhabit the lives of diverse characters different from ourselves. It would, after all, be difficult to populate a fictional world with only a narrow range of characters similar to the author.
Besides, Stockett worked hard to publish the novel. Although she became so discouraged at one point that she stopped tracking her correspondence to agents, she estimates that 60 of them rejected the novel before it finally found a home. So, I’ll stop envying Stockett her success and hope that Grandaddy Stockett is telling her some good stories about the Great Depression, which is the topic of her second novel in progress.
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