Kathryn Stockett brings it up before I can. “I have ears, I listen to critics,” she says. “I try to understand their viewpoint. So I was always very aware of the criticism around The Help, in terms of being a white woman writing in Black voices. And when it came to my second novel, I promised myself it wouldn’t draw the same criticism. I had a lot of false starts.”
We’ll get to Stockett’s second novel, The Calamity Club, in a minute. But first, a recap. The Help – about the friendship between a young white woman and two Black maids in the 1960s Deep South, and inspired by Stockett’s upbringing in segregated Mississippi – went on to sell 15 million copies following its publication in 2009 and spent more than 100 weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller lists. Two years later it was turned into a critically acclaimed, Oscar-winning film starring Emma Stone, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer. As rapid as its rise, however, was its downfall. Before long, complaints surfaced claiming that The Help sugarcoated the violence of segregation. Critics argued that the book peddled a white saviour narrative, and that Stockett, as a privileged white woman, had no right to speak from the point of view of two Black maids. Davis has said she regrets starring in the film adaptation. To some extent Stockett, now 57, had anticipated this, telling interviewers at the time that she worried that the story “wasn’t mine to tell”. Nonetheless, I wonder how difficult she found that period, during which she went from being lauded for writing a heartwarming, taboo-busting novel about race to being accused of racism – through her use of Black dialect and “subservient” racial stereotypes – in a matter of weeks. “It’s never fun to see such vicious criticism,” she says in her honeyed Southern drawl. “And I know that I wasn’t even exposed to a lot of it. As a writer, you learn to stop looking. The thing is, I get it. But I don’t regret writing The Help. I wrote what I had to write.”
Stockett has always defended her novel on the grounds that, whatever its flaws, it helped kickstart a conversation around race in America. “People were not talking about race in America back then,” she says. “It made people uncomfortable. And it was still, and is still a problem.” Of course, on one level people have always talked about race in America, but I suspect Stockett means that The Help moved the conversation to the centre of popular culture, from where questions of representation became a mainstream political issue.
Stockett is more regretful over a situation that arose in 2011, when she was sued for $75,000 in damages by Ablene Cooper, the maid who worked for her brother, who claimed that the book’s character Aibileen had been based on her; the case was eventually thrown out, in part because Cooper had applied for damages two years after publication, exceeding the one-year statute of limitation. “That [situation] made me really sad, because I didn’t know her, and I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve never even had a conversation with her before,” says Stockett now. Speaking more generally, Stockett thinks the backlash to The Help was all but inevitable. “America was going through a fairly natural cycle in that, when you repress talking about something for so long, such as race, eventually there’s going to be an uprising,” she says. “So it does not surprise me that there was such a big outburst of rage. I mean, America’s America.”
It’s worth noting too that The Help was caught in the crosshairs of America’s emerging, soon-to-become-poisonous culture wars; one wonders whether some of Stockett’s detractors simply jumped on the bandwagon. “In a way, that conversation has matured now,” she continues. “I’m not saying [my critics] have changed their mind about The Help, but I do think that when we talk about the role of the writer when it comes to characters they may not identify with, the outlook is now slightly more intellectual and nuanced.” Certainly the general temperature around the question of authorial representation and authenticity has cooled on both sides of the pond. “And I’m glad about that, and I really look forward to seeing where that conversation takes us.”
Stockett famously received around 60 rejections for The Help before it was eventually published by Penguin. In many respects, she considers herself an unlikely author. “As a child, I didn’t quite know how to process my emotions, such as loneliness,” she says. “So I learnt to escape into a book. I don’t know why some of us then emerge from underwater to become a writer. I’m nerdy and insular and socially awkward... Why in the world would I want to reach out to the public and show them my deepest, darkest secrets?”
Or, indeed, court their criticism. It has taken her 17 years to complete The Calamity Club, partly as a consequence of the response to The Help. A bravura sweep of storytelling set in Mississippi in 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, it’s narrated in turn by Meg, a precocious 11-year-old abandoned at a Christian orphanage, and the irrepressible Birdie, who is instructed by her mother to beg her older sister Frances for money from her husband, the scion of a wealthy Mississippi family.
The book is crammed full of issues on which Stockett undertook years of extensive research. They include the forced sterilisation programmes inflicted on women considered to be “imbeciles”; foreclosures – in Mississippi people were losing their homes for as little as “12 or 13 cents”; and the paucity of birth control options available to women in the 1930s. “The most popular form of birth control at the time was Lysol disinfectant,” says Stockett. “The stuff we clean our toilets with, and our floors. Ladies would use that in their underparts in the hope of preventing pregnancy.”
Moreover, it lays into Christian hypocrisy: poor Meg is treated appallingly by the head of the orphanage, whose apparent religious virtue belies a closet full of skeletons. Stockett herself attended a Christian day school for six years. “Even at the age of 57, I’m still pissed off by some of the things they told me,” she says. “They told me dinosaurs were not real. They squashed common sense and intelligence, and it still makes me so mad.” Of course, this is happening still – just look at the wave of religiously motivated book bans across schools in the South. “Anyone who limits our exposure to literature, or to facts, or to science is repressing mankind,” she says. “If my book is about anything, it’s that social justice is never safe.”
There is another reason it took her so long to publish The Calamity Club; in 2019, Stockett was dropped by Penguin. “Let’s just put it bluntly – I got fired,” she says. “It had been 10 years and I hadn’t produced a novel, and so they fired me. That was a particularly painful spiral.” Eventually she hooked up with an editor at Spiegel & Grau, an independent New York publisher, who went on to publish The Calamity Club. The episode feels oddly fitting – Stockett is likeable, albeit with a refreshing trace of ornery about her. And I suspect she will have the last laugh. “I gotta say, I think that because of my stubbornness and my scrappiness, [the fact I was fired] made for a better book,” she says. “Because in the end, I was writing it to raise a middle finger at Penguin. I certainly wasn’t writing it to fulfil a contract.” She also was not shying away from the topics that had landed her in hot water the first time around. There are two Black characters in The Calamity Club, plus another minor character about whom it would be a spoiler to reveal too much. Stockett thought long and hard about including them, but decided it would be impossible to set a novel in 1930s Mississippi and not “write about hypocrisy and racism”. She refuses to reject the impact of her upbringing in the segregated South. “My parents got divorced when I was six, and while I had a fine childhood, I spent much of my time with my grandparents, which is how I got to be so close to their housekeeper, Demetrie. She had a huge influence on everything I’ve ever written and probably ever will.” The Black characters in The Calamity Club, though, appear in the third person, rather than the first, as was the case in The Help.
Stockett is surprisingly pugilistic. On one level, I truly don’t think she minds what people make of her. “I’m not very comfortable in the literary world. But [at home] in Jackson, I feel I can say what I think. But all the time I was writing The Calamity Club I thought, ‘Oh s***, I’m gonna get in trouble for this [from the wider establishment].’ As a writer, you do what you were born to do, but you also have to hold your breath to wait for the s*** to happen. It would be depressing to me if nobody got pissed off.”
I suspect some people might indeed take issue with a central plot point concerning Birdie, who transforms her sister’s home into a brothel in order to save it from being foreclosed. Stockett takes care not to whitewash the lives of the women who work there, but she also refuses to cast them as victims, and many of the brothel scenes contain a levity that, in today’s still morally censorious climate, feels risky. But Stockett emphasises that she also writes to entertain. “I’m not writing to teach anyone a lesson,” she says. “In many respects, I write for the laughs.”
