Seventeen years after “The Help,” Kathryn Stockett is back with “The Calamity Club,” a bestselling novel also set in Mississippi.
On the Aug. 27 episode of “Open Book with Jenna,” Stockett spoke about her long journey to the followup — so long, in fact, that her friends advised her to “find a new profession.”
“The Help” was a hit on a scale that authors dream about. After receiving over 60 rejections from literary agents, Stockett finally got her break, and that Mississippi-set story led to a publishing phenomenon. Published in 2009, the book sold millions of copies and inspired an Oscar-nominated movie.
But it also attracted tremendous controversy. Stockett’s first novel, in part, followed Black domestic workers at a house in Mississippi, and she said she modeled their voices on the women she knew growing up in her family’s employ.
The book and movie sparked a dialogue about race, representation and who should tell whose stories, with star Viola Davis ultimately saying she regretted being part of the film.
After publishing her controversial juggernaut, Stockett retreated from the public eye and started working on her next book. And worked. And worked.
Stockett told Jenna she was committed to writing “a really short book that didn’t draw the same criticisms that ‘The Help’ did.”
“I was like, ‘I’m not going to stir the pot with this one,’” she said.
But the book wasn’t coming along, she said, because she “wasn’t telling the truth” in her writing.
As the time wore on, Stockett said the people in her life became concerned she was wasting her time. “People started looking at me. My friends started to say, ‘Kitty, I think you need to move on. Maybe either find a new profession or start working on something else. This is too long to work on the same project,’” she said.
Then, in 2019, Stockett was dropped by her publisher Penguin, and she went from being a literary Cinderella story back to being almost as unmoored as when she started.
But she “refused to give up.” In fact, she said the firing was “liberating.”
“There’s something scrappy inside of me. I think part of that has to do with coming from Mississippi. If you kick me, I’m going to come back stronger and kick back harder. I think that’s what I did,” she said.
It was only when Stockett moved back to Mississippi that she could start on the more “honest” version of the story, she said, and it “started to blossom.”
The move came in tandem with a breakthrough in the research process. Stockett learned about sterilization laws across the U.S. that prevented people from having children and according to Stockett was a means to “cleanse society of these so-called ‘undesirables.’”
