. First they were telling me to read it. Then they were saying, "What? You haven't read it? What are you waiting for?" After all, it's been on the New York Times Best Seller fiction list for 46 weeks now. But I hate to be peer pressured, so I procrastinated until last week.I read it feverishly in a few days, only pausing to copy a few particularly poignant lines into my notebook, and jumped right on the bandwagon of hype, tweeting about it and talking about it to anyone who would listen. And then the universe lined up to reward procrastinators everywhere. I was given the opportunity to ask Kathryn "Kitty" Stockett some questions via Skype for the @KatieCouric show!
The producers were looking for three to four women in a book club who had recently read the book to ask the author some questions. I reached out to members of my local book club and the Ohio Moms Blog and made a date with Amy Turn Sharp, Abby Aldrich, and Kelley Megahan. Yesterday afternoon we got cozy on my couch in front of my monitor and talked about the book with Katie and Kitty. It was a surreal experience to get all made up and welcome the CBS newsroom into my home remotely.
"Ohio, do you copy?"
"We copy New York, thank you!"
When I clicked "hang up" at 4PM yesterday, it seemed as though it was all a dream, but on Tuesday, the show will go live, making it a reality.
I was thrilled, not only to have a chance to "meet" Katie Couric from the comfort of my living room, but also to be able to ask questions to this incredibly talented new author. The Help is quite simply one of the best books I've read in years. It's an important book, one destined to become part of high school curricula everywhere. It is impossible to read it without asking yourself some difficult questions.
The novel illustrates the relationship between black domestics and white employers in Mississippi in the early 1960s, at the height of the civil rights movement through the voices of two maids, Aibileen and Minny, and Skeeter, a young white woman with a budding social awareness. Returning home after graduating from college, Skeeter becomes increasingly disillusioned with the way her friends treat their maids. For the first time in her life, she starts to see the African American women who have raised her and her friends as people with feelings and opinions of their own. She then enlists the help of Aibileen and a reluctant Minny to write a book about their experiences taking care of white families in Mississippi. In a time when the KKK ruled and all good houses had separate bathrooms for their help, this is an incredibly risky endeavor.
Each character is strikingly different and Stockett does an amazing job of getting the reader into each of their skins, forcing the reader to consider the world from a completely different viewpoint. Aibileen is in her fifties and has raised 17 white children in addition to her own, now deceased son. Whenever the children in her care reach "that moment ... in ever white child's life when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites" she moves on to another family. Outspoken Minny is not as accepting of the treatment of African Americans in Jackson, Mississippi. Her quick tongue and lack of deference has made it extremely difficult for her to find new employment and has made her keenly aware that "the white lady don't ever forget. And she ain't gone stop till you dead." Skeeter's story is essentially a coming of age narrative as the reader experiences her separation from her mother and her growth into a writer and a woman page by page.
While Katie asked Kitty many questions such as why she wrote the maids with a pronounced dialect but had whites speak in perfect English and the backlash she experienced from her family, she also gave us the freedom to ask some of our own. We were able to ask her about why she did not choose to dedicate the book to Demetrie, the maid who raised her, about whether she considered a different, less optimistic ending, and about the emotional sincerity of relationships between maids and their employers. Kitty had a gentle, Southern voice and it was mesmerizing to hear about her childhood and her process for writing this incredible book.
I can't tell you how excited I am to see the edited interview on Tuesday. I promise to embed it here as soon as I have it. In the meanwhile, get your name on that library waiting list or order your copy from Amazon, this is a book that you need to read.
