I ran across an essay by Kathryn Stockett yesterday and discovered that it was an excerpt from Katie Couric’s new book The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives.

Here’s how the book came about. Katie Couric was asked to give a commencement speech, and as this was not the first time, she decided to try something new. She began e-mailing people she had interviewed over the years asking questions about life lessons. In Katie’s book you will find advice from Jay Leno to Margaret Albright to Gloria Steinem to Whoopi Goldberg to Chelsea Handler and Tavis Smiley.

This book is wonderful. It’s probably the one you were looking for as you searched for something meaningful yet not too heavy for the graduate in your life.

As Kathryn’s essay seems to have escaped Katie’s book and found its way into cyberspace, I’ll share it with you here in honor of Kathryn’s visit to Lemuria today at 5:00.

Don’t Give Up, Just Lie by Kathryn Stockett

If you ask my husband my best trait, he’ll smile and say, “She never gives up.” But if you ask him my worst trait, he’ll get a funny tic in his cheek, narrow his eyes and hiss, “She. Never. Gives. Up.”

It took me a year and a half to write my earliest version of The Help. I’d told most of my friends and family what I was working on. Why not? We are compelled to talk about our passions. When I’d polished my story, I announced it was done and mailed it to a literary agent.

Six weeks later, I received a rejection letter from the agent, stating, “Story did not sustain my interest.” I was thrilled! I called my friends and told them I’d gotten my first rejection! Right away, I went back to editing. I was sure I could make the story tenser, more riveting, better.

A few months later, I sent it to a few more agents. And received a few more rejections. Well, more like 15. I was a little less giddy this time, but I kept my chin up. “Maybe the next book will be the one,” a friend said. Next book? I wasn’t about to move on to the next one just because of a few stupid l-etters. I wanted to write this book.

A year and a half later, I opened my 40th rejection: “There is no market for this kind of tiring writing.” That one finally made me cry. “You have so much resolve, Kathryn,” a friend said to me. “How do you keep yourself from feeling like this has been just a huge waste of your time?”

That was a hard weekend. I spent it in pajamas, slothing around that racetrack of self-pity—you know the one, from sofa to chair to bed to refrigerator, starting over again on the sofa. But I couldn’t let go of The Help. Call it tenacity, call it resolve or call it what my husband calls it: stubbornness.

After rejection number 40, I started lying to my friends about what I did on the weekends. They were amazed by how many times a person could repaint her apartment. The truth was, I was embarrassed for my friends and family to know I was still working on the same story, the one nobody apparently wanted to read.

Sometimes I’d go to literary conferences, just to be around other writers trying to get published. I’d inevitably meet some successful writer who’d tell me, “Just keep at it. I received 14 rejections before I finally got an agent. Fourteen. How many have you gotten?”

By rejection number 45, I was truly neurotic. It was all I could think about—revising the book, making it better, getting an agent, getting it published. I insisted on rewriting the last chapter an hour before I was due at the hospital to give birth to my daughter. I would not go to the hospital until I’d typed The End. I was still poring over my research in my hospital room when the nurse looked at me like I wasn’t human and said in a New Jersey accent, “Put the book down, you nut job—you’re crowning.”

It got worse. I started lying to my husband. It was as if I were having an affair—with 10 black maids and a skinny white girl. After my daughter was born, I began sneaking off to hotels on the weekends to get in a few hours of writing. I’m off to the Poconos! Off on a girls’ weekend! I’d say. Meanwhile, I’d be at the Comfort Inn around the corner. It was an awful way to act, but—for God’s sake—I could not make myself give up.

In the end, I received 60 rejections for The Help. But letter number 61 was the one that accepted me. After my five years of writing and three and a half years of rejection, an agent named Susan Ramer took pity on me. What if I had given up at 15? Or 40? Or even 60? Three weeks later, Susan sold The Help to Amy Einhorn Books.

Above: A glimpse of Kathryn Stockett in the film due out in August.

The point is, I can’t tell you how to succeed. But I can tell you how not to: Give in to the shame of being rejected and put your manuscript—or painting, song, voice, dance moves, [insert passion here]—in the coffin that is your bedside drawer and close it for good. I guarantee you that it won’t take you anywhere. Or you could do what this writer did: Give in to your obsession instead.

And if your friends make fun of you for chasing your dream, remember—just lie.

This essay appears in the anthology The Best Advice I Ever Got: Lessons from Extraordinary Lives, edited by Katie Couric and published by Random House in April 2011.

by Kelly Pickerill

If you’ve ever wondered what we at Lemuria do behind those old DOS computers all day, I’m going to let you in on some behind-the-scenes bookstore secrets. Once the Christmas rush is over, through the doldrums of summer (come in the store, people!), we take the books off the shelves, look them up, see what’s sold and what’s not, return some, and move others.

The cool thing about that is we sometimes think up new ways of grouping the books. This time, I’m working with memoir. Memoir’s not a new category by any means, but it is one that Lemuria’s done without for quite a while. We had a biography section years ago, I’m told, but it eventually got distributed throughout the store, so Faulkner bios got shelved with Faulkner’s books in southern fiction, so the Churchill biography was able to be with the British history books, so the Patton biography was placed in World War II.

But what about the memoir? What about those biographies that, though they aren’t about remarkable figures in history, nevertheless speak to everyman by either carving out a fascinating though little-known life, or fascinatingly carving out an ordinary one?

Well, now they have a place. (It’s in the psychology and business nook behind the front desk.) And just to prove how much we needed this grouping of like-minded books, now I’ll show you how much we love ‘em.

Jeannette Walls and Mary Karr both came to Lemuria in the past year. They were brilliant! Here are Lisa and Norma on Jeannette, and Billie on Mary Karr. We’ve had visits from Andre Dubus III and Mark Richard (click here for Lisa’s blog), and though their memoirs still live in the fiction room with their novels, you may find a copy or two in the memoir section. Rodney Crowell and our own Teresa Nicholas — the new section is six shelves and growing! Come in to get a peek at someone else’s dirty laundry, find out about that ill-fated relationship, read that story of hope despite the worst odds.