Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is still being talked and written about all over the country. Excerpts below are from the online edition of The Boston Globe on April 20. I found this review to be interesting because Kathryn relates to the interviewer how all of her files were destroyed in the attacks on 9-11, spurring some homesickness and a desire to write again despite the loss. Amazingly, Stockett also had trouble getting a publisher for her book. Can you imagine writing a rejection letter for The Help? Also noteworthy in the review is the reaction of a Junior League Member.
Read the excerpt below. Find the complete article at:
First-time author scores unexpected best seller
“Oh, honey, to me it’s an amazing journey.”
Reactions such as (Octavia) Spencer’s are becoming common as “The Help,” Stockett’s debut novel, creeps up the best-seller lists after an early February debut. The premise of the book usually causes an immediate visceral reaction, especially if readers know Stockett is white. After a few pages, though, most readers are hooked.
Entertainment Weekly reviewer Karen Valby called the book’s backstory potentially “cringeworthy” before giving it high praise and an A-minus. Industry standard Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and in The New York Times, Janet Maslin called “The Help” a “button-pushing, soon to be wildly popular novel.” Positive vibes are viral on the Web.
“It’s exciting to see someone get this kind of attention for a first novel,” Stockett’s agent, Susan Ramer, says. “This is very rare.”
Not bad for a manuscript that was shunned as Stockett shopped it to agents. She stopped counting at 45 rejection letters, but kept at it until Ramer snapped it up after reading a few pages. What others didn’t see — or care to read — was immediately evident to Ramer.
“Reading it, you say, ‘I’ve got to have this,'” Ramer says.
She was able to sell the book in a matter of days. Publisher Amy Einhorn chose it to launch her own imprint at G.P. Putnam’s Sons.
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The book also rang true to Vickie Greenlee, a 66-year-old travel agency owner, who has been a member of the Junior League for decades. Stockett skewers the Junior League of Jackson in “The Help.” Its president, Miss Hilly, serves as the book’s antagonist and its members, though genteel, steadfastly reinforce segregation — she starts a project that all good white Jackson families have separate bathrooms for blacks, for example.
Greenlee says the Junior League is very different today, but that Stockett captured the times well — well enough to raise a few eyebrows when Greenlee suggested they choose “The Help” for their book club.
“In describing the book to them, a couple of them said, ‘Oooh, I don’t know,'” Greenlee says. “But when they read it, they thought she did an excellent job. A lot of that was very relevant. And the relationships with our maids, we felt like they were part of our families. Then again they didn’t take issue with us or didn’t question what we did.”
Stockett had no idea anyone would ever read the book when she started. She began writing it while taking a break from her job as a magazine consultant in New York City shortly after the terror attacks destroyed her hard drive and her previous attempts at fiction, which began when she majored in creative writing and English at the University of Alabama.
“We couldn’t e-mail, we couldn’t even make a telephone call, a land line or cell phone, for about two days, so I just got really homesick and really it had been a lot of years since I had spoken to Demetrie,” Stockett recalls. “I remember wishing that I could just talk to Demetrie and hear her voice again. So I started working on this story … trying to escape the media and all the mess on TV. It started as a short story and just continued on and on from there.”
Stockett is continually surprised at the reaction to the book. It’s one of those rare books that gets pushed by both small booksellers and the big chains. It’s No. 1 on the Southern Independent Booksellers Association list and edged onto The New York Times and Publishers Weekly lists two weeks ago.
“I think it’s because of this word-of-mouth phenomenon because people begin engaging one another in discussions about how they grew up, what their feelings were about race differences in the ’60s and whether or not they relate to this kind of story,” she says. “I’ve gotten so many e-mails from readers who are sharing their stories.”
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