219. Kathryn Stockett

0:01This is a Global Player original podcast. These women, a very unlikely group of women, kind of come together all at the very end of their rope, you know, all financially strapped. And they use what God gave them. That's a very southern euphemism. Yes, yes, they do. The Calamity Club. Often people ask me, what do you want your reader to take away? And I've got to tell you, women in America are losing their health rights. And I'm not saying that we're going back to 1933, but I say this over and over. The car is headed in the wrong direction. Just for the record, my first concert was Elvis Presley.

0:55That's how old I am. You didn't see the King live. In the white suit. He was kind of bad by then. Yes, can you believe it? He came to Jackson, Mississippi. Sorry, I'm getting off topic here.

1:20It's a huge honour to have the top best-selling author, Catherine Stockett, in the hot seat today. and what a tale there is to tell. I mean, as I was just saying, Catherine, you are as interesting as your book. 17 years ago, Catherine Stockett rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists with The Help, a novel set in Stockett's native Mississippi about the lives of African-American domestic workers. I don't like that word. Anyway, staff, I think, as they navigate, another terrible word, racism and white privilege in the early 1960s. It sold in its tens of millions. I mean, extraordinary success.

1:59Adapted into an Oscar-winning film? Yes. Octavia Spencer. Incredible. And then, rather like the woman who waits for 17 years after her beautiful, perfect first child, you've now delivered your second baby, The Calamity Club. It's another blockbuster. It's already an instant bestseller. This is set in the very repressive society of your southern state of Mississippi in 1933. We could spend hours just talking about the books. And we will, of course, talk about them. But first, you. Your life story is almost as gripping. Welcome, Catherine Stockett. And I'm waiting for you to say, call me Kitty. Welcome to Difficult Women.

2:46Call me Kitty, Rachel. Yes! Yes. Your life story is almost as gripping as your novels. And you do mine your own background for your books. You were born in the South. Yes, yes. I was born in Jackson, Mississippi in the late 1960s. I'm aging myself there. And just for the record, my first concert was Elvis Presley. That's how old I am. You didn't see the King live. In the white suit. He was kind of fat by then. Yes, can you believe it? He came to Jackson, Mississippi. Sorry, I'm getting off topic here. But I grew up in a household with a wonderful black woman who was named Dimitri, who had worked for my grandparents and raised my father and his brother and my uncle, and then me and my sister and brother, and then the next kind of group of kids.

3:45It was just it was it was really such a special, incredible way, you know, just to be around someone that was she was funny and she was kind. And the thing is, is I was a little girl and I was just too dumb to ask her questions about her own life. and and then you know I'm living in New York flash forward to 2003 and I start writing a book because I wanted to ask those questions and try to find you know my own answers and you wrote the help in the voice of Abelene and you got you know obviously the book was an instant success And then there was a backlash. Can you explain? Well, I mean, it really was me writing about Dimitri, who looked after us.

4:40And the character's name was Abelene. And in the United States, I got a lot of criticism because I'm a white woman from the South writing in the voice of a black woman. And the thing is, is I kind of get it. Like part of me, because I'm from Mississippi and I'm a woman and I've certainly, you know, I certainly don't want someone telling me what my opinion is of Mississippi. I understand that that criticism. But at the same time, I'm a big believer in how important it is to try to understand what it feels like to stand in someone else's shoes. And I think that's my job really as a writer to to take the reader on a journey so that they can embody someone else as best I can describe a person so that they can start to understand what it feels like to have someone else's problems.

5:43and it gives you a bigger worldview. It makes you understand that you are not the most important person or the only person in this world. The world is so big, but also I think it's so important, and I wish they'd teach children this, to try to imagine other people's successes. I've tried to instill that into my own daughter, try to imagine what it feels like to reach a goal because I think that's what gives us hope. The book was a commercial and critical success and then people said you had no right to write in the voice of two black maids. Do you think you've said that you understand that but as a writer, you know, with creative freedom and freedom of speech, which is the First Amendment principle that governs the way we live and work or should do.

6:44Do you think they're right or wrong to criticize you for doing what you did? Well, look, we feel the way we feel. Our emotions don't abide by any sort of rules. So emotionally, I do understand. As an artist, I think that some art should make us fairly uncomfortable. It should make us think outside of our own world. And as a writer, I think it's my job to look beyond your own boundaries. and there is really if I you know I wanted to write a book about my hometown Jackson Mississippi I went back in time to 1963 because that was such a crucial time in the civil rights movement and a time when when white women were also pretty fairly stereotyped to act and and do a certain way like my own mother.

7:46And it is impossible to write about Mississippi, which is 50 % white, 50 % black, and not include the voices of color. And so I went on that journey. And I'll be honest, I really didn't think anybody was going to read it. but it it sold in its millions in the new book you write in the voice of two white women and we will get to the calamity club going back to Dimitri who is your not your what did you call this woman who brought up most of your family we called her Dimitri or just Mitri Mitri yeah and how did you refer to her was she the nanny was she how did what was her kind of title in the household um I mean back then we we called them the maid um your your domestic staff and um so maid was all right because we yeah I know it doesn't sound right today it's changed and that's that's okay yeah we used the word maid and um I you know we just I was so I felt so close to her But of course, when I got to be an adult, I realized that that was just a facade.

9:06She was doing her job. And while she showed me so much love and was so caring, I didn't know her intimately. And I remember I read somewhere that you discovered quite late on that she had her own separate bathroom and you didn't know where it was. You didn't even know about it for a while. I didn't. I didn't find out about that bathroom on the backside of the house until I was about 15. And that kind of shows you how, you know, dumb I was. Or how incurious about her in her for her own. What was her life like? That's right. Yeah. So I tried to answer some of those questions that I had later in life.

9:47And I think I'm still asking myself a lot of questions. You know, I'm still trying to understand Mississippi. It's, I have a very complicated relationship with it. I love it. It infuriates me at the same time. And that comes through in the Calamity Club a lot.

10:10Both books are set in the past in 63 and 33. I mean, to what extent has Mississippi properly integrated now? I mean, why do you always choose period? Could you imagine writing a modern in inverted commas novel? I think I kind of live in the past myself. I'm a little bit more enamored by the fashions of the past. And I like to choose a time that other people have studied so that I can then turn it over and kind of look at the belly side of a certain time in history. and see and examine it from my own perspective. This is fascinating because your books are very, not issue driven, but kind of story driven and character driven at the same time, which all the best books are.

11:08And are you one of those writers who the subject chooses them? or do you spend forever working out what you want to write about, what you want the subject to be? For me, it is always voice that comes first. And in the Calamity Club, it was the voice of Meg, who is an 11-year-old girl living in an orphanage. She's an orphan because two years earlier, her mother had gone to the store and mysteriously never returned. And so, you know, Meg is just turmoil inside by this. And not to add to it, she finds herself unadoptable because nobody wants to adopt the big girls. They only want the babies. and the second voice that came to me was the voice of Bertie and the reason why I think Bertie came to me is because I already had the kernel of this idea of a very adult subject of where I wanted this book to go yeah when you get to part two you find out what that is are we allowed to say what it is I mean I when I'm in front of an audience I always ask them who's read the book usually very few of them.

12:29And do they want me to go ahead and spill? And they always shake their head and say no. So it's up to you. What do you think? I think you should tell them a bit where the book goes. Okay. Because some may be shocked and some may be amused. Okay. Well, Meg, who's 11, and Bertie Calhoun, who's 24, their lives intertwine in Oxford, Mississippi. Bertie has come there to ask her little sister for money because she lives in the Mississippi Delta, you know, still living with her mother and her grandmother. So she's already at 24. She's already seen as an old maid. And she's come to ask her little sister, who married very well, kind of above her station, to help them out.

13:15And along the way, she meets Meg at the orphanage because that's where her sister volunteers. And those moments where they sit across a desk from each other become so important. And the conversations that Meg and Bertie have are really the driving force of the plot of the book. So then their stories kind of separate. Meg goes on to tell her own story with another family. And Bertie is at home in Oxford with her sister. And they are flat broke. Oxford, Mississippi, by the way. Oh, yeah. Sorry. The other Oxford. They are flat broke. There really were so few choices for women in 1933. If you didn't have a husband and you didn't come from money and you didn't have family supporting you financially, a woman had so few choices.

14:13And actually, in 1933, they passed a law that said a wife and a husband, a man and a woman, couldn't both work in one household for the government. They couldn't both have jobs. And so inevitably, it was the women that had to resign. Same here in the civil service up until the 70s. Wow, that's incredible. I don't understand it. I don't either. But what were the options? Kind of secretary, pharmacist? Yeah, you could be a nurse. teaching us but you could be a school teacher but when you got married as a school teacher up until the late 70s you had to you had to quit you couldn't be married as a school teacher and that was more of just a social rule and so these women a very unlikely group of women kind of come together um all at the very end of their rope you know all financially strapped and they use what God gave them.

15:14That's a very Southern euphemism. Yes, yes, they do. The Calamity Club. That's right. That's a name they sort of come up with for themselves that means something far dirtier than I can repeat on this show. We need to go back and to explain, you know, this hiatus of 17 years where, you know, You must have made a bunch of money out of the help, and I can't be more admiring of you for that success. We don't celebrate women's success enough. You said you got into trouble for the help, and you expect to get into a little bit of trouble for the Calamity Club. Can you fill in the gaps for our audience as to why there was a 17 years between the two books?

16:01Sure. So, okay, let me just go back and say that when I first started writing The Help, the first book, I was living in New York City. It was right after 9-11. You started the day after 9-11, didn't you? The day after, yeah. And they had turned our phones off and they had barricaded us into our neighborhood. So I couldn't get in touch with my family and just kind of let them know, hey, we're doing okay. I mean, it was a really tough time in New York City. And so I started writing in the voices from, you know, my hometown to kind of hear those, those, those accents, I guess. And, and I really wrote it out of homesickness.

16:45and I didn't have any expectation that anyone would ever read The Help and there were no expectations of me. So when I sat down to write the second book, what became The Calamity Club, you know, instead of just me alone in a room writing Out of Homesickness, now it was me, you know with all those readers and critics kind of staring back at me and it was it was paralyzing at times it took me several years to really kind of get the story just to a point where I liked it I was really invested in these characters and I think the reason for that is because I was so determined not to write a book that raised the same criticisms that The Help did.

17:41And I was also determined to write a very short book, which, you know, total fail. Big fat F on that, because The Calamity Club is about 600 pages. And really, like, what I finally had to give in to after five or six years of telling kind of bland versions of a story was that it's impossible to write about Mississippi in 1933 and write about women and not write about sexism and hypocrisy and racism and all the things that really kind of have stirred up trouble for me. No, you've done the right thing. I mean, these things still exist. And the fact that you're setting the book back then just reminds us that they still do in a way.

18:27They have not gone away. Racism hasn't. Segregation hasn't. Hypocrisy, sexism, violence against women. You know, none of those things have gone. In fact, under Trump, you know, it's not getting better. It is not. And often people ask me, what do you want your reader to take away from after reading The Calamity Club? And I got to tell you, women in America are losing their health rights. And I'm not saying that we're going back to 1933, but I say this over and over. The car is headed in the wrong direction. And I want women to take it very seriously when I say history repeats itself. And women's health rights, at least in the United States, are at risk.

19:15And you can never take any freedoms for granted. No, you cannot. Because if you do, you find them whipped away. You say that the main form of birth control was like this very powerful disinfectant called Lysol. Now in some red states, women have no access to abortion at all after six weeks. This is true, or contraception. It's insane that we are stepping back in time and stripping these rights away. I guess you know where I stand, on what side of the fence I stand. And, you know, I come from Mississippi, which is a very conservative place. Politically, it completely infuriates me. but I love it.

20:00I have such a frustrating relationship with Mississippi. It's home. It's home and it's beautiful and my favorite people live there.

20:14I did laugh out loud when I heard the story of how you met your husband and you have a beautiful daughter who lives in Greece, I think. I do. And you met, and this is probably the best meet cute story I've heard for a very long time he interviewed for a mag you for a magazine called uh creative loafing was my boyfriend at uh like I don't know a few years ago we dated for I don't know 12 years I think I dated him longer than I was actually married to my husband before that and he wrote I was a very critical um review of me and the book and he put a really unattractive picture of me up on the cover and so creative loafing creative loafing was the name of the newspaper that he worked for and so when it came out I called him and told him to come over that we needed to discuss this and um yeah he was that was a power move I mean you must have on some level wanted to actually see the guy again I was really mad you were okay you were angry not interested in him oh no I wasn't but then he charmed me and um we have since moved on we are no longer together um but you know he's a writer I'm a writer and and that's just does creative loafing still exist I don't think so I don't know I want to work for creative loafing so that happened you had writer's block for 17 years Oh, no.

21:46No, you were doing other stuff. I was writing. Okay, I take it back. So let me just say that when The Help came out, my publisher, I mean, they had me on the road for the hardcover for a year and the paperback for a year. And then the movie came out, and I was on set. They filmed it in Greenwood, Mississippi. And my daughter actually plays the part of young Skeeter with Cecily Tyson. Yeah. and um and then that and then the you know and then I was on speaking engagements so oh my gosh three four what turned into over four years of touring and as I told you before I'm a terrible multitasker I can't write and tour at the same time I can do one or the other interesting and the other thing you said that really chimed with me was when you have space and time to write it doesn't make it easier I mean after the tour finished and you know there you are with your writer's room and your study and your you know clean desk and you have to write the second novel and you know the day stretches ahead.

22:57Weirdly that doesn't make it easier than if you're like sitting on the tube writing on your phone. Right it is not easier. I don't know why writing is so uncomfortable and it just is. I think the most satisfying part of writing is after you've written. And you can actually be either proud or find something that you wrote kind of funny. And I do try to put in a lot of humor into my books. Of course, you know, I mean, I think it's funny most of the time. but there were occasions where I would really be cracking up and writing something and then I would send it to my editor and I would just be laughing and she would say that's not funny kitty maybe she didn't have the same sense of humor sometimes but you know also sometimes it's just not funny and you just have to learn to live with that do you think you're the best judge of whether it's funny or not maybe you have to try it out like a stand-up in in a live open mic type situation to see if it's funny no I have absolutely the worst perspective on it I'm not going to write it or pursue it unless I think it's it's somewhat funny when I'm trying to put the funny into the book but I have to have another person you know to act as a sounding board I think we all do You changed editors in the middle of the Clamity Club.

24:27I did. I mean, I think it's on the record that you've said it, you were fired. Your contract was axed with your publisher and you then went to a different publisher with the remains of what was in existence of the book. You hadn't finished the book and you were fired. Just explain what happened. Well, I was probably, you know, I'd had lots of false starts. I'd already given in to the fact that, like, I've got to tell the truth in this novel about Mississippi. So it had already taken its form. And right before I was about to hand it in, without even reading it, my publisher fired me. and so it it after so many years I think I was probably 10 years into writing this book um it it it was a gut punch it really hit me I felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach and I was kind of circling the drain as we call it in the states it's really where you're about to hit rock bottom.

25:35And I had a friend named Sarah, who kind of saw where I was. And she had actually read what I'd written. She was one of the few people I'd showed it to. And she called her friend Julie Crowell, who's my editor now and publisher. And she called her and she's from Mississippi, but she also lives in New York. And she said, Julie, I have this friend in Mississippi, and she's written this book. And I really think you should read it. And of course, Julie, when she tells the story she's like oh shit you know this is like the the nightmare when when someone says i have this friend that wrote this book and you should read it she's like uh but then it was catherine stockett it wasn't just a friend well i don't think she told her that really and so in the end julie agreed to read it and she liked it and just having that kind of support especially not only from a woman but from such an intelligent woman who has published many books under her imprint she was also with my publisher um at penguin and had since moved on and started her own company which is so brave it's an all-female company it's a boutique it's called something and grow isn't it spiegel and grow when when penguin cancelled your contract you don't have to answer this question i'm just interested because i've worked for penguin i've had books published by penguin and penguin fig fig tree um did you have to pay the the advance back yes you're joking i had to pay it back i had to pay back a million dollars it was but you were writing the book.

27:19I mean, some authors are under contract for decades. I understand. I don't, I still don't understand. Do you understand why they did it? No, I never got a reason. And I will say, I want a publisher that believes in me and is going to support me. And that was not the editor that they gave me, who I won't, I won't name names. But I could not have asked for a better editor and publisher than Julie Grau. I mean, I know probably people come on here and say that, and they're just blowing smoke up their ass, but I am so lucky. Julie, it's like she sprinkles fairy dust on your work, and she doesn't rewrite things for you.

28:06She just gives you the confidence and the direction that you need. She sounds ideal. As a writer, it's harder to find a good editor than it is a husband. What was the time period between that sort of bombshell from Penguin and then finding somebody who believed in you? About a year and a half. Oh, wow. That must have been a dark time. It was. But look, I think it made me a better writer. And I think the story is better because of it. It's a great story. Thank you. Now we've reached this point. Do you want to tell us about your difficult time or a time you've had to be very difficult? I think you just asked me that.

28:45And it was when I when they tried to tear up my contract. So when they did tear up my contract, and I finally just gave in and agreed. But another time I was difficult, very, very recently, was my husband is, we've been divorced for 20 years. And we've always He's gotten along pretty well. I mean, we got divorced for a reason, but he's always invited to Christmas at my house and the holidays. And even if he wasn't invited, he still shows up. And the thing about him is he's very funny, but we don't always get along. And this past Christmas, he really pissed me off. Why? He was being himself. He was being the very reason why I divorced him.

29:35And so, you know, as some men do, he promptly forgot all of the row, all of why we were fighting. And this year he's already asking, so when am I coming for Christmas? And I finally just had to say, you know what, you're not. You're in timeout this year. Timeout is where you, in the United States, that's where you put your kids when they've been bad. You put them in the corner for a minute just to think about what they've done. So I have put my ex-husband in timeout for this year. He will not be spending Christmas with me. He's on the naughty step. Is it New York or Mississippi Christmas? It's Mississippi.

30:12It is. Oh, that's great. And are your parents alive? Do you have Christmas with them too? My mom is still alive and she always comes over. And can I just take two seconds to describe Mississippi for you? because it is such a conservative state. But I, okay, so I went to high school with this guy, Tate Taylor, who wanted to make movies, and I wanted to be a writer, a novelist. And so when I wrote The Help, he immediately came to me and said, can I have the movie rights? And of course I said no, because you've never made a movie that's made any money. But eventually he talked me into it. And so he wrote the screenplay and he directed the film.

31:01And he after we made the movie, then he bought this house in the middle of nowhere in Mississippi. And after he did that, I bought the house next door. And then one of the main actresses from The Help bought the house next door to Tate. And then the producer lives out there, too. The casting director bought the house across the street from me. This is crazy. And a choreographer lives right next door. And it's this community, this bubble of people, of artists, that we're all such total weirdos. but we can be out there in the middle of nowhere and create and argue and talk about creative things and the art that we're working on.

31:53And it's just so magical. It's heaven. I want to come for Christmas. So that is, for me, that is what Mississippi is. It's this little town where we all come together. And we all have other jobs. I'm in New York City earning a living. They're in L.A. earning a living. And when we all get together, it's like sparks fly on the map. I think sparks have flown throughout our conversation. I've really enjoyed it. The book, the new book is called The Calamity Club. I presume Tate Taylor is going to make it into a movie. We'll see. I'm going to get to that next month when I get home. Anyway, I recommend it to everyone.

32:32And thank you very much, Catherine Stockett, for being this week's Difficult Woman. Thank you for having me. As Kitty left, her publicist told her that the book is being translated into a 19th language. The help was translated into 35 languages. What a superstar. Thank you for listening to another episode of my Difficult Women podcast. Just remember to subscribe and download wherever you get your podcasts to make sure the latest episode is always ready to go every Friday afternoon. Bye.

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