Kathryn stockett author biography

Interview

Kathryn Stockett explains the genesis of her first novel, The Help, about three very different women whose lives intersect in 1960s Mississippi.

What was the genesis of the novel?
Growing up in Mississippi, almost every family I knew had a black woman working in their house—cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the white children.

Kathryn stockett author biography

That was life in Mississippi. I was young and assumed that’s how most of America lived.

When I moved to New York, though, I realized my “normal” wasn’t quite the same as the rest of America’s.

I knew a lot of Southerners in the city, and every now and then we’d talk about what we missed from the South. Inevitably, somebody would start talking about the maid they grew up with, some little thing that made us all remember—Alice’s good hamburgers or riding in the back seat to take Willy May home.

Everybody had a story to tell.

Twenty years