How do you follow up a debut novel that sold 15 million copies, spent more than two years on the best-seller list and was made into an Oscar-winning movie?
And how do you rebound when you’ve been widely criticized for that novel, which explores the lives of Black maids in the Jim Crow South through the eyes of a white woman?
If you’re Kathryn Stockett, author of “The Help,” you absorb the substantive, thoughtful feedback and tune out the rest. You start another book, move to Bali and keep writing even after your contract is canceled. You find a new publisher.
Seventeen years later, you get ready to release another novel, “The Calamity Club,” which comes out on Tuesday.
“I wrote this thing for so long,” Stockett said in an interview. “I felt like everything I touched was failing.”
Stockett’s new book is a 656 page, 2.2 pound doorstop (yes, I weighed it) about two white women — a plucky orphan and a resourceful spinster — doing whatever it takes to survive the Great Depression in Mississippi. It’s an old-fashioned saga, generous in both detail and sprawl. Like its characters (and like “The Help,” which was rejected by more than 45 agents), “The Calamity Club” has already had its share of hard times.
Stockett, 57, grew up in Mississippi; both her books are set there, and she went home to work on the new one. You might imagine meeting her on a gracious front porch, but instead we talked at her apartment in the East Village, with views of a hardy maple tree and occasional whiffs of weed smoke wafting up from the street. The place was sunny, immaculately appointed and distinctly shoe-free (sometimes you know without being told).
Settling on a pink tufted couch, Stockett was polite but formal, like a friend’s mother who didn’t know you were coming over after school.
“I’m not a public person,” she said. “In fact, I did not take my beta blocker for this interview, I forgot.”
She laughed, a nervous chuckle with its own Southern twang. “I’m not made for publicity. It doesn’t make me … happy.”
Stockett promoted “The Help” for four years — first the book, then the movie, which was directed by her childhood friend Tate Taylor and starred Viola Davis, Emma Stone and Octavia Spencer, who won an Oscar for her role.
From the instant it landed in 2009, “The Help” was a lightning rod. In an otherwise positive review, a Times critic called the book “button pushing” and “problematic.” A Kirkus review mentioned a “whiff of white liberal self-congratulation.” In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, a writer for Time magazine described the movie as “a fantasy version of race relations.”
Stockett said, “I was not prepared for a lot of those conversations, but I learned a new language.”
She went on, “In the beginning, I got defensive. But I learned to say, OK let’s talk about this. Why did it make you uncomfortable? What do you think would be a better option? If I didn’t write this book, would we be having this conversation?”
When she started writing “The Calamity Club” more than a decade ago, Stockett had no interest in sparking additional controversy. As a result, she said, early drafts were “bland, vanilla flavored,” lacking undertow or guts. She said, “It’s impossible to write about a place like Mississippi, especially in the 1930s, and not talk racism and sexism.”
In 2019, while chipping away at the book, Stockett moved to Bali with her daughter, now 22, and her then-partner, Wyatt Williams. The two met in 2011, a few weeks after Stockett’s divorce was finalized, when Williams profiled her for Creative Loafing magazine.
In his cover story, “Life in the Belle Jar,” Williams described Stockett’s “penetrating eyes” and “striking, fit body” and posed a question: “Can the best-selling, anxious, overrated, vulgar, talented, burned-out author help herself?”
Stockett said, “I really didn’t like what he published, or the picture, and I called him after it came out and said, ‘You need to come over and we need to talk about this.’ And then I just was smitten.”
Their romantic relationship, which started soon after that, lasted for 12 years.
“I thought we’d be together for life,” she said, “So when we broke up, I crumpled inward.”
She whispered, as if her words might offend, “It was a really bad breakup.”
But the experience unlocked something for Stockett. She’d looked away from issues in the relationship; now she made Birdie, the chief adult character in “The Calamity Club,” a steel magnolia in an era when women were expected to be shrinking violets. Marooned in her sister’s house without furniture or money, Birdie stares down her predicament and finds a creative way to make ends meet while maintaining a saucy sense of humor.
In January 2020, “The Help” was back in the news, swept up in the backlash to “American Dirt,” Jeanine Cummins’s novel about a mother and son who escape a Mexican drug cartel by fleeing across the U.S. border. Cummins is white; once again, readers debated who has the right to tell certain stories.
Stockett said she didn’t pay much attention, despite sharing an editor with Cummins.
“I had checked out,” she explained. “I was in Bali writing this book. Part of the reason we went there was to get away from all the noise in America.”
That same month, Stockett recalled, she received a letter from Putnam saying that it was terminating her contract for “The Calamity Club.”
“They fired me,” she said, arranging the cuff of her white oxford around a dainty bracelet. “It had been too long. They just kind of gave up. They’d seen some chapters but they weren’t behind me.”
Ivan Held, president of Putnam, declined to comment, and Sally Kim, Stockett’s editor, did not respond to emails. A company spokesperson said in an email that the contract was canceled “by mutual agreement.”
Amy Einhorn, who edited “The Help,” didn’t respond to questions about whether she considered bringing Stockett with her when she left Putnam. But she did describe what it was like to work with Stockett on her debut.
“She never lost that incredulousness about being invited to the ball,” Einhorn, now a senior vice president at Crown, wrote in an email. “She had no idea how good she was. And my guess is she probably still doesn’t.”
As the pandemic gathered steam in March 2020, Stockett relocated to Church Hill, Miss., where she’d renovated an old house near Tate Taylor’s historic home, Wyolah. Sarah Laird, a fellow Mississippian whom Stockett met in her 20s while working in advertising in New York City, also has a home there.
“We had something like 380 dinners together throughout 2020 into 2021 — me, Tate, Sarah, our group, our kids,” Stockett said. “It was such a relief. I was insulated by nature, surrounded by people that I love and love me back.”
During that strange time, Laird offered to introduce Stockett to Julie Grau, a friend of a friend and veteran editor who was between jobs.
“I heard, ‘My friend has a novel and could use your help,’ and I thought, ‘Oh my God, that is everyone’s worst nightmare,’” Grau said in an interview. “And it turned out her friend was Kathryn Stockett.”
Of course Grau knew “The Help.” She also knew how long it had been since the book was published.
By this point, Stockett had experienced her share of low moments — of thinking, as she put it, “I’m shut down. I’m closed for business. I’m retired” — but then she met Grau.
“Julie is just … wow,” she said. “She changes peoples’ lives. You meet someone like this once in your lifetime.”
Grau said, “Kitty was understandably wary about her next move. We just waded in. Baby steps. She shared some pages and we talked about the pages and then she sent more pages.”
The two traded sections of “The Calamity Club” for about two years without a contract. Both were at a crossroads — Stockett, reeling from the dissolution of her relationship and her deal with Putnam, and Grau, starting to build the next incarnation of her longtime imprint, Spiegel & Grau. They communicated by email and phone, finally meeting in Stockett’s East Village apartment later in the pandemic.
Stockett went back to Mississippi and kept writing. Her hair got “frizzier and frizzier,” humidity and familiar accents seeping into her story in a way they hadn’t when she was in Bali.
Laird recalled dropping by the old schoolhouse where Stockett worked.
“I was flabbergasted at the amount of research that she had,” Laird said. “Every surface was covered with newspapers from the ’30s. I learned something in that moment about what it is to be a writer.”
That research led Stockett to the eugenics movement, in which women who were deemed promiscuous or feebleminded were sterilized. The goal, which gathered steam in the early 20th century, was a “cleansed” society, Stockett explained, a concept later adopted by the Nazis.
“And that is when the motor started,” Stockett said. “I was emotionally free, I was intellectually horrified by what I was reading, and that’s when the book really took off.”
The issue of bodily autonomy became the novel’s engine — and a likely conversation starter.
“I want people to understand that it’s no joke when we say that history repeats itself,” Stockett said. “We have seen it time and time again. And so for women’s rights, for women’s health rights, we’ve got to fight.”
Grau had never worked with an author who has had such a wide gap between books. She said the experience has been a reminder of “how crippling the expectations can be when you have a first book that makes noise.”
She went on, “We can’t publish to the controversy. You can’t do a memory wipe. As a publisher, I want to make sure Kitty has everything she needs to be prepared to go out and meet her public again.”
Grau wouldn’t share what Spiegel & Grau paid for “The Calamity Club,” but she said that Stockett could have gone for “many multiples” of what she was paid and that the book earned out months ago based on foreign rights.
“It’s a miracle for us as a young company that the stars aligned in this way,” Grau said. “It was an act of trust and showed a lot of integrity. Kitty was betting on herself.”
Although Stockett doubted herself at times, she never stopped writing: “I’m too stubborn for that.”
She’s ready to discuss “The Calamity Club,” even if things get tense: “I don’t talk much about politics. I don’t want to get tomatoes thrown at me onstage, but if it comes to that I’ll always be honest.”
And she remembers what she learned on her last book tour.
“Instead of getting defensive and having the big red stop sign, keep the conversation alive,” Stockett said. “It’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong. It’s about talking and storytelling, being vested in each other’s stories.”
Elisabeth Egan is a writer and editor at the Times Book Review. She has worked in the world of publishing for 30 years.
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