Remarkable yet real
Author Shetterly discusses women behind ‘Hidden Figures’
It’s been a year since Margot Lee Shetterly released her New York Times best-selling book “Hidden Figures,” which also inspired an Academy Awardnominated film, and she says it still feels surreal.
“It has been an incredible year,” she said.
Shetterly’s novel explores the lives of three African-American women, called “human computers,” who calculated the flight paths that would allow men to orbit the Earth and walk on the moon.
In 2016, Shetterly’s book and the movie were released almost simultaneously. That rarely happens, especially for a firsttime author.
The 48-year-old former investment banker recently spoke to students at the University of Houston for the Provost Summer Reading Program. Shetterly was joined on stage by Ellen Ochoa, director of NASA’s Johnson Space Center.In an interview with the Chronicle, Shetterly talked about writing the book, how she came up with the title and the Kevin Costner film scene that she gets asked about time and time again.
Q: When did you start writing the book?
A: I started the first interview in December 2010. I applied for some grants and sort of broadened the scope of the story because originally it was just about Katherine Johnson. Then it expanded to the other women. Then in the summer of 2013 is when I really amped things up and started doing more research. The book proposal sold in 2014, then a couple of months later, I heard movie producer Donna Gigliotti (“Silver Linings Playbook”) got a copy of the book proposal and optioned the movie rights to the book.
Q: Were you still doing investment banking?
A: I was not. I was actually living in Mexico. My husband (Aran Shetterly, also a writer) and I had moved to Mexico. We founded a magazine. We were first in Oaxaca, then we were in Mexico City, then we were in a town outside of Mexico City called Valle de Bravo. We only just moved back to the United States last summer. We were there for 11 years and moved back largely because of this book. But also, it was time to come back home. Our families are here.
Q: Why did the “Hidden Figures” movie and book resonate with so many people?
A: These are really remarkable women. They were real women, though, so they didn’t have to be a superhero that we hold on a pedestal. They worked hard. They were passionate about the work that they did. They faced their challenges squarely and jumped over them, so we get to applaud in the end.
Q: Why the title “Hidden Figures?”
A: It was not the first title. “From the Earth to the Stars” was one of the first titles. They were all a little bit more poetic, I guess. This was the one that fit. It just snapped into place. The women were literally hidden, and their work, their numbers, were hidden. More and more people are using the term now, so “Hidden Figures” has come to mean a person who has been lost to history but who contributed something important. That is remarkable to me. I get the “hidden figures” Google alert in my email, and it’s all kinds of crazy stuff sometimes: the “hidden figures” of the tomato-farming industry. Q: Did you know the women before researching the book? A: They worked with my father (at NASA). They were in the same sorority as my mother. They were people, in some cases, who I went to school with their children or their grandchildren. They were members of the community, so that was really what I knew about them. I knew them more as Mrs. Johnson, my mother’s friend, rather than Katherine Johnson, the person who calculated the trajectories for the early Mercury flights. Q: Did your parents encourage you to write their story?
A: It was really a little bit of, “That’s interesting that you’re so interested” because it was really my husband who had the idea after listening to my father talk about the women and what they had done. None of us imagined that it would lead to this.
Q: What did you think when you heard Taraji P. Henson, Janelle Monáe and Octavia Spencer were cast for the movie?
A: It was amazing. I never imagined that it would become a movie, much less a movie with that caliber of a cast. It was so meaningful that this was a movie about a group of AfricanAmerican women and that it was able to cast and give work to this group of very talented African-American women.
Q: Is there anything in the movie that was embellished for Hollywood?
A: The scene where Kevin Costner sledgehammers the “Colored” sign over the bathroom door and says, “At NASA, we all pee the same color.” People really want that scene to be true. It was very funny but very dramatic and memorable. Q: How has your life changed? A: The biggest thing is I am a professional writer now. I get a chance to write another book, which is really just the most thrilling thing ever.
Q: What will that book be about?
A: I’m just in the early stages of it. It will have to do with Baltimore and AfricanAmerican entrepreneurs in Baltimore midcentury, same time period as “Hidden Figures.”
Q: Do you think there are more stories, like “Hidden Figures,” waiting to be told?
A: Absolutely. One of the motivations for writing this was to show the black America that I grew up in and that I think a lot of people grow up in. It’s a community that sees itself as American, as normal as people getting up to go to work, as people hanging out with their families. I think there is this idea in popular culture that there is a super-different way of being, when in fact people are transcendent. They want the same things. They have their hopes. They have their dreams. They have their interests. They have their fears. They have things that they have to accomplish and challenges they have to face. So for me, it’s a great humanizing project, an inclusion project.