Kathryn Stockett needed some help
Oft-rejected author got a boost from filmmaker friend – and the rest is history
You couldn’t blame Kathryn Stockett for feeling down and depressed a few years ago. After all, the literary world seemed united in slamming the door in her face, as she struggled to find a publisher for a novel she had written called The Help.
Which is why – even now, as the royalty cheques from her phenomenal 2009 bestseller continue to mount – she won’t easily forget the scratched note she once received from one hostile literary agent: “We don’t want to do this. Please don’t send me your work any more.”
The bluntness of that message might have shrivelled the dreams of a less determined writer than the Mississippi-born Stockett, who had delved into her own background to lay bare a neglected aspect of the racist attitudes that pervaded the U.S. South of half a century ago.
But Stockett persevered, even as the rejection slips piled up. Many turndowns gave no reason – the manuscript was simply returned. But one agent did take the trouble to write a proper letter. It was still dismissive: “I don’t think this would be salable in the United States. No one would ever buy this book.”
Stockett can only smile when she recalls that particular prediction, given what’s happened in her life. The Help has been a fixture on many bestseller lists for the past two years. And now, there’s further vindication in that Oscar nomination for best picture, one of four nods given to the film version, which enjoyed a triumphant theatrical run last autumn and is now a hot seller on DVD.
“I took five years to write it,” Stockett says now, in an interview. “And then I started sending it to agents and I received 60 rejections. Finally, No. 61 took it and sold it in about three weeks to Penguin.”
And then the novel that nobody wanted took off like a rocket.
Stockett retains a quality of childlike wonder about her success. She’s also philosophical about those years of frustration, cheerfully pointing out that her original manuscript did need more work.
“So every time I received a rejection, I wanted to go back and make it better.”
But she also sensed that she was battling a widespread perception within the book industry: that a novel about southern racism, no matter how up- lifting, was no longer a marketable commodity.
Stockett had a childhood friend, actor and filmmaker Tate Taylor, who thought differently, and he ended up adapting and directing The Help for the screen.
He recognized that the novel did have something new to say in revealing the unknown story of the black women who worked as maids, housekeepers and nannies in the white households of a fiercely segregationist Mississippi town.
In fact, Taylor believed so strongly in Stockett’s manuscript that he grabbed the film rights even before the book had found a publisher. “I called Kathryn and said, ‘This is fantastic. You cannot give up … and I’ll make it into a movie.’ ”
It was an act of faith on Taylor’s part, as he turned down other work during the period he was writing the screenplay.
“I wasn’t being paid to adapt it, and I was broke afterwards,” he says now. “But it was also a blessing. … I had a whole year, without a bunch of people in my ear telling me how the story should go.”
Stockett and Taylor grew up in Jackson, Miss., in the 1970s, when elements of the racism depicted in film and novel still persisted. Each was raised under the loving guidance of a black nanny-housekeeper. “Kathryn and I like to refer to them as our co-mothers,” Taylor says. “Mine was Carol Lee and hers was Demitri.”
To which Stockett adds: “As children, we loved these women.”
The 43-year-old novelist has been told that The Help is a healing story that can affect even readers who still have prejudices. But she hopes both novel and film come across as toughminded.
“I was really stubborn about this when I was writing the book. These women, I could not portray them as victims. That story has been told too many times. I wanted these women to look around themselves and say, ‘Hey, this isn’t cool.’ And then they’re brave enough to do something about it.”
The main storyline of The Help deals with the decision of these black women to tell the truth about their lives to a young white journalist.
Stockett says the era she depicted in her novel was both ridiculous in its prejudices but also frightening.
“It was against the law in the South for black and white to swim in the same swimming pool, to use the same telephone, even to attend the same school for the blind. Horrible.”