Was this a topic you wanted to explore?

Absolutely.

You know, I came from a family mostly of men as a as a girl.

You know, I grew up at the dinner table.

with my three brothers, my grandfather, my father, his brother, and then there was me.

And sometimes my sister was there, sometimes she wasn't.

And I just, you know, I learned at a very early age to listen.

So my first question is, when you created the characters, did you already know where each of them would end up? Or did some of their choices surprise you as you were writing?

How did Julie come into your life? And what do you think she saw in this book that helped you see it again, or maybe differently yourself?

Gosh, you know, I think every writer can put their finger on one or two teachers in their life that lit their fire.

And for me, it was somebody giving me permission, like saying, hey, I know you've been writing this bullshit for, at that time, what, 12 years? I know you've been fired by your publisher, but I still like it.

And I think it's worth it for you to keep going.

Let's finish this and it's going to be great.

And just hearing those words of encouragement is huge.

I, you know, I was really flailing because I just had no direction.

And I'm curious, when did you first encounter that history? And when did you realize it wasn't simply research for the book, but really the driving engine for the book?

Is this a genre that you would usually gravitate towards as a reader?

No. I'm not a memoir writer, but I think it's so important as a writer to confront the places that shaped you as a child and kind of, can I say this, kind of fucked you up.

And the things that eff us up as children, you know, we just get that narrow window in our lives that we, and I feel like this is what Steven Spielberg was trying to say, They shape us and we keep going back and revisiting those nightmares.

And I don't care how fancy or perfect or special a childhood you had.

you always experience some trauma, whether it be something awful like death or discrimination or just hearing your parents having sex in the next room.

Whatever it is, it shapes you as a person, and you keep having those dreams.

as a grown person or a nightmare about that time that you heard your parents doing that.

What do you think is particularly powerful about the bond between Celie and Nettie? Because for a long time, they're not even together.

Yeah

... with a character in a place and, and, you know, a book that's so thick because we keep hearing all this news that, like, people can't read long things anymore.

And, you know, and that was very daunting.

I knew, I knew.

But, you know, when I was writing The Help, um, I thought that was really long.

Mm-hmm.

And Steven Spielberg said, "I cannot express how, how therapeutic and healthy it is for me to keep doing my job again and again.

I work so much out.

In the two novels that you've written, was that a word that came up for you, that you were gonna, that these, you, you were tipping sacred cows?

[laughs] Listen, when I, when I set out to write this book, um, I was determined not to write a book like The Help.

I wanted to write a book that didn't draw the same kinds of criticisms that The Help did.

And for about seven or eight years, I wrote a story, uh, that's long been since thrown away, but a version of this story that was so cautious, it came out so bland.

It lacked heart.

It la- lacked just truth.

I mean, you know, even though we make bullshit up as a writer every day, we're s- also channeling a truth through our characters.

What happened?

And, and if you can, wouldn't mind just reminding people what, what was said at the time.

Yeah.

The, there was some, there was criticism about The Help because I'm a white woman, and I live in the South, and I wrote in, in the voices of Black women, the Black women that took care of us as children, um, the woman that worked for my grandparents, her name was Dimitri, and she was wonderful.

And it was really a, a way for me to explore and answer all the questions that I had never asked Dimitri.

I, I just didn't have the sense to ask her while she was still alive when I was young.

Um, so it was, the criticism that came out of that, um, was in a way, I, I understand it.

I do.

Would you guess?

You're born and bred.

This might be the only thing I know about is the state of Mississippi.

I was born in a town called Jackson, which is the capital.

And, you know, when I first started writing The Help, it was right after 9-11, just a few days after that.

And they had cut our phones off.

and barricaded us into our neighborhood.

So I couldn't even call my family in Mississippi.

It's

So tell us about the canvas in which you've painted all of these characters, these rich characters, and the story that you have for them.

So, it's, of course, set in Mississippi in a town called Oxford, which is in North Mississippi and also where the University of Mississippi is based, which is very important to the story as, you know, if you make it to part two, you will find out.

And there are two voices in this book.

One is an 11-year-old girl named Meg, who one day her mother went to the store and mysteriously never came home.

So we meet her two years later in an orphanage, and Meg finds herself unadoptable because nobody wants to adopt the big girls.

They only want the babies.

And where Meg is headed, you know, where they send the girls when they turn 12, is the vegetable canning factory in Mississippi.

So how much research did you do and what did you find out about the era that surprised you?

Why that particular era?

Oh, 1933 was – it was – so for most people, you know, the Great Depression started in 1929 with the crash.

But for Mississippians, it started in 1927 when there was a really big flood of the Mississippi River that displaced 700,000 people.

And so we were already on track for hard times.

But I chose 1933 because – You know, as you will find in the nature of the story in part two, penicillin was not widely used.

And I know that sounds like such a strange detail.

But if you were a woman and happened to pick up a certain terrible disease in a certain profession, such as syphilis or gonorrhea, it was a real threat to your life.

the history, including forced sterilisation.

Right.

And these were, these were people that, you know, might have epilepsy, that might have autism, people that they perceived as having a lower intelligence.

They thought by sterilizing them they could stop the procreation of, of these types of people.

And the w- the one that really stood out to me was that in Mississippi a woman could be sterilized for being promiscuous, and, and that one stopped me in, in my tracks.

I mean, I, I guess, you know, the idea was that if, you know, if you're promiscuous, well, then you must be stupid.

And if you're stupid, then, uh, you know, sin- because it's hereditary-

W- what would your, um, advice be for young women be... and to encourage them to trust in themselves rather than waiting for the universe to give them this perfect sign that everything's gonna be okay?

You know, I think a lot of, uh, women are afraid to make a mistake, and it's a good question because I think that that's one of the reasons why it, it took me 17 years to write a second book.

No.

Yeah, right? It was...

You know, um, my, my brother and my sister had kind of gone off.

They're older than me, and gone off to live with my dad after the divorce.

And, um, so it was just me and my mom.

And, you know, my mom was, um, in the Junior League.

She was doing all the things that she was supposed to do, and one day she looked around herself and realized that she was a part of a club of women, um, that did not allow in people of color and didn't allow in Jewish people.

How'd that work out? [laughs]

Well, it's wonderful to see how these women come together and, and it does have some things in common with The Help in terms of this group of scrappy women getting through some really challenging times.

Yeah.

One question that I am sort of bracing myself for is, "Well, what took you so long?" And, you know, the answer to that is that [laughs] this one took me a few tries to really get into the story and to lock in and to get to know these characters.

And I have to admit that when I first sat down to writeThe Calamity Club, I wrote a really vanilla, kinda banana-flavored version of this story that, you know, it just didn't have any heart in it, and it didn't have any tension, and it was because I was being so cautious not to approach some of the same topics that I had with The Help that, you know, drew criticism.

And the truth is, and what I've quickly learned, is that you cannot write about Mississippi in the 1930s and not write about race and discrimination and hypocrisy and all the absurdities that come along with that.

What did you have to do to kind of bring that to life? Is this all just kind of coming out of your imagination, or is there some kind of research or some way that you could get an understanding of what that might have been like for an orphanage back then?

I mean, I did tons of research, and I talked to people in Oxford, and I, I really used the flood of 1927 that happened on the Mississippi River side of Mississippi.

So many people were displaced from that flood, and everything was underwater.

How do we get through any day? Yeah.

How do we get through our darkest times without humor? And I had to keep reminding myself that this was, you know, these were our grandparents or mine.

You know, I'm older.

And this was my grandmother.

This was my grandfather living at a time when you're watching people around you starve to death.

You're watching people that were living a very comfortable, high lifestyle life.

to have nothing.

I mean, I had to hold my stomach a few times reading the book because there are some scenes in here that are quite brutal, and I'm sure they come from truth.

Was that a word that came up for you? That you were gonna, that these, you, you were tipping sacred cows.

[laughs] Listen, when I, when I set out to write this book, um, I was determined not to write a book like The Help.

I wanted to write a book that didn't draw the same kinds of criticisms that The Help did.

And for about seven or eight years, I wrote a story, uh, that's long been since thrown away, but a version of this story that was so cautious, it came out so bland.

It lacked heart.

It la- lacked just truth.

I mean, you know, even though we make bullshit up as a writer every day, we're s- also channeling a truth through our characters.

What happened?