An Interview with Kathryn Stockett

Celia Blue Johnson & Maria Gagliano

(This is an excerpt--check out Issue 7 in print for the full interview.)

After you’ve finished reading the New York Times bestselling novel The Help, the characters’ voices will linger in your mind. Kathryn Stockett has a knack for capturing characters down to their tiniest nuances. You’ll chuckle at a sassy retort, scowl at a cruel insult, sigh over an unexpected apology, and tear up over a terrible revelation. Stockett is a natural storyteller, and when we called her from our Brooklyn brownstone, it felt like we could just as easily be sitting at the lunch counter at Brent’s drug Store in her hometown—Jackson, Mississippi—eating cheeseburgers and chatting about the inspiration behind her book, the complexity of her characters, and what villains mean to her.

The theme for this issue of Slice is Villains. In your novel, The Help, many of the characters are subjected to cruelty by people who could be considered villains, but you do a beautiful job of showing the humanity of each character, so nothing is really black-and-white. What was your process shaping these multi-sided characters?

I think the most common thing that happens when you are a writer and you create good people and bad people, readers love to ask you who a character is in real life. Itís so funny to me because I'm no different than the readers. I do the same thing with all my favorite authors. I wonder, Oh my gosh, who was in their family that acted that way? But these are just amalgams of many people we've known. Even really good people might have one bad trait. That's essential to building characters because one bad trait on a good person really shows up. One good trait on a really bad person shows up as well, but you usually don't worry about that good trait quite as much.

It's fun trying to make characters not too flat, meaning not all good or all bad. But it's a challenge, too. With Hilly Holbrook, who is considered my villain, the best I could do for her in terms of giving her a good side is show that she really cares for her children and that she's a great leader.

There's that moment in the book, too, when she's standing by the pool and Skeeter's talking to her. You see a certain amount of weakness when Hilly talks about her husband and the campaign. For someone who's so strong on the outside, you manage to show how overwhelmed she is by everything she's trying to achieve.

Sometimes you can see the cracks in the surface with Hilly. That's why I threw in that cold sore. You can really tell that all the stress is getting to her.

Speaking of things not necessarily being black-and-white, we're reminded of when Aibileen tells Minny she doesn't really believe in the lines that people draw all around them. Is there a specific event when Aibileen realized that these lines don't exist or was it a gradual understanding?

I think a lot of her realizations came after her son died and she began seeing the world through different eyes. Death brings us down to the essentials, and we realize we're all mortal and we're all so fleeting. We could just as easily be gone. In that same light, we're all made of the same things, flesh and bone. It doesn't matter what color your skin is--we're all people and with very similar DNA.

Many of Aibileen's realizations occurred after Treelore's death and as she developed a relationship with a white adult, Skeeter. And she had that realization herself that not all white people are bad, the way she was probably brought up to believe. That's a realization for Skeeter as well, that there's no difference between black and white.

There's a similar parallel between Celia and Minny, too.

Yeah, I wanted to make sure that The Help wasn't completely about race and the lines that exist between races. I wanted to illuminate all of those particular lines that exist: in class, in culture, in education, in religion. In Celia's case, whether you were part of society or not.

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