| October 1, 2002
Dear Students,
It is an exceptionally nice honor to have you reading my novel in your Modern American Literature class! I'm extremely impressed with your weblog, which I've been following. What fun for the author to listen in on your discussions and see the wonderful and provocative artistic interpretations that you've created. The experience has opened my eyes to new ideas about my own work!
During English class my junior year in high school (way back there in 1965), my dream and desire to become a writer vividly came to life because of a particularly special teacher named Mrs. McCorvey, who had a way of causing her students to fall in love with wonderful books. I decided I wanted to spend the rest of my life with books- reading them, and if I was fortunate, writing them. Perhaps you remember the character in my novel named Mrs.
Henry, who was Lily's English teacher. Well, I modeled her on my teacher Mrs. McCorvey. Maybe you'd like to know what books we read in her class in 1965? I happen to know because I listed them in a journal that I kept when I was sixteen, and which I still have. We read Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations, Death Be Not Proud, Pilgrim's Progress, The Diary of Anne Frank, Animal Farm, excerpts of Walden Pond, and Lost Horizon. In my novel (p. 16), I actually had Lily talk about smuggling Lost Horizon out to the peach stand. That was one of my favorite books of all times, probably
because it took me to a world that was so exotic and mysterious.
I sincerely thank all of you, and Mr. Richardson for delving into The Secret Life of Bees with such interest and depth. It has been a great pleasure for me to be part of your class and discover your thoughts about my work. You have been my teachers.
Above all, keep reading!
Sue Monk Kidd
Class questions:
1. Katie would like to know what personality traits of yours did Lily end up with?
My family and friends tell me that Lily and I share the same sense of humor. That's probably true. Lily can be very funny sometimes. I think both of us see humor in unlikely things and love to make sly little jokes. When I was in high school and college, I used to crack up my friends with my stories and antics, and to be honest, I am still known to do this.
Lily has a daring streak in her that I seem to share as well. Both of us take risks. Lily's risk taking involved breaking out Rosaleen, running away, knocking on the door of the pink house, becoming involved with Zach, and standing up to a cruel father. My risks for the most part have been more abstract and internal- daring to explore new ideas, questioning the status quo, challenging belief systems. (Generally duller than Lily's) Actually, I think Lily is a lot braver than I was at 14. You would never have seen me breaking anybody out of jail.
2. Christina would like to know where did the bees idea came from? Chrissie wants to know where you got the idea of the book from?
I'm going to answer Christina's and Chrissie's questions together because they have the same answer. For the most part The Secret Life of Bees started with one vivid image. It was an image of bees that lived inside a bedroom wall and flew out at night. This didn't just come to me out of nowhere. When I was growing up we had what we called the "family bees." I grew up in a large, rambling
house in the country. Bees lived inside the wall of a back bedroom that we used for guests. (Sometimes we remembered to warn our guests and sometimes we didn't). The bees made a home with us for 17 years. They were a part of my childhood. We kept the door to the guest bedroom closed, but they sometimes managed to get out, and it was nothing to come home from school and find bees taking an excursion around the house. No one really got stung,
except the guy I brought home from college to meet my parents (the one I would marry). But then he swatted at them. Everybody knows you shouldn't swat at a bee.... Anyway, the bees made honey inside the wall and it would leak out onto the floor. As I wrote the novel, I thought all the time about our "family bees," remembering how they sounded, their incredible vibrating hum. They engendered feelings of awe, even mystery, inside of me. Most people would have thought we were cursed to have the bees in our house. But I always felt we were chosen.
When I anticipated writing a novel, the first thing that came to me were those bees. I started to picture a girl in early adolescence lying in bed while a cloud of bees poured through cracks in her bedroom walls and flew circles around the room. I imagined the bees' coming as a visitation, as if there was some hidden purpose in it. I kept trying to imagine what it might be. I asked myself: Who is this girl? What does she want? Take a vivid image, and ask those questions and before you know it, you will have a novel.
3. Megan wants to know how autobiographical this story is? Shawn would like to know how long did it take to write?
Once, after I gave a reading of the scene where T. Ray makes Lily kneel on grits, someone in the audience asked if my father had ever made me kneel ongrits. She couldn't imagine, she said, anyone making that up! I explained that not only had I never knelt on grits, or even heard of kneeling on grits before it popped into my head while writing the novel, but that T. Ray is the exact opposite of my father. Plus, my mother never abandoned me like Lily's mother. Mine was a great mom, who actually won a "Mother of the Year" award. Both of my parents are still alive, and delighted that I put a sentence in the acknowledge page of the novel explaining that the parents in the novel were nothing at all like them.
I conjured most of the novel straight out of my imagination, yet bits and pieces of my life inevitably found their way into the story. There is the fact that Lily and I both wanted to be writers. We both rolled our hair ongrape juice cans, refused to eat grits, and created fallout shelter models for our 7th grade science projects. We also both had nannies, which was a very common thing in the 50's and 60' for middle class families in the South. As I wrote about Rosaleen, I could hear my own nanny's voice in my
head. She had a colorful way with words, and some of her sayings found their way into Rosaleen's mouth. For instance my nanny used to say that if you put her husband's brain into a bird, the bird would fly backward. You may recall that Rosaleen said exactly the same thing about her husband. Like Rosaleen, my nanny was also a connoisseur of snuff. She carried around a snuff cup and had a distinct manner of spitting it, which Rosaleen inherited.
It took me three and a half years to write the novel. I wrote the first half in three years, and the second half in six months. The first three years I was working on other projects, as well, and had to divide my time between them.
4. Tim is wondering about the symbolism of the river, and I'm wondering whether the numerous mentions of the moon were intended?
To me, the river in the novel represents the great flow of life. This is, in fact, a very universal symbolic understanding of rivers. Rivers typically suggest the stream or current of life that one follows on a winding passage that will eventually flow into the sea (or symbolically, into an even larger eternal life.) In college I took a humanities course in which I read this line by Plato: "You cannot step twice into the same stream.." He was speaking of life. He was saying that the stream is always changing and flowing, that it is never the same moment to moment, and that life is this
way. I made poor May meet her death in the river because death is part of the great flow of life, too.
The moon did turn up a lot in the book, didn't it? I didn't realize just how much until about midway through the writing. Much of writing is paying attention to the images that float up to us from our subconscious, and working with them creatively. When I recognized that I was generating a lot of moon references, I began to work with this more intentionally. The moon, like the river, is a very ancient symbol that has long been connected to Divine Mothers. For instance, the Virgin Mary is frequently depicted
standing on the moon. And the Black Mary statue in the novel had a moon painted on her. I wanted the moon to hover through the book quietly pointing to this association. In the last line of the novel, Lily looks at Rosaleen, August, June and the Daughters of Mary and says: They are the moons shining over me. They become her mothers, her "divine" mothers.
5. We all want to know who you would like to see playing the main roles in the movie?
My hysterically funny family and friends all think that they should have the leading roles. They want me to use my influence with the producer to get them parts. Fortunately, I don't have any influence.
The week we first learned that there was interest in making a movie version of my novel, my husband and I sat around dreaming up who we thought should be in it. We mentioned Angela Basset (June), Whoopi Goldberg (May), Oprah Winfrey (August), but we never came up with a choice for Lily, Rosaleen or Zach. My husband insisted that Dwight Yoakam would be a great T.Ray after seeing him in the movie Sling Blade.
6. Geoff is wondering why you included the interracial relationship between Lily and Zach?
In 1964 in the South, interracial relationships were taboo. Today it might be hard to appreciate just how taboo. I partly included the relationship for just that reason. I wanted to address the racial divides I remember while growing up in the South during the 60's, especially the most pronounced taboos of the time. It was important to me to portray the love and friendship that is possible between young people of different racial backgrounds... how genuine caring transcends the narrow boundaries that cultures often create for it.
My high school class happened to have been the first integrated class in my hometown in Georgia. There were two African-American students in the class, and I remember them to this day with much respect, and even with awe at their resilience. In the novel I made Zach the first to integrate the white high school in Tiburon. On page 301 Lily talks about students throwing balled up notebook paper at him in the hallway between classes, and that she was as likely to get popped in the head as he was for walking alongside of
him. This was not something I invented. I remember the notebook paper very well. And I remember the dignity of the black students who held their heads high and kept walking.
I feel that writing about the racial situation of 1964 has relevance for today, the same way that all images of historical cruelty do. They teach us to look at ourselves, and hopefully not repeat the mistakes of the past. One of the values of fiction is that it allows us to enter into lives that otherwise we would never know anything about. And hopefully the experience creates an empathy inside of us for these lives.
7. Beth would like to know how much editing was done to the final version?
I have a wonderful editor at Viking- Pamela Dorman. After I turned in the final manuscript to her, she made six or eight suggestions for improving it. Mostly this involved re-writing several key scenes, trying to bring more emotional content to them. One of those scenes was May's death. Another was when Lily found May on the kitchen floor making a "roach trail" and realized her mother had probably been at the pink house and knew the sisters. I rewrote the scenes several times trying to get them just right. And here's
something very few people know: my editor suggested we take a character out of the book, which after some hesitation, I agreed was for the best. The character was a white boy named Sonny who was Lily's boyfriend before she ran away.
Much of writing is re-writing. I actually like to re-write. It is like polishing a piece of wood, bringing out more and more of the hidden beauty.
8. Some of us wonder if you thought about shortening the length of Lily's story?
No, I never did. It was like there was an invisible thread in the story, and I just kept following it until I got to the end.
9. Is there a sequel?
After I finished writing The Secret Life of Bees, I missed Lily, Rosaleen, August, May, June and the Daughters of Mary like you would miss actual friends who suddenly move away. But I dismissed thoughts of a sequel. It seemed too risky to go back and tamper with the world I'd created. Right now I'm working on another novel, set in South Carolina in 1988. It is not a sequel, but after I finish it, who knows?
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