Eugenics, Depression-era sex work fuel new novel by author of ‘The Help’

Nothing can prepare someone for the kind of success Kathryn Stockett experienced when she published her debut novel “The Help” in 2009.

The book spent more than 100 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. It became an Oscar-winning film and has sold 15 million copies to date.

“Nobody was as surprised as I was that ‘The Help’ took off the way that it did,” said Stockett, who lived in Atlanta when the book came out.

After publication, Stockett spent five years on tour promoting the hardback copy, then the paperback, then the movie. In the process, she fielded a lot of flak from detractors who faulted her portrayal of Black domestic workers in ‘60s-era Mississippi, whose stories of abuse and oppression are told by a white woman.

When the opportunity arose to move to Bali with her teenage daughter in 2019, Stockett took it. Two years later, when her daughter graduated, she returned to the U.S., moving back to her home state of Mississippi.

The 2011 movie "The Help" stars Emma Stone as Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan, a young writer whose work stirs change in 1960's Mississippi. Also starring are Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis. (AP 2020)

All the while, her legion of fans was eagerly awaiting her next novel, some beginning to wonder if she would be like that other Atlanta author who wrote just one epic Southern novel, Margaret Mitchell.

But 17 years after that novel’s debut, the wait is over. On May 5, Stockett published “The Calamity Club,” (Spiegel and Grau, $35), a whopping 632-page historical novel set in Mississippi during the Great Depression in which a ragtag group of scrappy women pushed to their limits by untenable circumstances set out to rescue themselves from a desperate situation.

“The sophomore novel is notoriously daunting after you’ve had something successful,” said Stockett. When writing a first novel, “you write it really for yourself,” she said. “It’s just you alone with the page. The second time around, it’s you and the page and all those readers and critics staring back to you, so it was seriously paralyzing at times.”

“The Calamity Club” is told from two perspectives: Meg LeFleur, an endearing, 11-year-old orphan deemed unadoptable who’s about to be shipped off to work in a factory, and Birdie Calhoun, a 24-year-old small-town woman with few prospects who volunteers at Meg’s orphanage.

“The first voice that came to me was Meg,” said Stockett, “even though I had an idea that I wanted to write a book about a Southern family starting a brothel in their backyard. I didn’t quite know how to bridge the two. … What helped was when I came up with the voice of Birdie. She is what I like to call an underestimated woman. A lot of people don’t see much happening in Birdie’s future, and she kind of proves them all wrong.”

Stockett’s first draft of “The Calamity Club” fell woefully short of her expectations.

“It didn’t have the heart and the soul that I want a book to have as a reader or a writer. That’s when you question yourself as a writer and say, ‘What am I doing?’ But I didn’t want to give up because I didn’t want to give up on Meg.”

The novel sparked to life when Stockett came across a law passed in 1928 that gave the state of Mississippi the right to sterilize individuals deemed “insane, idiotic, imbecilic, feebleminded or epileptic.”

Author Kathryn Stockett. (Ken Kochey/Courtesy)

“It really jolted me awake,” she said. The more she learned about the eugenics movement, the more horrified she became, especially when she discovered that promiscuity was considered a sign of feeblemindedness.

“That really shocked the shoes right off me because I can’t imagine getting dressed one day and looking a little promiscuous, whether I know it or not, and walking down the street and it’s legal for enforcement to detain me, to pick me up, test me for sexually transmitted diseases and hold me. And if they deemed that I had a disease or that I had any kind of disability, according to them, or I was a threat to society, they could legally sterilize me,” she said.