Midway through writing her second novel, The Calamity Club, the bestselling Mississippi author was dropped by her publisher. In retrospect, she says, it was a blessingKathryn Stockett, author of The Calamity Club: 'I don’t know any novelists that write with the intention of just going to make a quick buck.' Photograph: Taylor Cooley Sun May 24 2026 - 04:04 • 8 MIN READKathryn Stockett is on a video call from her home state of Mississippi talking about the success of her first novel The Help and the challenge of following up a debut that has sold more than 15 million copies. Not only did The Help spend more than 100 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list, it was later turned into an Oscar-winning movie. The novel also famously came in for a lot of criticism which made her difficult-second-novel syndrome even more acute. She got there eventually, though, with The Calamity Club, a sprawling, 632-page historical novel about a group of plucky, resourceful women in Depression-era United States.It’s the obvious question, but here goes: why did it take so long? “Well,” she begins, in her charming southern lilt. “I was on tour for four or five years with The Help and then the movie and speaking engagements. I’m not the kind of person who can tour and write at the same time; they use very different sides of the brain. And once I started I had a lot of false starts. I had told myself I was going to write a very short, simple story that didn’t raise the kind of criticisms The Help did. I was writing cautiously and as a result I wasn’t happy with what I was putting on paper.”The Help told the story of black maids and a young white writer in 1960s Mississippi who secretly collaborate to expose the racism and inequalities of segregated Southern society. It was partly inspired by Stockett’s own experience as a “a spoilt white child” growing up in Jackson, Mississippi in a family that employed a black maid. Criticism of the book included questions about whether a white author could authentically represent the voices and experiences of black women who lived through segregation and domestic service in the Jim Crow South. The controversy became a broader discussion about who gets to tell stories, a debate that resurfaced again six years ago when Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt came in for similar criticism. By then, Stockett was deep into The Calamity Club. With expectations high and criticism of her debut still very much alive in her mind, she was struggling. “I guess the only way I know how to describe it is when you write your first novel, it’s just you, alone in a room … you don’t have any expectations of yourself. And with the second book, every once in a while, those readers and those critics will creep into your office and stare back at you when you are trying to do the very thing that you need to be alone for. At times it was paralysing. But the criticism wasn’t enough to stop me from writing a second book. “I just had to admit to myself that it’s impossible to write about Mississippi, especially Mississippi in the 1930s, and not write about hypocrisy and racism and sexism, and all of the absurdities that come along with that. So once I came to terms with that, the book really kind of took off.” After years of reflecting on the controversy, she is clear about her position. “The people were not looking at the story as a whole, they were fixating on the fact that I’m a white woman writing in a black voice. But I have no regrets about writing The Help, I have to admit that,” she says. “What I was told, and I believe this to be true, is that The Help started conversations that otherwise would not have been had. Conversations between white people and black people who were not talking about race for a long time. America was not talking about race. And it was still very much an issue. And so it started some conversations and it made some people uncomfortable and angry. But no regrets here.” [ Tara Brady: The Help arrives as though the culture wars never happenedOpens in new window ]By 2019 she was still under contract with Putnam, an imprint of Penguin Random House, the company that published The Help. She had been making progress with the book that would become The Calamity Club but then came a professional shock. “After 10 years, when I still hadn’t finished this novel, even though I was well on my way, they fired me.” The news was given through her agent. (In a statement to The New York Times, a spokesperson for Putnam said the contract was cancelled “by mutual agreement”.)Writers are not public speakers, or at least this one is not. I’d rather be in my PJs, being a dork, in front of my computer, writing things that crack me up— Kathryn Stockett“I just felt like a failure,” she says. “I guess I can say in hindsight, thank God it happened because I wasn’t getting the kind of editorial support I needed. Maybe if I was a real writer, then I could write a book without a good editor. But I’m not that kind of writer. I need someone who I can call every few days or once a month and play around with these ideas ... especially with a book like The Calamity Club with so many different plots.”As she floundered, an agent friend introduced her to Julie Grau of independent publisher Speigel & Grau. She credits Grau as the catalyst she needed to finish The Calamity Club. “When an editor really supports you as a writer, man, it’s just magical. Julie is always accessible, she’s a writer’s dream. I can call her up, the person who owns the company, and ask her a question. I could never do that before … I feel so blessed. I wish other writers who long for that kind of support would go and look at what else is out there.” The hugely entertaining book’s two main characters are a spirited and very funny 11-year-old orphan, Meg, and 24-year-old Birdie. “They’re old souls; they see right through bullshit,” Stockett says. “Meg is in an orphanage and finds herself unadoptable and Birdie has the same kind of stigma. She doesn’t understand the world she lives in.”The novel involved a lot of research and when Stockett stumbled on a law passed in Mississippi in 1928, it inspired a significant part of the book’s plot. “This law legalised the sterilisation of anyone who was deemed ‘feeble minded’ or anyone with any kind of physical or mental disability. It was legal to sterilise women so that they didn’t populate the state and it just stopped me in my tracks.” She discovered that Mississippi was actually behind the times and that two dozen other states had already passed their own sterilisation laws in the late 1920s. “It was called the Eugenics Movement and what really blew my mind was that the law in many states was expanded to include what they called promiscuous women.” In the book, Birdie forms an unlikely sisterhood by opening a temporary brothel. Did her views on sex work evolve in the writing? “It’s not my job to pass judgment,” she says. “It’s my job as a writer to show the reader that, in the 1930s, if you didn’t have a man in your life and didn’t have any skills and weren’t lucky enough to land a low-paying job in a shop or in an office your body was pretty much all you had. And I wanted the reader to understand that. I don’t want the reader to judge either. It’s more about just exploring the limitations of women in 1933 … there’s this sense that these women had to fend for themselves and take matters into their own hands. There are no men coming to save these women.”[ Author Emma Donoghue: ‘I grew up very normal, yet had this secret side that I thought everyone would consider foul’Opens in new window ]Raised in Mississippi, Stockett studied English at the University of Alabama. In her 20s she moved to New York, encouraged by her childhood friend Tate Taylor who was working there. (In a nice plot twist, the film-maker made his directorial debut with Stockett’s The Help.) She spent those early New York years working in the publishing industry before writing The Help, which received 60 rejection letters before publication. “They are just pieces of paper; you have to carry on,” she says, when I ask how she dealt with that. How does she feel about all the upcoming publicity for the book? “I’m terrified,” she says. “Can I admit that?” Recently, she spoke at an event to honour Octavia Spencer, who received an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in the movie version of The Help. “It went fine but it wasn’t enough training. I’m getting better, I think. Writers are not public speakers, or at least this one is not. I’d rather be in my PJs, being a dork, in front of my computer, writing things that crack me up, that hopefully, crack somebody else up too”. She is looking forward to coming back to Dublin as part of the tour. She’s been here several times. Her daughter Lila studied creative writing in Trinity and last year, aged just 22, married an Irish man she met while studying here. “When she told me she was getting married, my first thought was that she was knocked up. She wasn’t,” Stockett says with typical dry humour. She is open about her own past relationships. At 30, she married Lila’s father Keith Rogers and was divorced at 40. She was subsequently in a long relationship with writer Wyatt Williams, which ended badly. He was 16 years younger than Stockett while her current partner is “only 11 years younger than me so I’m moving up”. Is he also a writer? “No more writers,” the 57-year-old says emphatically. “Just ordinary civilians who have normal jobs.”Her daughter wants to be a novelist. Stockett jokes that between her writing aspirations and the youthful marriage “it’s like two mistakes in one”. What’s it like having a daughter who wants to pursue the same precarious profession? “We don’t talk about it,” Stockett says. “It’s sort of the elephant in the room, because she doesn’t read my writing, and I’m not allowed to read hers.” I express surprise that her daughter had never read The Help but she points out that her daughter was only a young girl when the book was first published. “It’s totally fine with me,” she says. Stockett has homes in New York’s East Village and Mississippi. I suggest that with the sales of The Help, she could have lived quite comfortably without ever writing another book. She balks at this idea. “I don’t know any novelists that write with the pure intention of, ‘I’m just going to make a quick buck.’ The point is not the money. The point of why we write is to answer these questions that are kind of bubbling up inside of us, and just because we wrote one thing doesn’t mean that those questions are going to stop. It’s my destiny, I guess, to keep writing, whether anyone reads it or not.”Kathryn Stockett will discuss The Calamity Club (Penguin) at the International Literature Festival Dublin, on Wednesday, June 3rd. ilfdublin.com IN THIS SECTION