Sue Monk Kidd (The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair) shares her thoughts on the Bees movie, reading groups, writing, and reading with Donna Paz Kaufman, founder and continuing advisor to Reading Group Choices ... In this month's 1-On-One!

DPK: How exciting to learn that The Secret Life of Bees will become a movie! It sounds like another opportunity for book groups to gather and recount Lily and Rosaleen’s journey. If you were to introduce the movie to a gathering of book group members, what would you say?   

SMK: I would say that it’s been a long time coming, and it’s been worth the wait! As a novelist, I think it has turned out for me to be a really wonderful experience. It’s not always the case for the author of a literary novel. Go and see the movie and take your sister or your mother or friends or your book group—watching the movie with a group of women would be a wonderful way to see it. (It’s releasing Friday, October 17th.) Expect an adaptation that is true to the novel.  I do think it matters that an author is pleased with the film version.
  
DPK: What was your involvement in the making of the film? 

SMK: The director, producer, and script writer invited me into this process. They were wonderful about including me and asking for comment. I felt I had a voice, which is always a good thing. I feel as though Gina Prince-Bythewood (the script writer) “got it.” She told me on the phone when she signed on to the project that she’d read the book, and it meant something to her. She felt strongly about the story. She said, “The best thing I could do is to be true to this story.” There’s nothing a novelist would want to hear more than that! Her vision is definitely in the script, and when she sent it to me to read, I found myself a little nervous about reading it. It took me about a week to pick it up. She told me later she was nervously waiting for my response. When I did pick it up, it was such an enormous relief to see the script—and a joy to realize that she brought “emotional resonance” into the script. I think there is a quality in the script that pulls on the emotions and not in a sentimental way, but a really authentic way.

DPK: Why do you think your stories resonate so well with reading groups? 

SMK: I believe readers are responding to Bees and Mermaid Chair for a lot of reasons that are mysterious to me. I can’t say I can pinpoint one. I suspect it has a great deal to do with some universal or archetypal story. It’s a story at the core of who we are, finding our place of belonging in the world.

The stories resonate with women. I got a phone call from a psychiatrist in Germany who gives Bees to her clients who have suffered a loss and are on a journey of healing. I found that fascinating.  Readers find some aspect of the story that resonates with them—the universal journey of the soul is to find love and redemption.

DPK: Do you find that, in your mind, you revisit particular ideas or parts of life, and then feel compelled to write about them?  

SMK: What I love to write about are stories that I feel are going to jolt the heart. The way to the reader is through the heart. In Bees, there were some things to learn about (Civil rights, bees), but what I’m interested in is reaching the heart. It’s where we are most affected and how we change. I like stories that have that deeper quality. It’s what matters to me.

DPK: Is it possible to be a good writer without being a good reader? 

SMK: Those two things are so connected, I don’t know how in the world to separate them. When my daughter was in the second grade, she came home with a form she needed to be filled out. She told her teacher my occupation was a reader. Ha! She thought it was an actual profession. I wish someone would pay me to be a professional reader. The way one learns to write is to read.

DPK: What advice would you offer reading group members about selecting books for discussion? 

SMK: Taste is so diverse. I think it’s a challenge. Like anything, we just have to be opened minded about other peoples’ choices. Books that tell these universal stories appeal most widely and most deeply. To Kill a Mockingbird will resonate for all times. It’s a journey you experience and feel with characters whose lives we can drop into and feel. Readers look for that. If the lives are different than our own, readers may be resistant to choose that book. We need to challenge ourselves.

DPK: You’ve written both fiction and non-fiction. Do you have a preference?   

SMK: I try to listen to those impulses from inside. I tend to have a contemplative, inward side. I feel that non-fiction (personal narrative, memoir) is from the inside out. All of my work grows from the inside. It starts with an image that I am compelled by, and the story sprouts out from that. My next book (due out next September) is a memoir that I just finished. It’s co-authored with my daughter, Ann Kidd-Taylor, Traveling with Pomegranates. It’s a mother-daughter story, but it’s also a story of two women; we’re telling stories from two ends of life. It was written when I turned 50 and my daughter graduated from college, and we traveled together to Greece. It became an extraordinary time in our lives. It’s a multi-layered memoir of both of us trying to find our place.
 
DPK: Will you write another novel sometime soon? How do you decide what to write? 

SMK: An image has emerged for my next novel, not long after I finished writing The Mermaid Chair. I sometimes have to wait on the images to appear. After finishing a book, I need to be sallow. I trust … I know … that there is great fertility in all of us. I know the image will come. The one that came to me I can’t tell you, because I haven’t even told my agent.  It’s not as simple as I make it sound. There’s a certain quality of an image that you just know is filled with a story. It’s like following a scent where you’re compelled to dig and delve.  I trust those images will continue to come. I think creativity is the connecting of images that don’t seem to go together. I made collages of the many images so I could create language around them.

DPK: What book or books changed your life? 

SMK: The one I read and reread in High School was Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. It had that heart-jolt thing for me. All of Eudora Welty’s stories, To Kill a Mockingbird is sacred text. (I tend to read fiction.)

DPK: What are your favorite words to live by? 

SMK: That is an extraordinary hard thing to condense. The conversation we create with life is so rich and diverse and vast that it’s painful to reduce it to a few words. Authenticity … I want my work, my life to be authentic to who I am, my voice. Compassion … that word literally means “with suffering”. You see this in May (Bees), and it is really is played out so well in the movie. All of the performances are spot-on; I loved every one of them. May has that hypersensitive heart in the way that suffering comes into her. I have a little touch of May in me. Remember that we are all connected, and it matters how we relate to one another. Stories should reach for this kind of connection.

ABOUT DONNA PAZ KAUFMAN

Donna Paz Kaufman founded the bookstore training and consulting group of Paz & Associates in 1992, with the objective of creating products and services to help independent bookstores and public libraries remain viable in today's market. She later met and married Mark Kaufman, whose background included project management, marketing, communications, and human resources. Together, they launched Reading Group Choices in 1994 to bring publishers, booksellers, libraries, and readers closer together. They sold Reading Group Choices to Barbara and Charlie Mead in May 2005. Paz & Associates now offers training and education for new and prospective booksellers, architectural design services for bookstores and libraries, marketing support through The Reader's Edge customer newsletter, and some print and video products on a wide variety of topics.

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