The Calamity Club: A Guest Post by Kathryn Stockett

The Four Winds meets Hang the Moon in this deeply engaging story of community and survival set in 1933 Mississippi. This conversation-starting second novel from the bestselling author of The Help was fifteen years in the making. Read on for an exclusive essay from Kathryn Stockett on writing The Calamity Club.

 

Kathryn Stockett's first novel since the #1 bestselling phenomenon THE HELP.

 

I wrote The Calamity Club with the same intention I had when I wrote The Help: what happens when you put together a group of scrappy, strong-willed women, all with a rich sense of humor, all at the end of their rope, in a place as complicated and colorful as Mississippi. No one’s coming to save these women—no husbands, no fathers, certainly no government programs. And from this desperation is born a terrible, awful business idea—that ends up being very profitable, allowing these marginalized women to take back control of their lives.

I suppose I’ll always be drawn to writing about what I call “the underestimated woman.” She’s a woman you pass on the street or see in the grocery store who doesn’t seem to have much going on, but the truth is, she’s boiling inside, longing to change her world.

Though I write about some very dark subjects—hypocrisy, sexism, racism—I can’t resist throwing in a good laugh here and there too. It’s how I stay sane, as a writer and as a mother, as someone from a place so full of beauty and horror and absurdity as Mississippi. To work in the humor, I ask myself this: what is the absolute worst thing that can happen to this character? This question helps me form the big arcs of the story (it’s how I arrived at the chocolate pie in The Help), but also it may inform the action on a daily basis for characters I especially want to torture (the way Birdie torments her sister, Frances, for being so petty in The Calamity Club). The answers these characters come up with, even in their darkest moments, are often funny. I don’t know where they come up with some of these things, but since I published my first book seventeen years ago, I’ve learned to let them do most of the talking.