Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books
Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books
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Kirsten Miller on Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Someone else’s idea that wouldn’t let goThe book began not with Miller but with her editor, who had just returned from Austin, Texas, where residents were posting yard signs reading ‘Come and get it’ outside homes that stocked banned books available to borrow. The editor called Miller with a pitch: a novel built around a little free library secretly stocked with those banned titles. Miller almost never takes outside ideas.
a couple of days later, I wrote her back and I was like, ‘I really want to write this book.’ And I just sat down and I was like, let’s do a test of concept. Four chapters, boom, they poured out because I had so much to say about libraries, about the South, about my heritage, about a lot of different things. You can sense the passion and it just kind of all burst out at once.
The editor’s instinct to call Miller specifically was rooted in geography. Miller grew up in Sylva, North Carolina, and spent her childhood in the local public library. That history meant the subject arrived with decades of accumulated feeling behind it, not as assignment but as autobiography.
everything that I love can be traced back to the things that I encountered in that library somewhere between the ages of, say, eight and sixteen. And so I see it as absolutely formative to my upbringing, to the person that I became.
Beyond the libraries and the South, there was something more private driving the project. Miller doesn’t elaborate on what those demons were, but the relief she describes is specific.
I exorcised some of my own personal demons with this one. And boy, it felt fabulous.
That the book arrived so fast, and with such evident release, suggests the idea landed on ground that had been prepared for a long time.
How she wrote it
Tucking a message inside a storyAfter the first four chapters burst out, the rest of the book demanded real discipline. The comic surface and the harder material underneath had to be held in balance, and Miller was adamant that the novel would never tip into sermon territory.
It does not lecture anyone, and that was very important to me, but there is a lot in there that’s difficult for some of us to read.
That commitment to not lecturing wasn’t a calculated strategy so much as a regional inheritance. The structure of the novel, in which each chapter takes its title from a ‘wholesome’ book Lula has approved while the real banned book inside does the narrative work, follows this same logic.
This book is very much in the Southern storytelling tradition. And I think that’s something that Southerners do really well is tell a story and tuck a message in there.
Choosing which banned books to place inside Lula’s little library was itself a curatorial act with both emotional and argumentative stakes. The final list includes Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue, and Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, among others.
All of the banned books are books that have actually been banned. There were points that I wanted to make, and there were books that fit those very, very nicely.
The chapter-by-chapter architecture, each section following a different resident of the fictional town of Troy who picks up one of the swapped books, grew directly from the premise. Miller described the discovery at the heart of each chapter in the book’s promotional video.
It’s really about these two women. One who is doing whatever she can to feed her empty soul. And the other one who has to find the courage to fight her. [paraphrased from audio]
The chapter structure kept that central opposition legible even as the novel multiplied its cast: each townsperson who reaches into the library and pulls out an unexpected book is, in some sense, being recruited to one side or the other of that fight.
The personal thread
A Southerner writing the South wholeMiller spent more than twenty years working in advertising in New York City, and the distance from the South she grew up in gave her a particular frustration with how that region gets read from the outside. The novel was partly written to correct that reading.
I had a lot of motives going into this, and one was to show people outside of the South that the South contains multitudes. We also have gay Southerners and drag queen Southerners and liberal Southerners. We have everybody.
That impulse to represent the South in its full range connects to the broader shape of her fiction. Every book she has written puts a woman up against a force that wants to shrink her, and the antagonist in Lula Dean is simply the latest in that line.
All of my books are about women who overcome forces holding them back and decide it’s time to kick butt. My protagonists have tackled sexist employers, abusers of young women, book banners, and even a Confederate general.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Kirsten Miller”On what’s at stake
What books actually do, and don’tMiller’s sharpest objection to the book-banning movement isn’t procedural; it’s factual. The novel dramatizes this argument most pointedly in a chapter about a teenage football player who picks up a gay romance believing it might be Chicken Soup for the Soul, reads it half-hoping it will explain his gay brother to him, finishes it bored, and walks away unchanged except in his understanding of his sibling.
No one on the face of the planet has ever been turned gay by a book. It’s just sort of you know, if anything, books about young gay people have probably saved thousands of lives. I think there are a lot of people out there who have a very wrong idea of the kind of power that books wield.
The small-town setting of Troy was chosen as much for its social mechanics as for its Southern atmosphere. In a place where everyone carries decades of shared history, a single little library becomes a pressure point for the whole community.
I also love setting stories in small towns, where everyone knows everyone else and colorful family histories and life-long grudges can give a book like Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books a delightfully scandalous soap opera atmosphere.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Kirsten Miller”The character Beverly Underwood, the neighbor who begins quietly slipping banned books into Lula’s little library, is the novel’s portrait of what resistance actually looks like at the local level. For Miller, she is also a call to a specific kind of reader.
I want the Beverly Underwoods of the world to step forward and start fighting for what they know is right.
What she wants us to sit with
Telling women to look at their own powerRunning beneath the comedy and the soap opera mechanics is a question Miller has been asking across her career, long before this book. The enemy in Lula Dean is a particular woman wielding performative virtue as a weapon, but the real subject is the woman on the other side who hasn’t yet decided to act.
One of my goals as a writer is to shake women like me awake and tell them, look at your life, look how powerful you are, go out and do something with that.