The Calamity Club
The Calamity Club
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Kathryn Stockett on The Calamity Club
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
The law that stopped her coldThe book she set out to write after The Help was a deliberate act of self-protection. Burned by criticism that she, a white woman from Mississippi, had no business writing in Black characters’ voices, she resolved to produce something safer, shorter, and harder to attack. The result was two versions of a novel that went nowhere.
I was determined that when I wrote a second book, I would write a nice, short simple book that didn’t draw the criticisms that The Help did. Having said that, the first couple of versions of The Calamity Club came out pretty vanilla and bland.
What broke the stalemate was not a change of heart but a change of subject. While researching 1930s Mississippi, she found Mississippi’s 1928 sterilization law, which authorized authorities to sterilize anyone labeled “feebleminded,” a classification applied widely to poor women and women deemed sexually improper. The discovery reoriented everything.
In my research, I stumbled on this law. It was like a bolt of lightning. It was a means to cleanse society. When I read that, it stopped me cold. I realized how little this had been written about from a fiction standpoint.
The historical fact handed her something no amount of careful self-editing could manufacture: genuine stakes, grounded in a law that had been real and largely forgotten.
Finding the law did more than supply a plot engine. It resolved the tension between the caution she had imposed on herself and the kind of book Mississippi actually demanded.
You cannot write a book about Mississippi where injustices are baked into daily life and not write about hypocrisy and racism and sexism and all the absurdities that come along with that. [paraphrased from audio]
Once she stopped holding the material at arm’s length, the book accelerated. The shift she describes is less a craft decision than an emotional one: permission to be horrified by what she was reading.
That is when the motor started. I was emotionally free, I was intellectually horrified by what I was reading, and that’s when the book really took off.
How she wrote it
Seventeen years, an 84-year-old researcher, and a dropped publisherThe research she did for the novel’s 1930s Mississippi setting went well past what any single scene required. She worked through stacks of Depression-era photographs and first-person accounts, and she sought out people who still had living memory of the period.
I studied stacks and stacks of photographs taken in the 1930s as well as read accounts of those who lived through this time and I even spoke to a few people that remember the Depression.
One image from the Library of Congress archive of Lewis Hine’s early-1900s child-labor photographs became a fixed point of reference throughout the writing. She returned to it repeatedly and described it in detail at her Square Books event.
She just has these crystal blue eyes and this white blonde hair, and she’s holding an oyster. And her look on her face just said to me, like she’s saying to this photographer, ‘Well, what you gonna do about it?’ [paraphrased from audio]
The girl in the photograph, a seven-year-old named Ruby who had been working in an oyster-shucking factory for over a year, gave Stockett a face to hold in mind when she wrote characters who had no institutional power and knew it.
Because the novel involves women in sex work during a period before penicillin was routinely available, she wanted accurate medical detail. The research method she landed on was hands-on in a way she clearly enjoyed describing.
With the help of an Emory med student, I learned how to set up an old-fashioned test for syphilis and gonorrhea in my kitchen at home. I am happy to say that I and most of my neighbors don’t have it. [paraphrased from audio]
Period-accurate vocabulary for female anatomy presented its own problem. Rather than guess, she asked her 84-year-old mother to compile a reference list. Her mother took the assignment seriously.
I did not want to give up on these women I was writing about. And if I was going to write this book, I intended to get the facts right. [paraphrased from audio]
Her mother returned with 1,362 entries, including “The Twat-lantic Ocean” and “The Indoor Barbecue at Snake Lake.” Stockett offered this list at the Montclair Literary Festival as her explanation for why the book took seventeen years.
The place where she actually wrote matters to how she describes the voices arriving. She has written both novels from the same building on her Mississippi property, a schoolhouse built the year before the novel is set.
I write in an old schoolhouse that sits behind my house in Mississippi, built in 1925. The voices come to me loud and clear in here.
The personal thread
Her mother’s life in the margins of the storyThe novel is dedicated to her mother, and the dedication is not ceremonial. Her mother’s experience as a divorced woman navigating the South gave the book some of its central questions about what happens to women who step outside approved roles, and her mother also participated directly in the research, compiling the period vocabulary list described above.
I was dumbstruck by the sterilization laws that were being passed in the US during the 20s and 30s, this idea of cleansing society of ‘undesirables.’ When I stumbled upon those laws, that’s when the story really started to blossom.
The sterilization law targeted women defined by authorities as sexually improper, which in 1930s Mississippi could mean a divorced woman, a poor woman, or simply a woman without male protection. The category shadowed the kind of life her mother had actually lived.
The narrator, Meg, is an 11-year-old orphan who has been pulled from school and barred from books. Stockett wrote most of Meg’s sections while her own daughter was that same age, and she drew on that proximity in ways she was direct about.
The Secret History changed my life. It was the first time I read a book by a woman from Mississippi that was my age. And she is the one, Donna Tartt, that lit the fire under my ass. [paraphrased from audio]
Tartt’s example matters here not as a general influence but as a permission structure: proof that a woman from Mississippi could write a novel that lasted. Meg’s hunger for books, and the fury she feels when they are taken from her, draws on that same understanding of what literature costs and what it gives.
On what the book is wrestling with
When the rules aren’t yours to breakThe women at the center of The Calamity Club are subject to laws and social arrangements they had no hand in creating. Stockett has described her writing as returning repeatedly to this specific pressure point, the moment when a character is told the rules cannot be changed.
When I reach this point in a story where the women are told no, that they can’t change a set of unfair rules, that they had nothing to do with being made, because they don’t deserve a say, that’s when I and my characters get very angry. [paraphrased from audio]
The type of woman she keeps building her fiction around is not a revolutionary in any visible sense. She is a figure who passes unnoticed in ordinary life and carries her ambition and her fury entirely on the inside.
I really like to write about what I call the underestimated woman. And the underestimated woman is, you know, just this person that you see in the grocery store or pass on the street and she doesn’t seem to have a whole lot going on when the truth is she is boiling inside to change her world. [paraphrased from audio]
The moral architecture of the novel rests on a claim she has made in her author’s note: that imaginative empathy is not just a craft tool but an obligation. She made this case in relation to the novel’s broad cast, which includes characters whose circumstances are far from her own.
As a writer, and as a human being, I believe it’s my duty to imagine what it feels like to stand in another person’s shoes.
What she wants us to sit with
History repeating, and the cost of forgetting itThe sterilization law at the heart of the novel is historical, but Stockett has been explicit that its presence in the book is a comment on the present. She made the connection in direct terms when speaking to AOL/Parade, pointing to women’s health rights as the live stakes.
I want people to understand that it’s no joke when we say that history repeats itself. We have seen it time and time again. And so, for women’s rights, for women’s health rights, we’ve got to fight.
Meg, the orphan narrator, has had books taken from her and has been told in every available way that she does not matter. Stockett built Meg’s interior life around a single line of Emily Dickinson, and at the NOON Book Club she explained what she wanted that image to do for the reader.
I just wanted the reader to see that sometimes you just can’t whip the hope out of people. Genuine hope is just too powerful. [paraphrased from audio]
For all the weight of the subject matter, she did not want the reading experience to feel like a lecture or a punishment. Asked at the Bookfinity interview to describe the book in the plainest possible terms, she offered a two-part answer that contained the whole of her intention.
Hopefully funny. Not too depressing, even though it’s set during the Depression. [paraphrased from audio]