The Help
The Help
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Kathryn Stockett on The Help
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A voice she couldn’t reach by phoneThe book began on the morning after September 11, 2001. Stockett was in lower Manhattan, the phone lines were down, and she couldn’t get word to her family in Mississippi that she was alive. She did what she says writers do when they run out of other options.
I just wanted to hear those voices, you know, from my past. I was living in New York City. I missed my family and my friends from Mississippi. And so I started writing in the voice of Demetrie. [paraphrased from audio]
Demetrie, the Black woman who worked for Stockett’s family for 32 years, died when Stockett was sixteen. The arithmetic of that loss took years to fully register: three decades of daily proximity, and Stockett had never once thought to ask what Demetrie’s life felt like from the inside.
Dimitri worked for our family for 32 years. Holy shit, she knew everything about us but we didn’t really know anything about her.
The shame Stockett felt about that silence was not immediate. It arrived slowly, in her thirties, long after Demetrie was gone and long after any conversation was possible.
I feel a little ashamed to admit that it wasn’t until I was 30, you know, 30 years old, maybe 35, that I really started to question and think about for the first time in my life what Demetrie must have been thinking and feeling as she was taking care of our family. [paraphrased from audio]
New York gave Stockett distance from Mississippi, but it didn’t give her relief from the subject. She kept finding herself in late-night conversations with other Southerners, all of them returning to the same people and the same kitchens, and eventually she understood what those conversations were actually about.
Twenty years later, with a million things to do in New York City, there we were still talking about the women who’d raised us in our mama’s kitchens. It was probably on one of those late nights, homesick, when I realized I wanted to write about those relationships from my childhood.
How she wrote it
Sixty rejections and one back-section phone bookStockett began with Aibileen’s voice, the character who most directly stands in for Demetrie. The timidity of that voice was not a stylistic choice so much as a self-portrait: the character’s hesitance mapped exactly onto the writer’s anxiety about what she was attempting.
Because I was so shy about writing as a white woman in a black voice, I started with a character that was humble and hesitant, because I think it reflected the way I was feeling about what I was doing. [paraphrased from audio]
When Aibileen’s quieter register couldn’t contain everything the book needed to say, Stockett found her way to Minny, the second of the novel’s Black domestic narrators. Minny’s voice came from a real person Stockett had been watching carefully at parties, taking notes without a notebook.
Minny was the easiest to write because she’s based on my friend Octavia. I didn’t know Octavia very well at the time I was writing, but I’d watched her mannerisms and listened to her stories at parties.
For period detail, Stockett went to the Eudora Welty Library in Jackson and worked through old phone books, not the listings but the back sections, which preserved the commercial and social texture of early-1960s Jackson in ways that more formal archives did not.
The back section of the phone book captures so much about the mundane life in a certain time, which somehow becomes interesting fifty years later. The fancy department stores, the abundance of printing shops, and the fact that there were no female doctors or dentists—all helped me visualize the time.
Writing in a Black voice across an entire novel was the problem that never fully resolved itself. Even after the book found readers and became a phenomenon, Stockett had not made her peace with having done it.
I was mortified that I was doing the very thing I’d been taught not to do, which was to touch on the issue of race, to highlight the things that separate us. I’m still thinking I’m going to get into trouble. I’m still not comfortable with what I’ve done. It’s a strange thing.
The manuscript went out to agents 60 times over three and a half years. The fortieth rejection told her there was no market for her kind of writing, and that one finally broke through her composure. After that she started lying to friends about her weekends, checking into hotels to write rather than admit she was still working on the same book. What kept her going had nothing to do with confidence.
I’m just stubborn as hell. If you tell me I can’t do something, I will march right out there and kill myself trying to do it!
Agent Susan Ramer, her sixty-first query, said yes.
The personal thread
What she never said to DemetrieWriting the book without an audience in mind was the condition that made writing it possible. Once Stockett stopped imagining readers, the book became something else: a private attempt to recover a relationship that had ended before she understood what it was.
At first, I wasn’t nervous writing in the voice of Aibileen and Minny because I didn’t think anybody would ever read the story except me. I wrote it because I wanted to go back to that place with Demetrie. I wanted to hear her voice again.
Interviewing white women who had grown up with Black domestic workers in the house, Stockett expected to hear nostalgia. What she found was closer to unfinished business: a debt many of them felt they had never properly acknowledged and now had no way to settle.
I started to better understand what they were feeling... It wasn’t just that they missed these women so deeply. I think they wished that they could tell them, one last time, ‘Thank you for everything.’ There was a sense that they hadn’t thanked them enough.
What she wants us to sit with
Practice at the thing we’ve been avoidingStockett has been careful, across many years of interviews, not to cast the book as instruction. The goal she returns to most often is smaller and more concrete: she wanted the rules of Jim Crow-era Mississippi, encoded into daily domestic life, to be visible on the page so a reader could hold them up and look at them.
I just wanted it to be on paper and I wanted people to look back on that and think about it and see how ridiculous some of those rules were. [paraphrased from audio]
Behind that specific goal sits a broader diagnosis about why racial understanding in America has moved so slowly. Stockett connects the failure directly to a silence she recognizes in herself: the same silence that kept her from asking Demetrie any real questions for thirty years.
For a very long time, we didn’t talk about it at all, because we were so afraid of saying the wrong thing and being typecast as racist. In order to get better at something, you have to practise and we haven’t been practising at all.
Stockett frames the act of reading fiction as a moral exercise, not a sentimental one. The imaginative demand a novel makes on a reader is, for her, the same demand that ordinary ethical life makes: to go somewhere uncomfortable and stay there long enough to learn something.
I believe it’s our job as human beings to imagine what it feels like to be in someone else’s shoes, whether it’s the President or a woman cleaning up the kitchen. That’s how we learn to be better people.
When readers asked whether she had the right to write what she wrote, Stockett never claimed authority. Her answer rested on a distinction between presuming to know and trying to understand, and she held that line consistently.
I’ll never know what it really felt like to be in the shoes of those black women who worked in the white homes of the South during the 1960s and I hope that no one thinks I presume to know that. But I had to try. I wanted the story to be told. I hope I got some of it right.