It started with a chair. Sue Monk Kidd, the unassuming author of the bestselling TheSecret Life of Bees, was struck by the image of a chair a friend of hers had seen in an old church in England. It had a mermaid carved into it. "I was captivated," Kidd says by phone on the eve of publicity for her new book, The Mermaid Chair. That mermaid, incised into hard wood in a cold stone church in Great Britain, was incongruous enough to spark a writer's imagination. So she did what writers are wont to do—she committed an act of wonderful larceny. "I began pulling together a story that would relocate the chair to a monastery on an island off the coast of South Carolina."
Kidd has made the chair her own. Pre-pub demand for The Mermaid Chair was intense enough to embolden Viking to plan a 400,000-copy first printing. Not bad for a writer who once toiled at a religious magazine and hustled freelance work—but just what you might expect for a writer coming off a first novel that has sold more than 3.5 million copies. The Secret Life of Bees, the lyrical tale of a 14-year-old Southern white girl named Lily and her black surrogate mothers, was embraced by reviewers and readers from the start. And the acclaim has hardly let up. In addition to being a mainstay on all the national bestseller lists for months, the coming-of-age novel is also a hit abroad. The Secret Life of Bees can now be read in 20 languages.
Although another writer might have followed up with a sequel to Bees—it does seem ripe for it—Kidd thought differently. To the inevitable question from Bees-drunk fans about another installment, Kidd, a dark-haired, 56-year-old mother of two, says in her warm Georgia drawl, "I always leave my answer open-ended," although at this point, it "isn't likely." Speaking from the second home retreat she and her husband, Sandy—a former family counselor, now her business manager—recently bought on the coast of Florida, Kidd is eager to talk about her new book. The Mermaid Chair, set on little Egret Island off the coast of South Carolina, features a married 42-year-old woman who shakes up her conventional life by falling in love with a monk—"quite different [from Bees] in terms of story and place." she says. But not so different, she admits. In The Mermaid Chair, Jessie Sullivan is summoned to Egret Island to try to calm her eccentric mother. There, at a Benedictine monastery, she finds the strange chair—supposedly with the image of a saint who once was a mermaid—and a monk named Brother Thomas who is on the verge of taking his final vows.
"I was in the middle of writing the story of Jessie when it struck me that both she and Lily [of Bees] have to leave home, paradoxically, before they can find home." Small circles of nurturing women anchor both novels, but Eros figures more prominently in Mermaid.Talking about the nature of Jessie Sullivan's search prompts this calculation from Kidd:"A woman wants love and freedom at the same time."
Jessie's personal awakening, and her love affair with Brother Thomas, is reminiscent of the relationship that Thomas Merton had with a woman while he was at the Gethsemane Trappist monastery in Kentucky.
Merton was among the many authors Kidd read during her self-described apprenticeship, mustering her courage to become a writer after graduating from Texas Christian University with a degree in nursing in 1970. Kidd was nearing 30 and living in Anderson, S.C., where her husband taught at a small liberal arts college, when her first published piece, an essay written for a writing class, appeared in Guideposts magazine. Soon the freelancer, whose specialty was inspirational and lifestyle pieces, became a Guideposts contributing editor, which in turn led to the 1989 publication of her first book, by Harper San Francisco, a compilation of her contributions to the magazine.
God's Joyful Surprise was followed there by two memoirs, When the Heart Waits (1990) and The Dance of the Dissident Daughter (1996); the latter remains among the imprint's top 50 bestsellers. But success with personal narratives didn't quench her dream of mastering fiction, and Kidd continued pursuing it with courses at Emory in Atlanta, plus study at the Sewanee and Bread Loaf writers conferences. Gradually her stories began appearing in literary quarterlies and elsewhere, but the winner of the South Carolina Arts Commission's 1994 Fellowship in Literature for Fiction inched closer to becoming a novelist when she was tapped for the Poets & Writers Exchange Program. She was invited to read her work at the New York Arts Club.
There she read a story called "The Secret Life of Bees." Agent Virginia Barber, who was in the audience, expressed interest in representing her if the story was ever expanded. Three years later, Barber received 150 pages of a novel and, in short order, had in hand a preemptive offer from Viking that Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, Kidd's current agent at William Morris and former partner of the now retired Barber at Writer's Shop, says, "blew everyone out of the water."
The second half was completed within six months. But when Pamela Dorman, Kidd's editor on both novels, told her the initial print run had been set at 56,000, she remembers wondering if that wasn't overly optimistic. It wasn't until she was in Boston on tour and heard her name as an answer to a question on Jeopardy that she began to grasp the scope of Bees' phenomenal impact. "I realized then that something big was happening." Now, with a similar tale of coming home, but with the added allure of prohibited passion, she may find herself having to buy yet another domicile to which to return.
