The Help Kathryn Stockett Essay

Kathryn Stockett’s Personal Experience “On the one hand I wonder, was this really my story to tell? On the other hand, I just wanted the story to be told,” a quote once said by Kathryn Stockett when talking about her bestselling book, The Help. The Help is a book about three women, two black and one white, during the 1960’s, the Civil Rights Movement. Inspired to write about her own maid, Demetrie, whom she yearned for, she started her research on the 1960’s and treatment of black servants by their employers. Kathryn had her own doubts when writing this book because after all she was a white woman from the south herself and had a black maid when she was young. But it paid off when her first book is a New York best seller and it’s clear to see why.

Demetrie had no children, was poor, and had an abusive husband and she was kind and gentle to Kathryn and her siblings. Since Stockett grew up in the South and was young, she thought having a black woman doing a lot of the household chores was something the rest of America was familiar. When she moved to New York, she saw this wasn’t how things were everywhere. Her moving to New York is shown in the book as well when Skeeter moves to New York to work for Harper’s Magazines in chapter 33. She started writing the book feeling homesick and started writing in the voice of her maid, Demetrie. Part of this can be shown in the book by the setting, which is where Kathryn grew up, Jackson, Mississippi. She then later sent it to her mother and who said she liked it and Kathryn continued writing. She then later realized that the character she had written based off of Demetrie, Aibileen, had some out of character moments and another character, Minny, arose. Kathryn just decided to continue writing from