Katie Couric And Kathryn Stockett Talk About 'The Help' (VIDEO)

Katie Couric interviews Kathryn Stockett, author of the mega-hit novel, "The Help". It's a long one, but worth watching in stages--book clubs weigh in via skype as well as Stockett's home town friends. It's a great publishing story of a surprise success.

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Comments

[TexanInMississippi]

02:43 PM on 03/04/2010

A great read! I've passed my copy around to several southern and northwestern friends and they all have loved it. I'm sending it to my sister next. Its last stop will be the local library (since we live in a small town, with a very limited collection, I figure it's best to donate my books so everyone else can have access to it.) Waaaa...I miss my old metropolitan library system.

[Asmodeus]

09:00 AM on 03/04/2010

While I agree that the racial issues involved are of great import, I have often felt that racism has most often been little more than a moral 'front' put up to forestall feelings of guilt and remorse over the more basic issue. This isn't just about the relationships between blacks and whites. It's about the relationships between those who have money, and those who do not. Nearly the whole of the driving force behind the slave trade was, as the name implies, economic in nature. Stoking racism was simply an effort to ensure continuity of a profitable practice by swaying public opinion.

I have not read the book, but it seems to me that the reason this story has such widespread appeal is because this story is merely a microcosm of our society-wide dysfunction. They need us to make their pretty non-reality a reality, and demand our respect. But all the while relegate us to the subhuman heading of 'Suckers/Deadbeats/Losers' in their minds and attitudes. Because clearly, their family having all that money means they're superior, not just lucky, and too dumb to realize it, too selfish to help others attain similar security.

[kitvancleave]

09:41 AM on 03/06/2010

Don't you think it's a waste of your time (and ours) for you to lecture on a book you haven't read?

Black English is not a dialect, patois, bad standard English. It's a separate language, and as long as people speak it at home, it needs to be recognized as such so kids don't come into first classes without a good grounding in Standard English. Remember: THE COLOR PURPLE was written in Black English and won the Pulitzer. So let's have a little respect for a cultural phenomenon -- a language created by people barred from education by their owners, many of them speaking different tribal languages, who could be beaten for not following orders in English. They cleverly developed a language only they can use effectively, a perfect revolutionary tool.

And could Katie not have found some black women to discuss the book?

[Asmodeus]

04:17 AM on 04/10/2010

You misunderstand. I am not in the least disparaging Black English. Just the evil reasons it became necessary.

And believe me, you need not explain to me the value of language and culture. I'm Native American. When the attempts at enslavement largely failed, whites began to exterminate us wholesale. Those few of us that were left were thrown into concentration camps where many still languish today. And then, when we were dependent upon them in our new 'homes', they started taking our children to white schools, where 'before and after' pictures of the 'Civilizing Process', where they were beaten, sometimes to death, for so much as speaking a word of their own language.

Don't get me started on what they did to the adults. I have empathy and affection for Black Culture, and it's people. But it is that of one who shares the foxhole with them. I simply do not bear the burden of knee-jerk sympathy-out-of-guilt that most whites in this country do. They have a secret code language? So? At least they had a way to speak it. One of my ancestors went into seclusion for a couple of years, and came back with an entire alphabet and written language for our people. That was special too.

So as you see, while I do empathize, and acknowledge the accomplishment, I don't feel sorry for them. Have you ever been to a reservation? They make the ghetto look like a first-world paradise....

[MeloMelo66]

05:25 AM on 03/04/2010

I haven't read it, am a bit apprehensive. I worry that I am not mature enough to read it. What I mean is that I read Brokeback Mountain and thought about it for months, I felt intensely sad at the intolerance and impossiblity of the characters' fate.

That is why I am apprehensive about reading "The Help" . I am worried about my own reaction to the impossiblity of the characters to escape the way society treats them at that time. I know I know, things will change eventually with the Civil Rights Act, but knowing me, I will still feel so sad that they had to endure that life.

A little context: this is the same person who used to cry as a child for the losers at Olympic Games/competitions, because they had trained so hard and didn't win -- whose mom worried that she always had the weight of the whole world on her shoulders:)

[MeloMelo66]

05:30 AM on 03/04/2010

society's intolerance

[rubygreen]

07:45 PM on 03/03/2010

Absolutely LOVED this book. I want her to write the next chapter and tell us what happened to all the characters.

PLEASE!

[roostertatoo]

08:31 PM on 03/03/2010

I second that request!

[All4ME]

07:10 PM on 03/03/2010

Huh. You guys are funny.

The 'dialect' didn't sink this book for you?

The interviews were long. I don't watch much Katie Couric, does she always spend this much time on a book?

[Tlanice]

09:38 PM on 03/03/2010

The dialect? She was writing a period piece. It was 1960s deep south. She wrote using the dialect of the time. Maybe you mean the way the maids spoke? Again, it's how Blacks spoke in the south back then and is still how some of the older (as in grandparents age) speak now...since they WERE the ones from back then.

The book wasn't for everyone. I read it for my book club and loved it!

[rubygreen]

09:42 PM on 03/03/2010

I read before I go to sleep and I just couldn't put it down, I laughed and cried all at the same time.

Everyone I recommended the book to, had the same reactions.

[dct1999]

09:51 PM on 03/04/2010

SOME black people spoke that way. Those who were middle class and educated DIDN'T.

[lele215]

11:02 PM on 03/03/2010

The dialect did stop me cold. The problem I have isn't that she used dialect. The problem I have is that only black characters speak in dialect. They are in Mississippi but white folks didn't have any linguist quirks. That's tells me everything I need to know.

This wasn't the book for me and it wasn't written for me. I accept that.

[All4ME]

07:56 AM on 03/04/2010

Right, lele, that's what I meant. In the interview when Couric brings it up, this author explains the use of dialect for only black characters as "you know, my mother and all my female relatives and my mother's friends all spoke so beauuuuuutifully"
and I thought 'honey, do you hear yourself and what you just said?'

In effect, the white ladies 'spoke beautifully' thus they are written in Standard American English, but the black characters spoke un-beautifully, so therefore they are written...in 'dialect'. That stinks on ice, like we say in New York!

This book may prompt a weep-fest in the South, and absolve all sins, slights and wounds of the past, but in my mind, what this book says (and this interview) is that southern ladies still have a long way to go.

[Freda Salamon]

06:35 PM on 03/03/2010

GREAT INTERVIEW...EVEN GREATER BOOK..HAVE READ IT TWICE

[thegirlnextdoor]

03:20 PM on 03/03/2010

I have read that book and it is wonderful!

[Susan Bosworth]

02:32 PM on 03/03/2010

I just finished the book the other night and was not only crying because how moved I was because of it but that it ended. Highly recommend to everyone.

[Tlanice]

09:39 PM on 03/03/2010

SUSAN! OMG I didn't want it to end either! I wanted to know what happened to Aibileen and Minnie.

[Tlanice]

01:37 PM on 03/03/2010

I read this book and loved it. Although I was born in the 80s in NY, my mom and aunts are from NY and they grew up in that time. I spent every summer down there and I honestly couldn't help but laugh at some of the book as I'd say things like "OMG! We did that!" or "I remember Grandma told me a story like that!" So many of the little details such as clothes, mannerisms or the ever present fan are all things I saw even at my young age either down there or up here at church (very heavy southern population at my church in NY)

[MeloMelo66]

01:23 PM on 03/03/2010

very good interview

[csoloveshp]

01:14 PM on 03/03/2010

I loved the book too! It was great.

[plow]

01:04 PM on 03/03/2010

I would love to tell you what Dimitri was thinking.

[Maitefa Angaza]

02:58 PM on 03/03/2010

Re plow: You know that's right!

[roostertatoo]

12:28 PM on 03/03/2010

Loved the book! So glad that it is being recognized