Mockingbird
I used to write about books on here from time to time. And then I didn't. It may have been because I wasn't finishing anything. Or I got lazy. Or I had nothing interesting to say.
Who knows.
But anyway.
I just finished Mockingbird, which is a bio of Harper Lee. As you all surely know, Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, was a longtime friend of Truman Capote, and helped him with the interviews and research in Kansas when he was working on In Cold Blood. To Kill a Mockingbird was her first novel and she never published another one.
Nelle Harper Lee is in her eighties, reclusive and didn't participate in any way in the writing of this book and the book itself mostly ends where her public life ends, when she's about forty. It's still fascinating. There's some very interesting stuff about Nelle as a child (who swore and punched boys and was quite a lot like Scout--as her father was a lot like Atticus and the town she grew up in was much like Maycomb). The section on Kansas and the research for In Cold Blood is another perspective on that moment in history to be linked with and compared to In Cold Blood itself and the Capote movie (and presumably Capote, the book, though I haven't read it). But as a writer it's most interesting to see the time her agent and editor spent with her getting the book ready to publish, to see things take off in ways none of them anticipated, to see the sales and the movie and Gregory Peck coming to a small Southern town, to see Harper Lee in later life, to see her become not so much a writer anymore as someone who has written.