Mega-bestselling author of The Help is back! Kathryn Stockett on The Calamity Club

[1:34]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zibby Owens, and you're listening to Totally Booked with Zibby. Formerly, moms don't have time to read books. In my daily show, I interview today's latest best selling, buzziest, or underrated authors and story creators whose work I think is worth your time. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author, and obviously podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that's coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don't have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do every single day. For more information, go to zippymedia.com, and follow me on Instagram at zippy owens. Okay. Did you read the book or see the movie called The Help? It was out in 2009, written by Katherine Stockett. I was obsessed. It's an amazing book. You probably read it. Over a million copies of it were sold. If not, go back and read it. But actually, you can read The Calamity Club, which is a novel, and this is her second book after the help. Katherine Stockett was born and raised in Jackson, Mississippi, and she lives between New York and Mississippi now. Be warned, this book is over 600 pages. It is beautiful. It is heavy. It is immersive. It took me a while to get through the whole thing because it's like reading three books in one. However, you have to have a really amazing plot to be able to propel someone to keep going. The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett. This is going to be a huge book, and I am honored and honored and honored to have had Kathryn on the podcast to talk about it before it came out. Welcome, Kathryn. Thank you so much for coming on Totally Booked to talk about The Calamity Club. So exciting. Congratulations. Thank you, Zibby. I'm so excited to be here. So first of all, how does it feel? I'm sure everyone's going be asking you this, but as a follow-up to The Help, here we are, what, fifteen years later, more than fifteen years later, how are you feeling about having another book coming out into the world? I'm really excited.

[3:36]Kathryn Stockett: You know, it's been a long time. The world has definitely changed since I last had a book out in the world. So I'm really I'm just excited to share my work readers. I don't know, it's daunting. At the same time, you kind of wonder, they going to think I'm crazy? Are they going to think it's funny? Are they going to understand it? It's so long. But I think that I mean, it made me laugh. I hate to say that about my own work, but I laughed so much through the writing of this book and

[4:11]Zibby Owens: I think the readers will too. I think so too. By the way, I think my favorite character aside from Birdie is Tom. I love Tom. I can't even Oh. That was like the most I mean, I can't I won't go into there's so many plot that I wanna talk to you about, but I feel like I need to do it offline after reading the book, like, because I don't wanna give all these things away. But what a special guy. I don't know. I have a special place in my heart. Thank you. I had some really interesting

[4:41]Kathryn Stockett: and and heartfelt mentors when I lived in New York and I was working in publishing. I mean, just I got so lucky. I know so many young women have had horror stories. And I don't know how I landed this job. I was consulting and I was going sort of from National Geographic to Conde Nast to Rolling Stone. And I had this wonderful person in my life who I thought of often when I wrote the character Tom. And he turns out to be a very tragic character. And in a way, it mirrors my mentor. So thank you for noticing that. Oh my gosh.

[5:27]Zibby Owens: Maybe I should back up and have you just explain the premise of the book.

[5:31]Kathryn Stockett: Oh yeah. Okay. So The Calamity Club, like The Help, I wrote it really with the same intention. And that is this idea of what happens when you put together a group of scrappy, strong willed kind of outsider women in a place, they're all at the very end of their rope in a place as colorful and complicated as Mississippi. And then you add to that, the great depression, the 1930s, which were such a different time for women than they are now. And there's no one coming to help these women. They're broke. They're desperate. No men, no brothers, no husbands, certainly no government programs. And from this stems a terrible, awful, but very profitable idea to make money. It's the story of sisterhood and friendships, good and bad, and a little bit of naughtiness. But like I said, I think the reader's gonna laugh. I think the reader's gonna have fun.

[6:47]Zibby Owens: Interesting. I mean, there's a lot of heartbreak in the book too. I'm actually surprised to hear not that I didn't have fun reading it and, you know, Birdie in particular and Meg too. So they're very smart, fun, you know, quick witted characters. And the the situational comedy too with missus Tart and, like, some of the other and Frankie you know, Francis, who's just like, oh my gosh. I can't even get over her. You know, it's funny because of their reflections, but I'm not sure I would lead with this is like the funniest, you know. It's incredibly moving. And the resilience of the characters is insane. Right? It's how do you go from just for for everybody, from the orphan Meg to her mother to, you know, a family who has fallen from grace. How do you how do you get back up? And I guess humor is one one of the tools in the toolbox.

[7:47]Kathryn Stockett: Absolutely. I mean, it's how how do we get through any day? Yeah. How do we get through our darkest times without humor? And I had to keep reminding myself that these were our grandparents or mine, I'm older. And this was my grandmother, this was my grandfather living at a time when you're watching people around you starve to death. You're watching people that were living a very comfortable, high lifestyle fall to have nothing. So many families that lost everything bonded together and all moved in one house. And I did hear from several people that I talked to that there was a lot of joy in that. Also a lot of, Oh, this is a real pain in the ass. But they just waited it out. But Mississippi was a different situation than a lot of The United States because the Depression hit Mississippi way before the stock market crash of nineteen twenty nine. We had this enormous flood, I mean, maybe the biggest flood in history in the Southeast in 1927, and then we had a drought and then we had a boll weevil and we just had all these manner of things in a state that was already not doing great anyway, Mississippi. And so it hit us a little bit later, the real tragedy, right around 1933. And people ask me, why did you pick that time, that particular year? And that's because that was right before things were bad, but they weren't devastated yet in Mississippi. But also 1933 was right before prohibition ended. So I wanted just something that we sort of take for granted now, just alcohol, to have a real taboo around it. I wanted, if you had a couple of cases of whiskey in your cellar, I mean, that was contraband, but also you were pretty damn lucky to have that. So I wanted that to have more value than obviously it does today. These simple things that I have a whole bar full of alcohol that I don't really drink, but it's there. But in a college town, you know, having a lot of whiskey means something.

[10:22]Zibby Owens: Even the way you described the college town and the shopkeepers just sort of sitting there with their, you know, elbows on the table waiting in the empty stores just waiting for the kids to come back to school. Like, the way you depict place and scene and time, really incredible. And now I have, like, a new view on college towns in general. And, like, all these there are just so many minor things in addition to all the major things. Like the way you tackle race relations back then and how, you know, even the sheriff is like, you can't, reminding everybody all the time, you can't mix blacks and whites. That And just the idea of a interracial relationship was, I mean, what they were doing as punishment. I mean, I had to hold my stomach a few times reading the book because there are some scenes in here that are quite

[11:09]Kathryn Stockett: brutal and I'm sure they come from truth. Well, miscegenation, which is the coupling of a black and white, was not on the books illegal until 1930. So even though it was not done often, it sort of rose into the spotlight again in the 1930s. And after that, many more Jim Crow laws came to be, but it was quite scary. I mean, but it wasn't just miscegenation. It wasn't just the people frowning upon blacks and whites being together. There was this movement in the 1920s and 30s called the Eugenics Movement, which the Calamity Club, a lot of the Calamity Club is about this movement. And basically what it was, was this idea that we as Americans needed to cleanse our precious white societies of what we considered undesirables. And in the 1920s and '30s, states began individually passing a sterilization law that made it legal for anyone with epilepsy or autism, or had a criminal record, or in some States, the deaf and dumb and blind to be sterilized so that they didn't propagate and then become a problem of the state. It was a big part of the Christian community, which is hard to believe, but there's very little love and kindness in that theory of let's take away your basic rights. And this happened much more to women than it did to men. But the interpretation of these sterilization laws, especially in places like Mississippi and especially in places like California, was that it grew to include, if you looked even a little bit promiscuous, you could be taken into custody and you could be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. And I think the idea was if you were promiscuous, you must be of lesser intelligence as a woman, intelligence as a woman. And therefore, let's just go ahead and sterilize you so that you don't make more like yourself. It confounded me when I read about all the different cases. And it also broke my heart to think of how many cases we don't know about. I think the estimate, the recorded number is something like seventy thousand people in America were sterilized during this time. But really, we know the numbers is more like hundreds of thousands.

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[16:34]Zibby Owens: Ugh. And, of course, you tell us one person's story. It feels like we've experienced that. Right? It's one thing to say tens of thousands of people, but just like this one story, like, that they could do this to anyone

[16:46]Kathryn Stockett: against their will. It's just plan after World War one. You could stop a woman on the street just for looking, just because a cop thought she looked tawdry. The same. California enforced the law. They were really the biggest propagators of the sterilization law. They made it such an important part of their policy that Adolf Hitler asked the head of eugenics in California, How are you doing this? Come to Germany and show us how. And he didn't go, but he sent Hitler a piece of paper with a diagram showing the effect of how one feeble minded woman with low morals could have an effect on all of society. Wow.

[17:38]Zibby Owens: Yeah. They really keep this part under wraps, right? It has been written about enough.

[17:44]Kathryn Stockett: Yeah. So, you know, that's one of the reasons why I I grabbed onto it because I felt like this story needed to be told.

[17:51]Zibby Owens: Yeah. And, you know And again, this is just like one of so many horrific I mean, not to say the book has a lot of horrific, but just that things happened during that time that we can't even imagine in our world of, like, being canceled for saying one wrong thing. I mean, what they were doing for the gay community also at the time, and what they did what they would do in mental health institutions to try to fix quote unquote, you know, the homosexuality disease. I mean, passages in the book too, oh my gosh.

[18:24]Kathryn Stockett: Yeah. Conversion therapy had not quite taken off. And there were some really brutal experiments that they were doing to try to convert a, usually a gay man, into a straight man. And there's a character in the Calamity Club that, God help him. As much as Rory irritated me and made me so angry as he told me, the writer, what he was gonna do in the story, because that's how it works, I felt so horrible for him because he was a victim of the times, but at the same time, so mad at him for the choices that he made and for being a coward. Yeah.

[19:07]Zibby Owens: Wait, go back to the characters writing themselves and the process of writing this book and all of that. Tell me journey of

[19:16]Kathryn Stockett: the novel. Oh yeah. It took me a really long time to write this. And let me tell you why. After The Help, I told myself, okay, this time I'm going to write a really simple, book that doesn't raise the red flags that The Help did, doesn't cause the kind of criticism that The Help did. And I tried to write that story for many years, for over five years. And what I finally had to surrender to was the fact that you cannot write about Mississippi, especially in 1933, and not write about racism and discrimination and repression of women, the repression of black people, all of these things that I was trying to avoid. And so I just, I gave into it. And when I did, the voices, I mean, talk about crazy. I sit in this little room, I have to have this feeling that I'm actually going to work in the morning. So I get up, I have breakfast and I kind of changed clothes and I go, I mean, 10 yards away to another little house that was the old school house on this property. And I sit down at my desk and it's tiny and it has kind of a weird smell. And that's where the characters talk to me and they are basically driving this bus. I don't always get a say and we argue and I'm talking out loud. And if you ever saw me, you know, just through the window, you'd be like, who in the hell is she talking to? Yeah.

[21:10]Zibby Owens: They're definitely Wait. Wait. Wait. Tell me tell me an argument you had with a character. Like, what did someone do that you were like, no, you can't do that? Oh my gosh. I mean,

[21:19]Kathryn Stockett: just I mean, Flossy. Flossy was constantly just tempting me with the stereotype of the hooker with a heart of gold. And she challenged me a lot. And so did Ruby, her sort of nemesis in the story. These women, you know, I was just like, I can't show that. I can't go that far. I don't want to write about, I don't know how to say it, illicit sex. I don't want to write about that. Ruby would say something really wrong to you and I would just start cackling, but I'm not in control. And there's something else that happens when I write that is very strange. I don't always remember what I wrote. That's how far away I am, how out of body I am. And sometimes I'll go back and read something I wrote just like three days ago, and I have no memory of writing it and no idea sometimes where I was headed with that, which is always trouble. But you know, the characters speak up and put me back on track.

[22:26]Zibby Owens: Wow. Were there any characters that spoke to you that you ended up cutting and did you feel Yes,

[22:32]Kathryn Stockett: I did. I did not feel bad. I felt wonderful. I love cutting. I love cutting a character. I love cutting a storyline, but I had a lot more of a character named Charlie in there, her inner thoughts. And I found out that the nuance that I liked the most about Charlie was that she was a secret keeper. She had one motivation in her life and that was to get Meg back her daughter. And I didn't really, it was just, it was good for me to know these things about her as I wrote about other aspects of her life, but it was not important to this story. I wanted her to be of one mind, one mission. Let's make money so that I can get my daughter back. And as a mother, you know, I can understand that. I get that one mission. It is the only thing that I would be focused on if my daughter,

[23:29]Zibby Owens: you know, had been taken away from me. And yet she showed a lot of restraint because there was an opportunity for her to just like run and grab her at one point. Right? She knew where when she knew where she was. But she was so methodical too. Like, she was like, she had to make sure everything was lined up so that she would be okay to take her daughter.

[23:48]Kathryn Stockett: That's right. I mean, she made a plan, but I had to keep reminding myself and sometimes reminding the reader that she had had two years to think about this. Yes. That's true. To sit alone and just be in pain. Mhmm. Figuring out how she's gonna get her daughter back. And I'm not saying that the plan itself, you know, came to her in a complete form, but she had a lot of time on her hands to solve this problem.

[24:19]Zibby Owens: Well, I'm sorry to hear we lost some of Charlie, but I loved the parts of her that you did share. I feel like we did get a complete understanding of her and who she was and how her life ended up taking these different paths that maybe weren't the plan. But here she is, this super bright lady who has just, you know, fallen victim to the system in a way.

[24:41]Kathryn Stockett: Yeah. She had the hardest time of of the whole book, the whole sterilization storyline. And Charlie, it was hard to write sometimes. Just just imagining, you know, I'm a big believer that as a writer, it is our job to actually, to truly imagine what it feels like to stand in someone else's shoes. And I have to do that with so many different characters. It's a lot of hats to wear, but with Charlie, I could really feel her pain. I could feel the anguish and her anger. She was, I mean, rightfully so, so angry. And that anger can be the reason that can often get you off course if you give into your anger. So she had to learn control. And did you tap into your own mother feelings? Like how old are your kids? How did you Absolutely. Do I have one daughter and she's 22. And so if you think about it's seventeen years since I published The Help. So she was still, she was a very young girl. She was Meg's age. A lot of Meg came from my daughter, Lila, because I was a single mom, I was living with her and just watching her, watching my daughter just spot the bullshit, see right through the bullshit immediately and call it as so many children do, call it like she sees it. And I learned that and I picked up on that and she really, you know, she might not know this. She has not read the book yet. She's writing a book and she's a lot like me. She has to be really careful what she, what kind of gas she puts in the tank because we start to pick up on other writers' nuances. Sometimes they're very words. We have to really be careful.

[26:39]Zibby Owens: So she's not ready yet. She said she'll read it after she finishes her book. Oh my gosh. Well, what do you think she'll make of it?

[26:48]Kathryn Stockett: Well, I mean, we all want to impress our children, right? I mean, I want her to look at it and think and be, I don't know, hopefully proud of her mom. Cause it was quite the journey as the reader will find out, you know, 600 pages of story. It was a long trip.

[27:11]Zibby Owens: Wow. Well, I love in the book too. I mean, even though there are so many characters and we get a lot of backstories, I feel like it really centers on two families, the Heidelberg family and the Tart. Right? And we are we inhabit their worlds and their cousins sometimes and their homes and their living rooms and their help and all of it. Like, we are immersed into those two different but sort of complementary families. And it's almost like, who are we rooting for? Which family would I rather be in? Like, how would I operate in this system? Right? You as the reader have to like put yourself in there. Like, would I be comfortable sitting on that living room couch with Mrs. Tard pre fall? You know, how would I interact with the moms by the lake, you know, chitchatting with the Heidelberg? You know, I don't know. It's tell me about, like, how you keep a novel going, because you still had me turning all the pages to find out what was going to happen, yet having two very different central families.

[28:22]Kathryn Stockett: Well, I organized the book, so there's a part one and there's a part two because I wanted the reader to have some relief. Kind of like, you know, you're not old enough to know this, but when I went to the movies-

[28:38]Zibby Owens: What do you mean? Thank you. Mean,

[28:40]Kathryn Stockett: there was an intermission

[28:42]Zibby Owens: when you went to the movie theater. Okay, fine. I was not I did not have an intermission at the movie theater. You

[28:48]Kathryn Stockett: got a moment often like when you go see a Broadway play, you got a moment to sort of think about what you've seen. And in this case, what you've read, think about where your characters are and just take a breather so that you can start the second journey of the book. And I think with 600 pages, this was a really important kind of structure to follow. But I just think there's only so much mileage you can get in this many pages in a story this full of having a girl sit in a room in an orphanage. She's confined more or less to one room. So I wanted to expand Meg's world exponentially and have her feel a bit overwhelmed by the wonders of the Heidelberg home. This is very different than where she came from even before she became And an I also wanted to show a different kind of lifestyle for Mississippians, I guess. I mean, the Tartes lived this sort of wealthy societal lifestyle, but the Heidelbergs are different because you have a matriarch running this family. You have a very intelligent woman that is calling the shots and it wasn't really expressed in the book, but she's basically running the business and she's going control of all of the family members. And I thought that was really interesting. And I've not read a lot of books about that, that were fiction in the 1930s, but we know it happened. I mean, because there have been strong women throughout all of history. Yeah. Even the dividend distribution,

[30:43]Zibby Owens: the emotional ramifications

[30:44]Kathryn Stockett: of that. That's right. You've got to be loyal to the family. But wanted Meg to be put once again in a place with like minded people. And I felt like the bond between Meg and Tom was so strong. Love that. Meg had never had a father and to have an intelligent father who loves to read, which is Meg's greatest joy in life, it was like finding a best friend. It was in a way, a non romantic, but it was it was a love affair. Mhmm. And I really, really loved writing about their relationship.

[31:26]Zibby Owens: Yeah. That was incredibly poignant. All of it was so good. Oh my gosh. Okay. What do you want what is your greatest hope? Like me, for example. I just finished this. I put it down. Now we're talking. What do you want me to take away from the book with all of the story now in my head? What should I what do I go back into the world thinking and feeling differently, having read it all and learned about this time and place and everything? What do you what do you how do you want readers to be changed?

[31:54]Kathryn Stockett: Okay. Well, of course, I want us to have an appreciation for what our grandparents went through. And for some people, our great grandparents, that like history repeats itself. It is so obvious when you go back in time and look at the choices that people made and the absurdities and the way people are underestimated and the rights. And then I also want women to read this book and think, Oh my gosh, look at where we're, what we're going through now in America. These rights that women have, and we have not had them for that long and they could so easily be taken away And not just in America, all over the world. We've got to fight for women's rights. They, they could slip away so easily.

[32:46]Zibby Owens: Amazing. Catherine, thank you. Thank you for the hours of immersion, the things I learned, the people I got to know, the role models I got in a way, and just being so transported. I mean, that is what good fiction does. Right? You are in another space. Even though I'm sitting here today in 2026, like, I was in it for a while, and that is so powerful. So thank you for that. You are probably the best reader I've ever talked to. So thank you for for going, you know, through that journey with me. Oh my gosh, I barely scratched the surface. There was so much more to talk about. But thank you for saying that. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much. I'll be rooting for you. Bye bye. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Totally Booked with Zibby, formerly moms don't have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and buy the books.