Book #67: Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee

Title: Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee
Author: Charles J. Shields

Before reading Mockingbird, I knew a couple of things about Nelle Harper Lee. I knew that she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. I knew that she had been the research assistant who worked with Truman Capote on In Cold Blood. And I knew that she had a reputation for being quite a recluse. In fact, she's so reluctant to be in the public eye that she refused to take any part in the publication of Mockingbird, so although it's a complimentary look at her life, it's definitely an unauthorized biography.

Shields does a great job painting a portrait of what life was like growing up in Monroeville, Alabama (Nelle and Truman were next-door neighbors and best friends), gives lots of insight into her childhood and family life (her father, A.C. Lee, was the inspiration for Atticus Finch), shows Lee as a stubborn nonconformist who abandoned law school to move to New York and write, and suggests reasons for why Lee never published another book (most of her literary support system either died or retired around the time she finished her second manuscript) and why she withdrew from society.

When Lee published her novel, she was about the same age that I am now. She had dreamed of being a writer since childhood. She had worked on her manuscript for several years, even quitting her job for a year to devote herself full-time to her story. When it was published, nurturing it became her full-time job. She went on book tours and speaking engagements nearly nonstop for a couple of years, at which point she worked for several more years on the production of the film version of the novel. So from its incubus until Peck accepted the best actor trophy at the Oscars, Nelle Harper Lee had lived To Kill A Mockingbird for at least a decade. I know I have such a one-track mind lately, but even though NHL never married or had a child, it seemed to me like TKAM was her baby. It took years to create and years to promote, and its success definitely took her by surprise. It seems like people sometimes judge her unfairly by saying that since TKAM was her only novel, that she didn't live up to her potential as a writer. Would someone say that about a SAHM who only had one child? I don't think so. As I try to figure out what life holds for me in the post-baby stage, I really hope that I'll be able to find something fulfilling and productive, but I also know that with all of my babies, they, like Lee's novel, definitely need nurturing in the post-production stage.