ATLANTA (WXIA) -- When we first met Kathryn Stockett two years ago her book, The Help, was an enormous best selling sensation. Who would have thought that reaching and staying at number one was merely a beginning for this virgin novelist?
What came after the book 'The Help' was the movie 'The Help.' The movie garnered Golden Globe and SAG awards and is poised for further success with four Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture.
Sitting in her Atlanta home, Stockett laughed and said, "I think I'm going to the Oscars. I think I'm going with Tate and Octavia. I'll probably be sitting way back in the top row but I don't care. I just want to be there. It's just so cool right now to look at other people that I love, like Octavia and Viola and Tate and celebrate their success and know that maybe I had a little part of that."
She had a big part. She chose her childhood friend Tate Taylor to direct the movie and it was a choice supported by no one.
"There was a span of time where everybody in my life was telling me you can't give it to Tate, he hasn't broken through yet, he hasn't made enough films yet. He's not successful he'll never get the right actors," she said. "And Tate convinced me he told me we understand this world. We both grew up in Mississippi we had African American women in our lives that changed us. Who better to tell that story on the screen?"
Her faith in him has paid off. She played an extra in the movie in one scene, and says she had a blast in Greenwood Mississippi during the making of the movie. "There's nothing to do there. There's not even a movie theater there. So we would go from one person's house to the next having parties, buffet suppers," she said.
Her personal life has changed dramatically. Stockett is now divorced. She says her husband supported her while she wrote, and the success of her book allowed her to more than pay him back.
"You know I'm single now and that was a great feeling to be able to part ways with someone amicably and give back to them for supporting me all those years," Stockett said.
She is working on her second book and the expectations weigh on her. Stockett says, "It makes for a very unsteady pen, so I'll just apologize up front. It's not going to be the help. It's going to be something very different and yet also very southern. I know this is a once in a lifetime thing. I don't think it's going to happen with the second book and I don't have that expectation."
The woman with five dozen rejections is hard at work on her sophomore effort. It was due over a year ago in January, but Stockett has that whole Oscar nominated movie made from her book excuse thing. Novel number two will be finished in a year. So for the thousands of fans breathlessly waiting, it's about a family of women in Oxford, Mississippi, in 1927.
"They're having a ball, they're wealthy, they're white, they're happy, they're young and beautiful and then the depression hits and it totally humbles them," she said. "They have to learn how to make it on their own, and So I go back and revisit that theme of color again because it levels everyone out. Everybody has to eat. It makes you realize how alike we all are. We're all human beings. But this group of women finds a rather unique way to earn a living."
And that's all she'll say about it. For now.