Hyperbole

I've read several books in my lifetime that made me think, "This is the best book I've ever read in my life!" Here's another one.

This is our (Susan's) selection for book club this-coming Friday. I thought I had read it before, but I hadn't. All I knew about To Kill a Mockingbird was that movie, which was good, at least the parts of it that I've seen. I'll watch it again someday in toto, to see if it moves me anything like the book.

I saw newspaper photos of Lee meeting Gregory Peck, when the movie was being made. She wore jeans and flapping shirttails, which were not terribly fashionable in the 1960s. I remember thinking she could have at least put on a dress to meet that great man who, in the photos, wore a suit, and was perfectly groomed and gorgeous.

Harper Lee was one of Alabama author Hudson Strode's creative writing students at the University of Alabama. Dr. Strode had left the U. a year or two before I started there. Harper Lee was a fellow alumna of Helen Norris, who was a member of our state poetry society and also, at one period, an Alabama Poet Laureate.

Another of Lee's fellow alumnae was Mary Lee Stapp, one of my late ex-husband's lawyer friends. I guess she must have been in law school with JTC. When the children and I lived in Montgomery in the 1970s, Mary Lee was one of our old friends there; she was then attorney for the state welfare department. I remember our friend Jamie Pettigrew scolding her for some minor disagreement: "Mary Alexandra Siddons Lee Stapp!"

I loved that house in Montgomery. The floors tilted off in all directions, the furnace had been condemned, and the Spanish roaches were as big as newborn kittens. But the house is still standing, on Ponce de Leon Avenue. Someone must have fixed it up. I'll bet the roaches' grandkids are still there, though. The "exterminators" in Montgomery used to say, "If you have a clean house, you'll have clean roaches."
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I was worried because my Betty Lou novel has so many characters, I was afraid the names would be confusing. So I particularly noticed, in TKaM, the names of characters, which far outnumber mine. And my novel will turn out about the same length, so I guess it's OK.

My sole and only criticism of To Kill a Mockingbird is the same opinion that made me sort of neglect it for the past 50 years: It struck me as just a teeny bit too cute and sweet for the time in which it was set. Small town life in the South, in my experience, was never an idyll, even among professional people, even among rich people, and especially not among the poor. But maybe it was different in Monroeville. And it makes me reexamine my own novel, whose setting I'm probably viewing through the wrong end of the telescope.