Latest news with #Spiegel&Grau
Asharq Al-Awsat
16-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Asharq Al-Awsat
The Author of ‘The Help' Wrote a Second Novel. Yes, Following Up Was Daunting.
Fifteen years after her blockbuster novel 'The Help' sparked conversation and criticism for its portrayal of the lives of Black maids in the South, Kathryn Stockett is publishing a new novel. Set in 1933 in Oxford, Miss., 'The Calamity Club' centers on a group of women whose lives intersect as they struggle to get by during the Depression. It will be published in April 2026 by the independent press Spiegel & Grau. Anticipation for a follow-up from Stockett was high. When it was released in 2009, 'The Help' caused a stir with its frank depiction of racial inequality. It went on to sell some 15 million copies, spent more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list, and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie. In a video interview from her home outside of Natchez, Miss., Stockett admitted that writing a second novel in the long shadow of her debut was daunting. 'The pressure was definitely on,' she said. 'The fear of failure, it really weighs on a writer.' The novel also drew sharp criticism for its portrayal of Black characters and their speech, which some readers and critics found insensitive and offensive. Viola Davis, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in the film, later said she regretted participating, adding that she felt the film failed to accurately capture the voices and lives of Black women. In some ways, the debate over 'The Help' foreshadowed the 'own voices' movement in the literary world, which pushed for more diversity in literature from writers drawing on their own cultural backgrounds. Stockett said that 'The Help' would most likely not have found a publisher in today's environment, but that she doesn't regret the way she told the story. 'I doubt that 'The Help' would be published today, for the fact that a white woman was writing in the voice of a Black woman,' she said. 'I did get a lot of criticism but it didn't get under my skin, because it started conversations.' 'The Help' was inspired in part by Stockett's relationship with a woman named Demetrie McLorn, who worked as a maid for her family and died when Stockett was a teenager. The story, which takes place in Mississippi in the early 1960s, has multiple narrators: a Black woman named Aibileen who works as a nanny and housekeeper for white families, Aibileen's outspoken friend Minny, and a young white woman, Skeeter, who is appalled by the racism she witnesses. Stockett's new novel, set in the segregated South, also engages with the issue of race, but not as directly, Stockett said. 'Race is always in the background,' she said. 'It's probably always going to be in the background of any book I write.' Stockett first began working on a novel set in Depression-era Mississippi in 2013. She did extensive research into the era, learning about the Farm Act, child labor laws, the eugenics movement and the forced sterilization of women in prison, and Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic policies. The story is narrated by two white female characters: an 11-year-old girl who lives in an orphanage and a young woman from the Delta who has come to Oxford in hopes of helping her family through hard times. In 2020, after writing some 800 pages, Stockett felt stuck, and almost abandoned the book. A friend who had read the manuscript connected her with Julie Grau, co-founder of Spiegel & Grau. They worked for years without a contract, and kept the project quiet. A few years later, they signed a deal. With its release next year, the book will be published simultaneously in Britain by Fig Tree and in Canada by Doubleday Canada. 'There's something really precious about giving writers the time and the space to execute that follow up,' Grau said. 'It was really remarkable and ideal to shield her from the glare.' Stockett said she was so stunned by the success of her debut that she's set aside any expectations about how 'The Calamity Club' will be received. 'I can't believe it happened then,' she said, 'and I have no idea what's going to happen this time around either.' The New York Times
Boston Globe
09-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Melody Beattie, author of a self-help bestseller, dies at 76
'You could call her the mother of the self-help genre,' said Nicole Dewey, publishing director of Spiegel & Grau, which has sold more than 400,000 copies of the book since taking over publication in 2022. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Trysh Travis, author of 'The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement From Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey' (2009), said in an interview that 'Codependent No More' has succeeded because of Ms. Beattie's common-sense approach and 'vernacular charm.' Advertisement Travis added: 'There had been other books and pamphlets published in the recovery space in the early 1980s. Melody made the same arguments, but her voice came across very clearly. It wasn't clinical — and she had a set of ideas that could be applied to many if not all the problems one was having — and it hit the market at the right time.' In 'Codependent No More,' Ms. Beattie cited various definitions of a codependent person. She also introduced one of her own. 'A codependent person,' she wrote, 'is one who has let another person's behavior affect them and who is obsessed with controlling that other person's behavior.' The other person, she wrote, might be a family member, a lover, a client, or a best friend. But the focus of codependency 'lies in ourselves, in the ways we let other people's behaviors affect us, and in the ways we try to affect them' — by actions that include controlling them, obsessively helping them, and caretaking. Advertisement Recalling her difficult marriage to her second husband, David Beattie, who was also a substance abuse counselor, Ms. Beattie described an incident when he was in Las Vegas. She telephoned him in his hotel room, and he sounded as if he had been drinking. She implored him not to break his promise to her that he would not get drunk on this trip. He hung up on her. In desperation, she called the hotel repeatedly into the night, even as she was preparing to host a party for 80 people at their house in Minneapolis the next day. 'I thought if I can just talk to him, I can make him stop drinking," she told the Minneapolis Star Tribune in 1988. But at 11 p.m., she stopped calling. 'Something happened inside of me, and I let go of him,' she said. 'I thought, 'If you want to drink, drink. …' I gave his life back to him, and I started taking my own back.' She said that was the first step in detaching herself from their mutual codependence. They eventually divorced. Detachment, she wrote, 'is not a cold, hostile withdrawal' or a 'Pollyannish, ignorant bliss'; rather, it is releasing 'a person or problem in love.' She asked: When should the release happen? Her list was long. It started: 'When we can't stop thinking, talking about, or worrying about someone or something; when our emotions are churning and boiling; when we feel like we have to do something about someone because we can't stand it another minute.' Melody Lynn Vaillancourt was born May 26, 1948, in Ramsey, Minn., and grew up mainly in St. Paul. Her father, Jean, a firefighter, was an alcoholic who left the family when Melody was 2. Her mother, Izetta (Lee) Vaillancourt, owned a nursing home after her divorce, but, Melody Beattie said, beat her four siblings. (She escaped the punishment herself, she said, because she had a heart condition.) Advertisement Melody was sexually molested by a stranger when she was 5; began drinking whiskey at 12; and started using amphetamines, barbiturates, LSD, and marijuana in high school. By 20, she was shooting heroin. She also robbed pharmacies with a partner and, after being arrested, spent eight months in drug treatment in a state hospital. After being successfully treated, she held secretarial jobs before being hired as a chemical dependency counselor in Minneapolis, assigned to treat the wives of men in treatment. Her patients were uniformly angry and focused so much on their husbands' feelings that she found it nearly impossible to get them to express their own. 'Eight years later, I understood those codependents, those crazy codependents — we didn't call them that, we called them significant others — because I had become one' through her marriage to Beattie, she told the Star Tribune. 'All I could think and talk about was the alcoholic, what he was or wasn't doing.' She was, she said, 'filled with anger and anger because he wouldn't stop drinking.' While treating the women, living on welfare, and writing freelance articles for a local paper, The Stillwater Gazette, she interviewed experts on codependence, hoping to write a book on the subject. She received a $500 advance from the publishing division of the Hazelden Foundation substance abuse recovery center, now called the Hazelden Betty Ford Foundation. The book was published in 1986 and spent 129 weeks on The New York Times' advice and how-to bestseller list. Advertisement Ms. Beattie went on to write several other books, including 'The Language of Letting Go: Daily Meditations on Codependency' (1990), which has sold more than 3 million copies. Writing in Newsweek in 2009, Dr. Drew Pinsky, an addiction medicine specialist and media personality, named 'Codependent No More' one of the four best self-help books of all time. Ms. Beattie heavily revised it for a new edition published in 2022. In addition to her daughter, she leaves two grandsons; a sister, Michelle Vaillancourt; and a son, John Thurik, from her first marriage, to Steven Thurik, which ended in divorce. John was raised by his father and maternal grandmother. Her marriages to Scott Mengshol and Dallas Taylor, who played drums with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, also ended in divorce. Her son Shane Beattie died in a skiing accident in 1991 when he was 12, plunging her into grief. She wrote 'The Lessons of Love: Rediscovering Our Passion for Life When It All Seems Too Hard to Take' (1995) — a personal book, not a self-help guide — to describe her journey from a broken spirit to recovery. Her first step was to write two letters, one of which said: 'God, I'm still mad, not pleased at all. But with this letter, I commit unconditionally to life, to being here and being alive as long as I'm here, whether that's another 10 days or another 30 years. Regardless of any other human being and their presence in my life, and regardless of events that may come to pass. This commitment is between me, life, and you.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
New York Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Melody Beattie, Author of a Self-Help Best Seller, Dies at 76
Melody Beattie, whose experiences as a drug addict, a chemical dependency counselor and the wife of an alcoholic informed a best-selling book about codependence that has guided countless people to shed toxic relationships, died on Feb. 27 in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was 76. Her daughter, Nichole Beattie, said the cause was heart failure. She had been hospitalized from Nov. 30 to Dec. 12, then evacuated from her home in Malibu because of a wildfire and moved into her daughter's home, where she died. By popularizing the concept of codependence, Ms. Beattie (pronounced BEE-tee) became a literary star in the self-help world with 'Codependent No More: How to Stop Controlling Others and Star Caring for Yourself' (1986), which has sold more than seven million copies worldwide. 'You could call her the mother of the self-help genre,' said Nicole Dewey, the publishing director of Spiegel & Grau, which has sold more than 400,000 copies of the book since taking over publication in 2022. Trysh Travis, the author of 'The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement From Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey' (2009), said in an interview that 'Codependent No More' has succeeded because of Ms. Beattie's common-sense approach and 'vernacular charm.' She added: 'There had been other books and pamphlets published in the recovery space in the early 1980s. Melody made the same arguments, but her voice came across very clearly. It wasn't clinical — and she had a set of ideas that could be applied to many if not all the problems one was having — and it hit the market at the right time.' Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
New York Times
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
The Author of ‘The Help' Wrote a Second Novel. Yes, Following Up Was Daunting.
Fifteen years after her blockbuster novel 'The Help' sparked conversation and criticism for its portrayal of the lives of Black maids in the South, Kathryn Stockett is publishing a new novel. Set in 1933 in Oxford, Miss., 'The Calamity Club' centers on a group of women whose lives intersect as they struggle to get by during the Depression. It will be published in April 2026 by the independent press Spiegel & Grau. Anticipation for a follow-up from Stockett was high. When it was released in 2009, 'The Help' caused a stir with its frank depiction of racial inequality. It went on to sell some 15 million copies, spent more than two years on the New York Times best-seller list, and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning movie. In a video interview from her home outside of Natchez, Miss., Stockett admitted that writing a second novel in the long shadow of her debut was daunting. 'The pressure was definitely on,' she said. 'The fear of failure, it really weighs on a writer.' The novel also drew sharp criticism for its portrayal of Black characters and their speech, which some readers and critics found insensitive and offensive. Viola Davis, who was nominated for an Academy Award for her role in the film, later said she regretted participating, adding that she felt the film failed to accurately capture the voices and lives of Black women. In some ways, the debate over 'The Help' foreshadowed the 'own voices' movement in the literary world, which pushed for more diversity in literature from writers drawing on their own cultural backgrounds. Stockett said that 'The Help' would most likely not have found a publisher in today's environment, but that she doesn't regret the way she told the story. 'I doubt that 'The Help' would be published today, for the fact that a white woman was writing in the voice of a Black woman,' she said. 'I did get a lot of criticism but it didn't get under my skin, because it started conversations.' 'The Help' was inspired in part by Stockett's relationship with a woman named Demetrie McLorn, who worked as a maid for her family and died when Stockett was a teenager. The story, which takes place in Mississippi in the early 1960s, has multiple narrators: a Black woman named Aibileen who works as a nanny and housekeeper for white families, Aibileen's outspoken friend Minny, and a young white woman, Skeeter, who is appalled by the racism she witnesses. Stockett's new novel, set in the segregated South, also engages with the issue of race, but not as directly, Stockett said. 'Race is always in the background,' she said. 'It's probably always going to be in the background of any book I write.' Stockett first began working on a novel set in Depression-era Mississippi in 2013. She did extensive research into the era, learning about the Farm Act, child labor laws, how the eugenics movement led to the forced sterilization of women in prison, and how Franklin D. Roosevelt's economic policies caused married women who worked for the government to lose their jobs. The story is narrated by two white female characters: an 11-year-old girl who lives in an orphanage and a young woman from the Delta who has come to Oxford in hopes of helping her family through hard times. In 2020, after writing some 800 pages, Stockett felt stuck, and almost abandoned the book. A friend who had read the manuscript connected her with Julie Grau, co-founder of Spiegel & Grau. They worked for years without a contract, and kept the project quiet. A few years later, they signed a deal. With its release next year, the book will be published simultaneously in Britain by Fig Tree and in Canada by Doubleday Canada. 'There's something really precious about giving writers the time and the space to execute that follow up,' Grau said. 'It was really remarkable and ideal to shield her from the glare.' Stockett said she was so stunned by the success of her debut that she's set aside any expectations about how 'The Calamity Club' will be received. 'I can't believe it happened then,' she said, 'and I have no idea what's going to happen this time around either.'
