Help Me Out Here--Who's Hilly in the Help?
Kingfish broke the story last week of the lawsuit filed by Ablene Cooper against Kathryn Stockett, author of the bestselling novel The Help, for intentional infliction of emotional distress. Today the Wall Street Journal reported on the lawsuit.
Cooper alleges that she was the basis for the book's Aibileen character and that she asked Stockett not to portray her in the book, but Stockett refused. If Cooper is Aibileen, I guess that makes Stockett Skeeter.
Big deal. I
want to know who Hilly is. In the book Hilly is the racist, overbearing Junior League president who keeps all the other Jackson “elite” women in line—the bigot line.
The book is set in the early 1960's. Hilly would be in her 70's now. So who is she?
If Cooper is Aibileen, then she should be able to identify other Jackson residents who Stockett portrayed in the book. And the one who we all want to know is Hilly. So please Ms. Cooper, can you help us out here? Who's Hilly?
By the way, the book is very good and I highly recommend it for anyone who has not read it yet.
Thanks for this post. Downloaded it yesterday and read it on the plane on my way back from vacation from London.
While I've now been to every county in Mississippi and every courthouse, I'm not a Mississippian by birth. This story was really fascinating and makes me curious in the modern era how the sorts of ideas that pervade the book about race (both from whites and blacks about each other) continue to exist.
In my 2007 book, The Thin Thirty, about the UK football team (which had a brutal coach and a gay sex scandal involving Rock Hudson), I did a lot of original research as that UK team played Ole Miss (in Jackson) the night before Meredith was admitted. They were witness in part to the history of that fateful night.
Didn't one of your fellow bloggers file this suit? Interesting--I believe he's about the same age as Stockett. I wonder if she turned him down for the prom or something......
What a fantastic story, The help. I cannot put it down..... Very intereting again to hear that in the end they were exploited. So everythihng she was trying to portray in the story really becomes hypocritical. I must follow the lawsuit.... For a first time writerI think she is superb as a person she may not be so nice. Who knows... what her intentions were. The story wouldn't have been told otherwise so it is atricky one. Thanks