Letter from a Reader 8.1.26
What journalists should ask 'Calamity Club' author Kathryn Stockett, Joan Didion on California, and the world's best gift for a reader
A question I’d like to see a journalist ask Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help and The Calamity Club, this week’s No. 1 New York Times fiction bestseller: How does she feel about having belonged to the now-desegregated Phi Mu sorority at the University of Alabama (’91) back when, like all UA Greek houses, it had only white members? Does she still pay her alumna dues?
These questions are fair game when racial justice is a subject of The Help, Stockett’s 2009 blockbuster-novel-turned-movie. And it plays a role in The Calamity Club, in which a heroine helps to run a temporary brothel for the white students of Ole Miss in 1933, nearly three before its desegregation.
