I have a bad case of the f#$$k its. I’m not surprised. I’ve gotten some challenging and disappointing news as of late and I am still rehabing my ankle from my Birthday mishap. Sometimes there are things that yank me out of my slug nest because I know that someone, somewhere might be waiting to hear what I have to say about that topic.
Many people know that I find the Great Gatsby insufferable. I am also not a big fan of Pride and Prejudice, mainly because I want to smack Darcy right in his smug face. I am just now finding my appreciation of Jane Eyre. I am, however, a huge fan of Flannery O’Conor, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Harper Lee.
Much of my appreciation of Harper Lee comes from her relationship with Truman Capote. (He inspired the character Dill in To Kill a Mockingbird.)
I am also a big fan of the friend who gave Harper Lee a year’s salary so she could focus on writing for that year. It was during that year that she wrote to Kill a Mockingbird.
People are now waiting with bated breath to read her second book, Go Set a Watchman, which is a sequel to her classic tome.
Those who have read enough to opine are getting all Annie Wilkes about the future of Atticus Finch. (Also, her brother, Jem, has died but no one is really whipped up into a frenzy about THAT.)
Readers are offensensitive because it is revealed that Atticus Finch is a racist.
Really? An old man in the south in the 1950’s is a racist? That comes as a huge shock to me.
What I find interesting is that Harper Lee wrote this novel before she wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. What that means to me, who fancies herself a writer, is that Harper Lee created characters with rich, full lives and wrote their story as it was in a point in time. Then she went back 20 years in those character’s histories and wrote another. As I say over and over and over, characters are a summation of every thing that has ever happened to them in their whole lives.
I call this the Frozen Burrito Theory. Every bean in every burrito that a character has every eaten leads them to the momen in which they are seeing. If you unwrap every burrito, you find a million stories in each layer. The layer that was To Kill a Mockingbird created the Atticus Finch that is in Go Set a Watchman.
Stop getting all crazy, America. It’s not Harper Lee’s Cocka-doody Fault that someone tipped your sacred cow.
That’s a lot of metaphor. (Sheep!)
Writer Chick 