The Help spent 379 days in the Amazon Top 100 list. It has 1,751 reviews on Amazon.com and rates 4.5 stars. It is a novel, but, as Lanie Tankard argues, it deserves consideration from a memoir perspective.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

New York: Amy Einhorn Books (Putnam), 2009.

Available in hardcover, paperback, audiobook, CD, and Kindle editions.

Movie in the works.

Reviewed by Lanie Tankard

The Help is a testament to the power of memoir, even though it is a novel. It’s actually a book about writing a book — a metabook. And the writing is clear and pure and true.

Kathryn Stockett has created powerful voices for three main characters, and alternates them in chapters much like Barbara Kingsolver did to great effect in THE POISONWOOD BIBLE. The reader is thus privy to different views of the events as the lives of the characters intertwine.

The story is set in Jackson, Mississippi, during the civil rights movement of the Sixties, and eloquently illustrates the boundaries between the help and their employers. This wise book captures a time period important in our history as a country. Even the cover is brilliant both in color and design, and is a subtle portrayal of the book’s theme.

The Help captures the edge — that space between marginalized peoples and those in power by virtue of skin color, gender, age, wealth, heritage, wedding ring, beauty, or Junior League membership.

As a young woman of the privileged class begins to collect stories of the help to publish in a book, the activity changes them all. The maids without power begin to find strength through the telling of their stories, although they fear for their lives. Even the writer’s life is changed while collecting these stories as she begins to view her town through the eyes of the maids.

The simple act of putting down on paper the events of one’s life is empowering. The Help gives pause for thought and should foster deep discussions about prejudice of all types. The book is rich with insight for writers of memoir.

  I am also pleased to announce that I will also host a guest post here at 100memoirs.com from Linda Joy Myers on March 24 and an interview with her on March 25 about her subject “How to Write your Memoir and Still Go Home for the Holidays.” Linda Joy, who is an author, teacher, and therapist, will talk about what we owe other people, especially family members, who show up in our own published memoirs.

Linda has generously offered a giveaway of her new book The Power of Memoir to one of the lucky commenters on her guest post. I will explain how the giveaway works at the time I post Linda Joy’s essay.

Linda Joy also heads the National Association of Memoir Writers, a website that offers both free resources and membership for people engaged in memoir writing. You will also find a Facebook fan page for the organization. I recommend exploring this online community.

Both of the topics for these guest posts–the role of humor in memoir and the ethics of writing about family member–surfaced in the comments section of my review of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress. If you followed that conversation, you will want to read these guests posts also.

Guest posting is still new to me. I am grateful to Lanie Tankard, who offered two excellent guest essays in this space about memoir clusters and touchstones. One thing I love about blogging is that I learn something new every day. Growth happens faster when I connect to other writers. I love to share what I learn with you.

I knew that Ebert had battled cancer, lost weight, and kept on going. What I did not know, until I saw that picture and read the article in Esquire about him, was that he has also lost his physical voice and most of his jaw, not to mention that he struggles with his hip and shoulder, unable, now, to sit for any extended period.

This photo was a shock, partly because his website continues to show him with an intact jaw and partly because I have read more of and about Roger Ebert this year than at any other time, without knowing he had lost his physical voice. Essays, reviews, and blog posts, written with clarity, urgency, and love, have been pouring out of him. I highly recommend the February 16, 2010, article in Esquire  by Chris Jones, an intimate portrait of Ebert which may make you ponder, once again, the paradox of finding your life by losing your life.

Look at Ebert’s eyes in this photo and you will recognize the windows to his soul, the part of his face that cancer has not touched, except, perhaps to deepen the pools of wisdom, humor, and warmth contained therein. Cancer has also not touched his mind nor his creative energy. He uses his laptop like a lifeline. No longer able to be televised or recorded, he now “speaks” through his fingers.

“The greatest films are meditations on why we are here,” says Ebert. As his own experience on earth contracts and draws nearer to the end (consciously now), his voice takes on the kind of compassionate strength we recognize from our best teachers, their love of life, and their desire to share the best of who they are and what they know.

Two thoughts about Ebert relevant especially to our own pursuit of the best of memoir in this blog.

1. His top 100 list of movies assumes that 100 outstanding examples of a genre, explored in depth, create a curriculum that anyone else can learn from. Johnny Cash used the same method to teach his daughter the classics of country music. Bennington College offers one of the best low residency MFA programs in the country and uses this motto: “Read one hundred books. Write one.” Isn’t that a great curriculum in six words?

I feel confirmed in the use of 100 memoirs as a teaching/learning device. However, it’s easy to feel daunted by the depth of knowledge required to take on such a task. To get to the list of 100, both Ebert and Cash, spent their entire lives listening and watching much that never made it to their lists. By contrast, I’ve gotten a late start, but everytime I come across another “top 100 list,” I feel empowered to continue the quest. With the help of guest bloggers and great commenters, however, it seems like an attainable goal. If you click on the next link, you will see Ebert’s own great website with a feature I would like to add to this blog some day–all 100 movies (for me it will be memoirs)  in a clickable list that takes you to a review post about that movie. What a great resource. You can also find a printable version of just the movies themselves to add to your Netflix queue or take with you to the store. It took him 13 years to construct this list, adding a new one every two weeks. It might take me as long, but what fun!

2. Ebert’s has taken his calling to find meditations on “why we are here” in darkened movie theaters to new depths as he has fought for his life in the last four years. He says, at the end of the Esquire interview essay, that he has no desire to write his memoir, although he has been encouraged by many to do so. His approach to memoir is appealing to me, and becoming more so all the time. He has shared many personal experiences in individual essays and blog posts. He doesn’t want to revisit these essays or to impose a larger narrative arc on them in order to create a book memoir. If you want a great example of online memoir essay, read his  confession of being an alcoholic here.

If you add up the online personal essays, the Esquire interview, and the top 100 best movie reviews, you have lots of ways to understand Roger Ebert’s own raison d’etre. It’s own very similar to my own. I’ve stolen it from Wordsworth’s long memoir poem, The Prelude:

“What we have loved, others will love

and we will teach them how.”

How would you answer the question, “Why are you here?” Have other people’s memoirs shed any light on this question for you?

Just one year later, the book is not only written but published, and today NPR did a feature on the author, including an excerpt from the book.

The comments are highly critical of NPR for “shilling” for a writer who seems to evoke little sympathy for her small misfortunes compared to the truly indigent women she compares herself to. She may fear being turned into a “bag lady,” but in reality, she came nowhere close to that fate. I read the excerpt on the NPR page and decided not to buy the book.

What do you think? Who is the audience for a book like this? Do you expect it to succeed or fail? Commenters on the NPR website were disgusted that NPR ran the story. Are you?

He sums up what he sees as a universal response, coming from all people, when they hear jazz or listen to a story or poem–”I see the hurt and the pain, but I also see the joy and celebration.”

Black writers have given us some of the first and best American memoirs–from slave narratives to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and Richard Wrights’s Black Boy.  Mary Karr’s included all three of these in her list of Top Ten Memoirs previously described here.

Blackness as an idea includes many spiritual traditions. Christianity has been a major influence in black community in this country, but today Islam and Buddhism have become important spiritual influences also as the American idea of blackness expands to include the whole world.

Miller’s voice reminds me of Langston Hughes’ smile, which he celebrates as being Buddha-like. One of Miller’s more interesting ideas is that “there should be people that you know are poets by their behavior.” Below you can see a living example of the idea of universal blackness as you watch the short video of Lucille Clifton reading her poem, “won’t you celebrate with me.” This reading is bittersweet because Clifton died last Saturday, Feb. 13, 2010. You can read more about her here.

Wonderful resources–John Coltrane, Langston Hughes, Charles Johnson, music playlist, video, etc.– on the Speakingoffaith.org website can be found here.

I have not read Miller’s own memoir, pictured above, so I would love to hear from those who have. And I will be reviewing a number of African-American memoirs in the weeks and months ahead. Black memoirists, like black poets, musicians, dancers, and visual artists have evolved a combination of truth and beauty that appeals to all people and will last forever. We need to celebrate the beauty of blackness not just this month but every month!

Three days after the Super Bowl, five parodies, from light to dark in tone, have reached Mashable! You can watch them here! Google must be bursting with pride, since every parody is another form of advertising for Google–except perhaps the last one in the list.

Which ones are best? Why? Do any of them topple the original?

At the end of the 28 days, Kelsey will be defending her thesis–her own memoir–in an MFA program. Let’s not only wish her luck, let’s learn from her experiences and grow our own list of important memoirs. Crowdsourcing coaching–I like that name for the same thing I have been doing in this blog. Teaching myself as I share what I learn.

The goal of reading and writing about 100 memoirs was the initial driver of this blog. If you want more lists than Kelsey’s, move to the right on this page and click on the category called “lists.”

Can you add other lists? Your own or ones you have found online?

Here are the four most relevant paragraphs to our concerns as we seek to understand the power of memoir to go beyond the telling of the events of a single life: