In Praise of Mentor Texts, Part I
There’s a photo of Harper Lee and Mary Badham, the young actress who portrayed Jean Louise “Scout” Finch in the film version of To Kill A Mockingbird, framed in my bedroom. Mary is curled up inside a tire swing and Ms. Lee is presiding over her with both hands on the tire as if she would wheel them away if she could. Both wince into the camera in an uncomfortable hesitation. The photo was taken in 1962, and I gently peeled it out of an O magazine perhaps 50 years later. Mary and Ms. Lee have been squinting at me ever since.
In July 2019, I began the querying process for my novel manuscript. In December 2019, I stopped. Between July and December, the heartbeat of the pages I had been prodding over stopped beating. My query emails whirled off to agent inboxes with depleting enthusiasm.
The end of 2019 brought Obama’s list of 19 favorite books, which led me to Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. The lure of scholarly true crime, longing for a president who reads, and nostalgia for To Kill a Mockingbird made me hit purchase on the audiobook, which my ears devoured during commutes to holidays gatherings (remember those?).
I’ll skip the recap of Furious Hours and just say this: read it, listen to—honestly. It’s a masterpiece in its own right as it composes Lee, villainizes the murderous Reverend Willie Maxwell, and stitches together the origin story of our eternal Mockingbird.
To explain what this book did for me, I need to plop you about four hundred pages into the book. At this point, an unknown Lee has written what we know as Go Set a Watchman, featuring Scout as an adult. With this story, Lee has caught the attention of an editor, Therese von Hohoff Torrey at J.B. Lippincott & Co. Hohoff is captivated by the characters and the town—but not by the forlorn adult perspective of how Lee tells her story.
In turn, Lee sets out to cohere the narrative of the adult Jean Louise Finch with some disjointed narrative of Jean Louise Finch as a child from a story she had titled The Long Good-bye. During Lee’s two years of revisions with Hohoff, the manuscript changes from the point of view of a disillusioned, adult Scout revisiting her childhood town to the story of Scout as a child in real time, clamoring down the streets of Maycomb with Jem and Dill.
I was driving home from my cousin’s house in Lancaster when I thought about how Lee’s writing conundrum applied to my own. In my WIP, the bulk of the narrative follows three adolescents through a significant summer in their lives. The end of the novel flashes forward to the near future of their college years and then the distant future of their middle age. At the time, I felt the flash forward was the strongest twenty pages of writing. However, only one agent had requested to see the full manuscript, and if in fact she did read to the end, that made exactly one person who had read those oh so strongest of pages.
At the helm of my Corolla, eastbound on the PA Turnpike, I determined that the fully matured Jean Louise Finch needed to preside over my story. Meaning—my story needed the adult perspective of my three main characters to legitimize the storyline of the childhood summer within the context of the novel’s larger themes. So, I took the reverse of Hohoff’s ordinance and added an adult point of view and adult scenes to the forefront of my novel.
After this revelation, my reluctant hands found their way back to the keyboard. I had a path forward into what would turn into a year of quarantine, virtual teaching, dog-adopting, and rewriting. Cep’s book reacquainted me with something I had learned in my writing program but, obviously, needed to learn again.
Books are mentors. They sit on the shelf for years, waiting for to us reach for them at precisely the right moment when our aims align with theirs. They force us to pay attention and find our story in another story. Furious Hours found me by chance through a string of escapism and allegiance. It unlocked a new perspective, a rewrite, and a new novel. It also pointed me back to Mockingbird, a book I’ve always considered a friend.
According to Cep, Hohoff admired Lee for her willingness to take edits and revise, qualities often fleeting for young writers. I don’t know much more about Hohoff than what is written in Cep’s pages. Playing the numbers game alone, it’s probable she would have passed on my book. But, let’s say we had worked together: I hope she would have had the same impression of me as she had with Lee. I absorb the revisions, and I go where they lead me.
Deconstructing a manuscript and piecing it back together is painful boring thrilling demoralizing extraordinary and so many other things that ultimately amalgamate. I’ve spent the past year dodging questions about my WIP, cancelling plans, and spreading notecards over my bed. Simultaneously skeptical and thankful, I’ve been peering back at Mary and Ms. Lee, daring them to keep their watchful post for just a little longer.