Why We Will Miss Harper Lee Forever
I don’t know whether to quietly go hide a stick of gum in an oak tree or run out into the street and yell “CECIL JACOBS IS A BIG WET HE-EN.” Nelle Harper Lee has passed away at age 89, and it feels u n d e n i a b l y like a small part of our childhoods we had each hidden safe in our treasure boxes has vanished from within.
Harper Lee is known entirely and only for To Kill a Mockingbird, her only real novel, which schools have assigned students every year for decades out of utterly good intentions (thanks, mom), but which is exactly the kind of magic, witty, smart, heart-opening novel you wish you found yourself without any Important Lessons arrows attached to the cover.
It’s the book that gave us dad-crush Atticus (Gregory Peck took him to new levels of giving-us-the-vapors), based on her father, the lawyer Amasa Lee,* Jem, based on Nelle’s adored older brother (who, yes, all ye who were broken-hearted after reading Go Set a Watchman, died young), Dill, a fictionalization of her childhood boy-next-door Truman Capote, and most importantly, Scout Finch, the tomboyish narrator and stand-in for Nelle herself. If you ever hated dresses as a grommet, got in trouble for “getting ahead of the teacher” in school, or wore a ham costume to a public outing, Scout was likely it for you.
The second Scout started speaking (“it began the summer Dill came to us, when Dill first gave us the idea of making Boo Radley come out…“) I was goddamned-to-hell in love with her, and with the tiny snowglobe of a Southern town (“Maycomb”) she inhabited. I was so delighted by the feisty Scout that I named my baby after her (I really did: here she is dressed as a ham; here she is dressed as a shouting ham (if not ham costumes, I *exclusively* dress her in overalls)). The wee Scout could beat boys at physical combat (same), but, more importantly, she was quick to question all the crumby customs of her hometown: the racism, the sexism, the vanity, the patronizing way adults dealt with kids.
Everything you loved about Scout was something you were effectively admiring in Nelle. For me, reading her biography and GSAW didn’t diminish the legend that is TKAM, but just gave me more to love about the person behind the magic, you know?
I learned three main things from the biography of Harper Lee:
- To Kill a Mockingbird was the result of multiple drafts and years of work on a fictionalization of her childhood. All her conflicted feelings about “home,” the shaded bigotry of the people she loved, and the narrowness of the female ideal found their way into the book. She needed a ton of encouragement to get the book written, and eventually quit her day job to crank it out in her apartment on York Street in New York City’s Upper East Side after her family and friends gave her enough money to support her for one year. #persistence
- She was one of the most ball-busting gals you ever met. She attended an all-girls college and blended in about as well as Lena Dunham with Taylor Swift’s girlsquad, giving zero cares about lipstick or doing her hair or wearing skirts. After she transferred to the University of Alabama, the boys at the university satire paper tried to keep her down, but she busted her ass until she got published, then worked her way into an editorship. She started law school because her father wanted her to join his practice, but dropped out one semester shy of graduating because she h8d it. This picture really encapsulates her attitude.
- She was besties with childhood buddy Truman Capote for yearsssss and responsible for getting him the scoop on the murder behind In Cold Blood (he had zero charm and no one in the town wanted to speak with an uppity gay journalist from New York City). He encouraged her to write (they wrote stories together as tots!) but got a mad case of the greens over the attention she received once TKAM was published.
Okay, I am ten seconds away from lowering this chicken-wire sarcophagus over my head and calling it a day, but I would love to hear why you loved Harper Lee, or if you read Scout’s voice and said, YES. YES TO THIS. Or any other feelings you have today, really. Put it in the comments <3
Gee minetti, we’ll miss you, Nelle.
*Nelle Harper Lee’s mother suffered from mental illness and abused her as a child; acquaintances theorize that Lee left her out of TKAM to erase her from memory.
All art by Camille Manley
