Sue Monk Kidd was born on August 12, 1948,
in Sylvester, Georgia, and lived on a plot of land that had belonged
to her family for more than 200 years. She
spent all of her childhood in Sylvester, a safe, small, rural town
she has called “endearing” and “Mayberry-esque” in interviews, even though
the town was the site of racial injustices so prevalent in the South
during that time. As a child, Kidd observed the deeply ingrained
segregation between white and black southerners. Nevertheless, she
recalls listening to the stories of the African American women that
worked in the domestic realm of her home. As a teenager, during
the mid-1960s, Kidd witnessed the beginnings
of desegregation; the injustices she encountered left a lasting
impression, as did two literary works she read at the time: Henry
David Thoreau’s Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854)
and Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening (1899).
These works would come to guide her early years as a writer.
In 1970, Kidd graduated from Texas
Christian University with a degree in nursing. Throughout her twenties,
she worked as a registered nurse in pediatrics and surgery and as
a nursing instructor at the college level. Although she kept a journal—she
has always been an avid chronicler of her own life—Kidd did not
publish any writing. Around this time, she met and married Sanford
Kidd, a theologian. The pair later had two children, Bob and Ann.
In the late 1970s, while her husband was
teaching at a liberal arts college in Anderson, South Carolina,
Kidd began to take writing courses with the intention of learning
the craft of fiction writing. However, just before she turned 30,
a nonfiction essay she had written for the class was published in Guideposts magazine,
then reprinted in Reader’s Digest. Inspired by
this success, Kidd began to write professionally; eventually she
went on to publish hundreds of articles and essays on religious,
inspirational, and personal themes and became a contributing editor
at Guideposts.
Throughout her thirties, Kidd began to use her writing
to explore philosophy and theology. She read widely in the classics
of Western spirituality, philosophy, and literature, and she has
named the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung and the monk and poet Thomas
Merton as important influences discovered during that time. In 1988,
Kidd published her first book, God’s Joyful Surprise: Finding
Yourself Loved, a spiritual memoir that explores her Christian
faith and personal relationship with God. Her next book, another
spiritual memoir called When the Heart Waits: Spiritual
Direction for Life’s Sacred Questions (1990),
describes Kidd’s spiritual awakening. Virtue magazine
named this book its “Book of the Year” in 1991. Kidd’s
third book, Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey
from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine (1996), describes
Kidd’s transition from a Baptist upbringing to the development of
her unique feminist perspective. This bestselling memoir explores
feminist theology—a thematic interest that would reappear in her
later fictional work, including The Secret Life of Bees.
As successful as her nonfiction books had been, Kidd began
feeling an urge to write fiction as she entered her forties. She
enrolled in graduate writing courses at Emory University and spent
time at the Sewanee and the Bread Loaf writers’ conferences. Gradually
Kidd began to publish short fiction in literary journals. In 1997,
she decided to expand a short story she had published in 1993 in Nimrod magazine.
That story, entitled “The Secret Life of Bees,” would become the
seed for her first published novel. It took Kidd nearly four years
to complete The Secret Life of Bees.
The Secret Life of Bees draws on both
Kidd’s personal experience as a child growing up in the segregated
South and on American history. Kidd has cited the storytelling influences
of her father and of the African American maids who worked in her
childhood home as forces that helped shape the novel. Even though
slavery was outlawed in the United States in 1865,
several laws, known collectively as the Jim Crow laws, were enacted
to limit the civil liberties of the newly freed blacks in the American
South. These laws ensured that blacks were treated as second-class
citizens, even as lawmakers invoked the “separate but equal” doctrine.
In practice, the laws institutionalized prejudice, racism, and discrimination.
Under Jim Crow, blacks and whites were forced to attend separate
schools, were not allowed to get married, were not able to use the
same textbooks or library books, and were not allowed to drink from
the same water fountain or sit in the same sections of movie theaters, among
other things. In 1954, Brown v. Board
of Education of Topeka eliminated segregation in schools;
in 1964, the Civil Rights Act eliminated
the other Jim Crow laws. Over time, the civil rights movement rid
the United States of these practices and worked toward establishing
a society of equals.
Upon the publication of The Secret Life of Bees in 2002,
the novel found a wide readership and received much critical acclaim. Since
then, it has been translated into more than twenty languages, nominated
for England’s Orange Prize, named a finalist for the 2003 Book
Sense Book of the Year award, and selected for Good Morning
America’s Read This! program. The book has also been made
into a movie. In 2005, Kidd published The
Mermaid Chair, which won the 2005 Quill
Award for General Fiction; in 2006, she published Firstlight, a
collection of her early writings on spirituality. Kidd lives with
her husband and their dog outside of Charleston, South Carolina,
where she is at work on another novel.
