Banned Books Week Event: To Kill A Mockingbird Discussed By Emmy Award-Winning Filmmaker Mary McDonagh Murphy - Author Of 'Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration Of Fifty Years Of To Kill A Mockingbird'

Wed, 12/20/2006 - 1:37pm

When: September 27, 2010 at the Downtown Library: Multi-Purpose Room

In observance of Banned Book Week (September 25 - October 2) as well as the 50th anniversary of this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Mary McDonagh Murphy, will show excerpts from her new documentary 'Hey, Boo: Harper Lee & To Kill a Mockingbird' and discuss the documentary and her book 'Scout, Atticus & Boo: A Celebration Of Fifty Years Of To Kill A Mockingbird.' She will also cover the controversies surrounding 'To Kill A Mockingbird,' and why it has been one of the most challenged books in America.Mary McDonagh Murphy's new documentary and book explore the novel's power, influence and popularity. With reflections from Anna Quindlen, Tom Brokaw, James McBride, James Patterson, Wally Lamb, Oprah Winfrey and more, they chronicle the many ways the novel has shaped lives and careers. Harper Lee has not given an interview since 1964, but Murphy's reporting, research and rare interviews with the author's sister and friends add new details and photos to the remarkable story of an astonishing phenomenon. A book signing will follow and books will be available for sale at the event.

Transcript

• [00:00:26.24] JENNY HOFFMAN: In recognition of banned books week, we would like to welcome our speaker this evening, Mary McDonough Murphy, and thank her for being here. To get us started this evening, I'd like you to help me welcome Josie Barnes Parker, the director of the Ann Arbor District Library.
• [00:00:47.01] JOSIE PARKER: Good evening, everyone. It's an interesting opportunity to stand in front of a community and talk about the challenges to material that have occurred at the Ann Arbor District Library in preparation for a talk that someone's going to give about a title that we all love, but which has received many, many challenges. And we talked about this earlier about the irony of how To Kill a Mockingbird can be such a loved book and so well read and yet so challenged.
• [00:01:17.80] And what I hope to do, in my few minutes before Mary speaks is to give you a little view into what is challenged in Ann Arbor, and why things are challenged. And help, I think, all of us understand that challenges generally reflect the community. For instance, Harry Potter is not challenged here. To Kill a Mockingbird is not challenged here. Those are not what are challenges here. Ann Arbor District Library is a reflection of the community, and it's a very diverse community. It's also a very well educated, well read, and intellectual community with a tremendous interest in art in terms of all forms of art, media and particularly, and our film collection is one of our most challenged collections. It's also one of our most popular, and one of our most used, and the foreign film portion of it is what I'm mostly referring to. We would never withdraw those titles, but we do have to address how people who are not comfortable with unrated material in a public library react to it. So I hope this evening could give you some idea about what's challenged here, and how we do respond.
• [00:02:37.69] First thing I want to do is let you know that, while it's called banned books week, and that's an American Library Association title for it, has been for a very, very long time, it isn't how we think of it here at all. When a person objects to an item in the collection at Ann Arbor, give them a form that's called a request for reconsideration. Couldn't be more polite either way. And we treat it that way. We treat it very generously, very politely. When we receive a request for reconsideration, I then appoint a committee of three or four persons on staff who are professionally the most prepared to address a challenge of that genre or that format. And then I send them the request for reconsideration with the name of the person redacted. So it's a blind process. And that has to be that way, because our staff who work here know most of you, whether you realize it or not. And it isn't a good thing to try to be non-judgmental about a request for reconsideration. Libraries have responded defensively to challenges for a very long time. And that's where the whole banned part of it came from.
• [00:04:00.06] I think we have come to a place where we recognize that it's very positive for material to be challenged. It's a community that's paying attention. There isn't anything wrong. It's how we respond to those challenges that translate into what the reaction is to the library's collection, and how we go forward. So in this particular library, it's a request for reconsideration. The committee's appointed, and we have a process that has been approved by the library board for a long time. So many days are given to the committee, and then a response has to come back to me. I then take that information and determine whether I agree with it. If I don't, we go back and we have a different conversation. Most of the time, I'm in agreement. I then communicate back to the person directly and explain the decision and the basis for the decision.
• [00:04:52.11] In the event that a person receives a letter from me and it indicates something that's contrary to what they would like to have happen, they then have an appeal to a library board, which is then a public appeal. It's known who is challenging and why. And it's done at a public board meeting. And the library board has 10 days to then respond back to that person.
• [00:05:15.30] I think, in my eight years here, there hasn't been an appeal to a library board. But I think right before I came, there was. And the title was Under the Blood Red Sun by Philip Salisbury, which is a young adult novel set in Hawaii. And it's when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. And it's told from the point of view of a white boy whose best friend was Japanese American and how their two families, how everything just went to smithereens, no pun intended, and in terms of their relationships and what happened. And someone in the community who was Japanese American descent was uncomfortable with how this book portrayed that time. The book stayed in the collection. It's one of the most-- it has the highest awards given to young adult novels in America. And so it has retained its value as a piece of literature in the young adult. Collection I loved it. I think the book's great, and I recommend it.
• [00:06:11.92] What I did is I went back to 2005 and picked up some titles, and some things that happened for challenges. And I hope that you find this a little bit interesting. Two things that happened in that year. We had a challenge to a book by Todd Parr who writes fiction books for very young children. And it's a book called The Family Book. And Mr. Parr illustrates his books with cartoonish type character representations. And in The Family Book, he illustrated families of all kinds, families with one parent, families with two parent, families with parents of the same sex, both sexes. And a person was affronted by the fact that there were two fathers in the family and wanted the book not removed. It was an interesting situation. This person wanted signs put up in the library warning people that there were things here that might offend them. We went through the entire process. We looked at the book. We did everything that we say we do. And then I had the challenge of writing a letter back, explaining that depending on who you are and where you come from, there's something here to offend everyone. And in some respects, that makes it a public library in the truest sense. And I was able to do that, and that is an example of one.
• [00:07:43.36] Another one was a book called Egypt in Pictures. And the author was Jeffrey Zuehlke. It was a collection of chapters edited, written by different authors. It was published in 2004 and 2005. It was probably written in the two years before that. And Mr. Zuehlke made some very interesting generalizations about Muslims in Egypt. And he did not fact find clearly what he had written. And he made statements that were just false. Someone in the community who knew, read it, brought it to our attention. We went through this process, and we realized that there were, not only in his chapter, but in others, terrible representations of Muslims in this book that were not factual. And we withdrew the entire set from the collection.
• [00:08:41.39] And I wrote a letter to the editors and to the publisher and we sent them all back. We were credited for that with the publisher. And it was one of those situations where we would not have read all of those articles, but someone in the community did and understood it to be wrong, brought it to our attention. We responded appropriately, and we took the book out of our collection. So we will take a book out of the collection. It is not true that it's wrong to take books out. Sometimes it's totally appropriate. And there are a couple of others where we withdrawn the book because it had misinformation or incorrect information inside of the content.
• [00:09:21.55] In 2006, there is a film that came out. It was a Meg Ryan film called In the Cut. You may have seen it. To some people, it was a great movie. To some people it was the worst 90 minutes you could spend anywhere. But what it was was In the Cut had a very graphic scene in the first five minutes of a forced situation of oral sex in the bathroom in some club. And that 30 minutes was a big deal to the person who wanted me to remove that film from the library. We looked at that. We looked at all the reviews. We retained that film. I did have feedback from the person, and they chose to let it rest. But that type of reaction, what I also learned is that the person did not watch the entire film. It stopped right there. And that is something we take into consideration. When they fill out the form, they tell us, usually, whether they read the whole book or not, or they watched the whole film or not. If they didn't watch the whole film or did not read the entire book, it matters. It matters in our estimation of their comments in terms of how to weigh them, because it's the whole piece that we're withdrawing, not the first 30 minutes of the film. We can't chop it up that way.
• [00:10:42.73] In 2007, this one proved to be a very big challenge for us. We have in our library collection material in over 21 languages, including fiction. We buy from publishers all over the world. And we rely on reviews that are published in English from all over the world about this material. We do not have people working here who speak fluently all the languages of all the material that's part of the collection of the library. We purchased a book by an author named Yung Hu, a Korean. And the English title was No Love No Sex. This was a book about two young women who were grappling with whether or not they should have the type of relationships that were common in their age group and expected. Easy come, easy go, free love. And one of them was doing that, and the other one wasn't. And it was that dynamic and the discussion between them in how that book unfolded in terms of who they became and what happened to their characters.
• [00:11:46.26] As it happened, this book won many awards in Korea, literary awards that were comparable to the type of literary awards we're accustomed to in this country. However, no one here could read this book well enough to judge this book for a consideration. We tapped our colleagues at the University of Michigan, and they were very gracious. And we had a couple people there who are Korean, are fluent, who read the book, and then sat with our committee, and went through the book along with the reviews and talked through the issues that were raised by the person in the challenge. That was a first for us. It was an important lesson, because this is likely to happen again. And we ended up retaining the book. So far, we haven't had to do that again.
• [00:12:39.06] And just so you know, I should have told you, we average two to six challenges a year. And they are film, magazine, children's books, fiction, nonfiction, all over the map. There's no pattern to it at all. And in 2008, we had six. In 2006, we had two. It's just whatever, whatever people pick up, and however it strikes them.
• [00:13:05.30] Some of you may have seen the movie Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. We have it in this collection. We are probably one of five public libraries in the country that have this movie and circulate it, and it's very well circulated. It is a very hard movie to watch. Mr. Flanagan, if you remember, died at 43 of cystic fibrosis. And he fought his illness physically against his own body. He decided that was how to fight it. He would hurt himself, and that was fighting his disease. He chronicled that in this film. And nothing's held back in this movie, nothing. When we appointed the committee, we had to talk about, you have to be able to watch the whole thing. And it was hard to do. I watched it, because I knew it was going to be a difficult one for us to deal with, because I understood the content was so graphic. My husband was with me. He couldn't do it. He left the room. It was pretty hard to deal with. So if you check it out to watch it, please note, you don't need children around at all. It is a very difficult movie. However, the subject matter, the way it was handled, the cinematography, the documentation on his life and what he did, are all impeccable in this film, and it won many awards. So it's remained in this collection. And that one was one of the most difficult ones.
• [00:14:38.76] The Hunchback of Notre Dame, the graphic novel, came out a couple years ago. The story is true. The story is the story. There's nothing made up or changed about the story. However, in a graphic novel for teenagers, the pictures are all there, and nothing's left to the imagination. And someone who really wanted their child to read The Hunchback of Notre Dame was very disturbed, because their child had difficulties reading the literary book. And they decided to try this. And it's one thing for us to have mind pictures. It's another thing for us to have pictures laid out in front of us. And that was the problem. And we had to talk through what the point of the graphic novel is and explore that with someone and why it's important that we have this genre. And it's one of the most popular genres in this library for adults and for teenagers. And we kept that one.
• [00:15:36.90] Then in 2009, a magazine. Actually a magazine last year in 2009, and actually we just finished one this year, too. It was sort of interesting because it was Young Miss. And for those of you who are my age remember Young Miss being called Young Miss, magazine for girls. Now it's just called YM. And girls were talking about things in magazines that we didn't talk about when we were teenagers. And the magazine, Young Miss was objected to because it was so open about contraceptives and sexually transmitted diseases. And this was a parent of a 13 year old who didn't want her 13 year old to know anything about this. And it's very hard to do this, because you know the 13 year old knows a lot. And the mom just doesn't know the 13 year old knows a lot. And working it out.
• [00:16:27.98] And that magazine stayed in the collection as did Fangoria. And Fangoria though, is very edgy. It's pushing the edge in the same way that Sick is pushing the edge. Fangoria is a magazine for fans of gore and horror. And we had it where it's most popular. It was in the teen collection. And once we went through this process and dealt with this request, and based on how this person had written it, we kept the magazine. But we moved it into the adult magazine collection on the second floor of this building. It was only housed in this building, so it was an easy move up. That satisfied the individual. It wasn't right in the face of teenagers. Now never mind that they probably are the highest circulating group on this magazine. But it was where it was, and how we were presenting it, that was the objection. So we did that.
• [00:17:22.44] And then there are always the ones that come up, always. And while we haven't had To Kill a Mockingbird and we haven't had Harry Potter, and I'm realizing that I'm sort of concentrating on the ones that I know are about girls, and I should have done a better job here with that. Alice books by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor have been challenged and challenged and challenged. And in 2009, someone challenged again Outrageously Alice, which has been in print since the mid-80s. And when I got the request for reconsideration, I saw what it was about. I called up downstairs one of the children's librarians who I know and knew I was going to put on this. And I said, you know, here's the deal with Outrageously Alice. There's a new crop of 12 year olds and their mommas every year. And we're just going to have to deal with this every year, or almost every year. Because it is that transition time, that age when children are really becoming grownup, and they're thinking about things, moms in this case, aren't ready for. And they come to the library and up til now, it's been amazing. My child reads above grade level. My child can read 800 page novels. My child is doing all these wonderful things.
• [00:18:48.89] And then suddenly, my child picks up Outrageously Alice. And Alice is a girl in a household of men, a father and a brother, who lover her dearly. And they're confronted with Alice in puberty in this book. And Alice is asking lots of really hard questions, and when she's not getting her answers, she's going out to find them herself. And so she finds them in places that-- while Alice gets through this book intact, it's a close call. And it's that close call that is the problem. And how her relationship is with her boyfriend. and what happens. She goes to a bridal showers, it's a lingerie shower. I don't know how much that's done anymore, but it certainly was done in the 1980s because that's when I got married. And it's interesting how it's portrayed in the book. The cover now, the new Outrageously Alice, which was part of the problem, shows Alice at this party holding up this Leopard print like piece of material. And the mother was right away, this is not a good book. But it was what would get that book into the hands of certain children. And they're going to open it up because it has this titillating cover, rather than being a good story. That's a problem. That's actually an issue. And that's more of an issue than children reading about things that we might be uncomfortable with.
• [00:20:12.36] So in this particular library, we do receive challenges. They are all over the map in terms of format. Children's books are challenged as well as adult. They're are all handled the same way, no matter what. They're all handled graciously and politely. Confidentiality is maintained. As a matter of fact, I was trying very hard to go far enough back that someone wouldn't feel picked out of the crowd if they happened to be here. And we are grateful that we're asked the questions. We are people working here. We spend $1.6 million a year on material in this library. We do not read all of it. We have not watched all of it. We cannot tell you that everything we purchased has been selected by a professional with the utmost care. We might have been able to tell you that 30 years ago or 40 years ago. But we can't tell you that now. And we make mistakes. Things are placed in one part of the library that probably they shouldn't be there, and we ended up moving them. We do it voluntarily or it's pointed out. And that's the kind of place this library is, and I'm proud of it. I would like to see us move away from the terminology of banned to request for reconsideration, asking people to reconsider a title. But nationally there's a defensive reaction to this, and it's too bad, because I think it gets in the way. And if I have a message, that's my message, is that we'll reconsider anything. And we'll do it politely, even if it's not politely presented to us.
• [00:21:48.04] And what I'm going to do now is, since I've given you a little overview of what happens in your town, in your library, I'm going to introduce Mary McDonough Murphy who has put together a book and then a film that will come out in a few months on the celebration of 50 years of To Kill a Mockingbird. And all that's occurred around To Kill a Mockingbird, and the lives it's touched and how people responded to it and still respond to it. Mary has been in film for most of her-- and brought journalism, and for most of her career. She started out in newspaper, public journalism, and moved into television pretty quickly. And she says in a very unorthodox way, not to be copied, because it probably wouldn't happen.
• [00:22:38.11] She spent 20 years at CBS, and she was a senior producer. And she produced things like 60 minutes, 48 Hours and some of the morning shows. She has worked on documentaries, including-- I want to make sure I get it right-- she was the producer of Cry for Help, which aired nationally on PBS in April 2009, Digital Days, which was narrated by Tom Brokaw, which is an examination of the internet's impact on the newspaper industry, and it was for the Associated Press. Very timely then. In our town now, whether you realize it or not, we don't have a print newspaper. It ended over a year ago. And that's been difficult, very difficult. Before Your Eyes: Don't Take My Husband, a CBS news prime time documentary chronicling the deportation process of three persons who had been involved in the Irish Republican Army who were living in this country. Her love is story telling, and the documentary allows her to do that. And we know from this what a great job she's done. And we're about to see and find out that she's probably copied that beautifully in a film. So Mary?
• [00:23:55.88] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Thank you very much. I thought I would just talk a little bit and then show you some clips from the documentary. And then we could come back, and I can answer any questions that you may have. If you're here tonight because To Kill a Mockingbird has made a great impression on you at one time or another, you're not alone. It's one of the most astonishing phenomenons in publishing, really. It was published in 1960. The publisher thought maybe it would sell 4,000 copies. Well fast forward to 50 million copies later. It still continues to sell about a million copies a year. I've been noticing there's a lot of reporting on Facebook this week, because there's a movie coming out about it called The Social Network. I would just like to politely suggest that for all the discussion of Facebook, To Kill a Mockingbird, the readers and lovers of To Kill a Mockinbird, is probably one of the greatest social networks of our time. And perhaps a more meaningful one, I might politely suggest. It was the first and only novel of Harper Lee. We have not seen a second novel from Ms. Lee. And it's set in a small town.
• [00:25:19.53] And if you ask almost any person to a person, they can tell you sort of where they were and what was happening in their lives when they read To Kill a Mockingbird. And I was lucky enough to ask people like Oprah Winfrey, and Wally Lamb, James McBride and Harper Lee's sister, and Tom Brokaw. And everyone to a person can tell you, not just where they were but what the edition looked like, and what the lamp in their sister's room looked like while they were reading it, and how long it took.
• [00:25:54.07] Often, I think it's the first adult novel that a young reader reads, and then they're just kidnapped and taken on this incredible journey. And it continues, I think, to affect young readers still today. It is still widely read. 75% of our nation's schools have it in their eighth or ninth grade curriculum. So that accounts, I think, for the million a year. So I think I'll just show you some clips, and then if people have questions, I'm happy to answer them. I guess I should just say that this started as a documentary. I started it several years ago, and the reason it became a book is because I just had too much stuff. I had too much great material. And I knew I had to do something more with it. So here's some clips. And them I'm happy to answer anything afterwards. Thanks.
• [00:27:05.13] OPRAH WINFREY: I remember starting it, and just devouring it.
• [00:27:10.54] LEE SMITH: I was just knocked out.
• [00:27:12.75] JAMES PATTERSON: To Kill a Mockingbird was probably the first page turner that I ever read.
• [00:27:17.10] WALLY LAMB: I didn't realize that literature could do that.
• [00:27:22.68] ANNA QUINDLEN: I think there are certain books in which the characters are so real and so vivid that you feel as though they've become close personal friends.
• [00:27:32.33] OPRAH WINFREY: I wanted to be Scout. I thought I was Scout.
• [00:27:35.36] MARY BADHAM: Scout was a lot smarter than I was. She's a lot smarter than a lot of adults I know.
• [00:27:41.61] ANNA QUINDLEN: I think one of the reasons I became so obsessed with Harper Lee is because everything that she did convinced me that she was just a grown up Scout who hadn't gone over to the dark side of being a girly girl.
• [00:28:01.60] WALLY LAMB: Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather, the streets turned to red slop, grass grew on the sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square.
• [00:28:16.24] JANE CLARK: I do think that she was talking about her town and her family and all the people that she knew here.
• [00:28:22.82] REVEREND THOMAS LANE BUTTS: We are very close friends. She's not reclusive. Very different from that. She's open, she loves to be around people and associate with people. She does not like to be exploited by people.
• [00:28:33.67] SCOTT TUROW: I cannot imagine what drove her into silence.
• [00:28:36.99] MARK CHILDRESS: It might have been to knowing Truman and watching what it was doing to him.
• [00:28:42.17] DIANE MCWHORTER: What are the odds of two people like Truman Capote and Nell Harper Lee coming out of a tiny little talent guide. It's phenomenal when you think about it. And then just the incredible contrast between this person who has become the conscience of country, and Trumam Capote who was probably a sociopath.
• [00:29:00.72] ANNA QUINDLEN: Can you imagine the pressure on Harper Lee to write a sequel To Kill a Mockingbird? Once the movie came out and you could see that it kept selling every year, they just must have thrown rose petals and chocolates and millions of dollars at her feet.
• [00:29:26.00] TOM BROKAW: I was still in college when it came out. It was one of those memorable pieces of literary fiction that came along at an impressionable time in my life, and also in the country's life.
• [00:29:36.92] SPEAKER 1: We think of this book as sort of being a post civil rights novel. But it actually was published before the biggest explosions of the civil rights movement and helped bring them on.
• [00:29:46.30] ANDREW YOUNG: To Kill a Mockingbird gave us hope that justice could prevail. And I think that's one of the things that makes it a great story, because it can be repeated in many different ways.
• [00:30:00.20] LEE SMITH: People think this is over. This is not over. It still has this galvanizing effect on a young reader. It remains as relevant today as it was the very day that it was written. It never ages.
• [00:30:15.04] RICHARD RUSSO: Masterpieces are masterpieces, not because they are flawless, but because they tapped into something essential to us, at the heart of who we are and how we live.
• [00:30:28.67] JAMES MCBRIDE: To Kill a Mockingbird was a great book now, it was a great book yesterday, and it will be a great book tomorrow. We need a thousand Atticus Finchs.
• [00:30:41.05] OPRAH WINFREY: Stand up. Your father's passing. I just love that.
• [00:31:02.14] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: I should note that Scout lively using the N word to her father is one of the reasons it's frequently challenged, To Kill a Mockingbird, for the offensive language. And also Lee Smith who you saw there who wrote The Last Girls and 11 other novels, tells a great story in the book about her first internship. It was at the Richmond, Virginia paper in 1966. She arrives thinking she's going to be this fantastic star cub reporter, and a local physician in Hanover county had challenged To Kill a Mockingbird saying that any story that involved a rape was completely inappropriate for children. And the editor of the local paper had written an editorial saying if any child in this county writes me a letter explaining why they want to read the book, I will personally send them a copy of the book. So Lee Smith, who really thought she was going to be a star cub reporter, spent the summer mailing copies of To Kill a Mockingbird to every child that I wrote a letter to the editor. Any questions?
• [00:32:19.42] AUDIENCE: According to what you just said about the challenge, so it would be with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
• [00:32:25.25] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Right. And they're frequently challenged. Especially in this book, it's the use of the language, which is of course the language of its time set in the '30s, and the harshness and the brutal language becomes objectionable despite the novel's very explicit anti-racist, racism, message.
• [00:32:54.18] JENNY HOFFMAN: If you have questions for either Josie or Mary, just raise your hand. Here's one right here.
• [00:33:01.92] AUDIENCE: Good evening. Did Truman Capote ever comment on To Kill a Mockingbird, and do you think Harper Lee has another novel?
• [00:33:12.98] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Did everybody hear those? The questions are did Truman Capote ever comment on To Kill a Mockingbird, and does Harper Lee have a second novel? Truman Capote and Harper Lee, as you saw and I get into it a little bit more, were very, very close childhood friends. And he did write a blurb and take the author photo for the first edition of To Kill a Mockingbird. And the blurb was pretty-- you know, it sounded like he hadn't even read the book. I mean it's kind of like a rare and interesting person has written a novel. But what actually did happen is he read the novel in galleys. and he said very nice to his old friend Harper Lee, but not much else. And when I talked to Harper Lee's sister at great length about what happened to that friendship, because it is a very close friendship that fell apart, she said that he was just insanely jealous when she won the Pulitzer prize, and that the whole friendship kind of foundered after that, because he couldn't contain his envy. And he couldn't really sort of hang around with her anymore. So that's what happened there.
• [00:34:28.29] On the subject of the second novel, I can only tell you what her sister, Alice Bench Lee, 99, still sitting at her law practice in Monroeville, Alabama at the firm her father helped found. Barnett, Bugg and Lee, right off the town square. Alice told me that there will be no second novel. That when asked why she didn't publish a second novel, she just said she couldn't top what she had done, and that she had nowhere to go but down. And now it's also laid to rest any suggestion that there's something under her mattress or in a lockbox somewhere.
• [00:35:17.74] AUDIENCE: I realize you were just showing us some clips of what was there. I'm curious what people said about Jem. I had the pleasure of reading the book with some seventh and eighth graders, and Jem is such an important character for them at that age. And when they're just watching him through the novel and his need for privacy and all of that, I'm wondering what people had to say about that.
• [00:35:40.63] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: I followed two eighth grade classes reading the novel, and Jem was, as you said, a very important character, especially to eighth grade boys. I particularly love the way, the relationship between Jem and Scout and the way he goads her on, and also the way she treats his adolescence, like he's from a foreign country or something. But I couldn't do a little montage on everybody. And the reason I didn't deal with Jem is mostly because the people I interviewed didn't actually say that much about him. And so when I tried to build these little sections, I didn't have enough Jem stuff, actually, to do it. It doesn't mean that I don't think he's a really important character. So I had the kids in the classroom talk about him a lot, which is in the documentary. There's a really interesting book by a woman named Kathryn Erskine called Mockingbird which tries to imagine Scout without Jem, which is kind of interesting to think about.
• [00:36:55.85] AUDIENCE: I just wondering if there was a scene or just something about it that you sort of looked at with fresh eyes now. You saw it differently or interpreted differently as an adult versus as a child, or something that you sort of saw a new layer to.
• [00:37:09.90] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Well my adult rereading of To Kill a Mockingbird made a far greater impression on me than my adolescent reading. One of the things that Rosanne Cash says, both in the clip and in the book, is that you should just read the whole thing as a parenting manual. And I think if you do read To Kill s Mockingbird once you're a parent, you do look at it differently. Because the relationship, the total acceptance and understanding of Atticus and his children and the kinds of discussions he has about them with his brother Jack and his sister Alexander, that really got to me in my adult reading. And also, the first time I ever read the book, I was just completely in the tank for Scout. It's all I really noticed. Not unlike Oprah or Anna Quindlen, I was besotted by Scout. And so when I read it as an adult, I was like, did I actually read this novel before, because there was so much else in it. And I was completely blown away by the writing, which I think often gets overlooked in any discussion of the novel because there are so many other things to talk about. Love, loneliness, childhood, race, tolerance, justice. So yeah, the writing really blew me away when I read it as an adult.
• [00:38:37.01] AUDIENCE: I kind of have a related question. What's the youngest and the oldest first reading you encountered? What's the youngest someone has--
• [00:38:43.49] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: I just met a kid in Monroeville this weekend who is in fifth grade and read it and really liked it. Now how much he understood it is up for grabs. But he does live in the town that it was more or less set in, so you can sort of see him doing it. But mostly, 12, 13, 14. And then I've also run into people who just read it last week. And they're very adult. And I sort of envy them that experience, too, reading it for the first time. How old were you when you read it? Sixth grade. That seems early to me, did you think so? Yeah? I think it's great to read it early as long as you're going to read it again. I think it's great to read it at 13 as long as you're going to pick it up again at 30.
• [00:39:36.51] AUDIENCE: Read it twice, at least.
• [00:39:50.45] We know your book is available. What about seeing the entire documentary?
• [00:39:56.27] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: It's almost done.
• [00:39:59.01] AUDIENCE: Where do you think it will be shown?
• [00:40:04.36] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: It's a lot more expensive to make a documentary than it is to write a book, because you got to-- I mean, every time you leave your house, it's $2,500. It's a big expense, because you're hiring crews and editors and doing all that stuff. So I've had to take bill paying gaps in the process so I could get up to speed. But I'm almost done scoring it right now, which is a very interesting process. And I'm recutting just a few sections. And then I think there may be a broadcast being discussed right now, some people who made buy it for broadcast. And then I'm also going to make it available on my website, probably the end of November, I think, if I really get everything to go the way I want it to. It'll be available off my website at the end of November as a DVD.
• [00:40:59.93] AUDIENCE: My question is for the library. The question is, why do you have this challenge and reconsideration process? Why don't you just tell people if they don't like the book, no ones forcing you to read it?
• [00:41:15.74] JOSIE PARKER: Would like a job and you can name your salary? You can come work for me any day. That doesn't solve it. People don't accept that and walk away, which is not really--
• [00:41:31.31] AUDIENCE: Why do they have to accept it?
• [00:41:32.56] JOSIE PARKER: Because they pay for it. I think fundamentally, when you get down to it, they pay for it. The public library is the most amazing prepaid service that we have. And the people in this community pay a lot for the public library. So they have a right to say, what is this doing here? Why is this here? I object to it. What they don't have a right to do and what we don't let people do, is decide, for you and me, what we get to read and what we get to see, based on religious beliefs, social beliefs, racist beliefs, economic issues. When they object to something, and we can respond to the challenge in a way that tells them why we're keeping it, the hope is that they'll look at things differently in the future from that point on. And I have to say, except for a couple of situations, we don't have people coming back at us constantly with challenges, that are individual people. So that is why we do it. I don't think it would occur to us to ignore it, frankly, because it is a public library, it's publicly paid for. That's why we do it. We could have a good over coffee.
• [00:42:48.24] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: But she likes your moxie.
• [00:42:49.41] JOSIE PARKER: I do! I totally do. There are days, believe me, what I write in those letters and what I think are not generally the same.
• [00:43:03.15] AUDIENCE: I have a couple questions. When it comes to the challenge of this book, I'm wondering if there have been regional differences, significant regional differences, about where it's been challenged. And I'm also curious about other reasons for the book to be challenged.
• [00:43:21.15] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Texas. There are a lot of challenges of lot of things. But I haven't investigated this thoroughly, but do you know much about?
• [00:43:36.81] JOSIE PARKER: I think the primary reason that To Kill a Mockingbird is challenged and it's--
• [00:43:40.90] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: But regional, do you know regional?
• [00:43:42.53] JOSIE PARKER: Oh, it's definitely regional, because it's not challenged here. And I think that it's challenged where the language is either essentially offensive, really offensive, or it's PC, it's not PC. So we are challenging it, because it might offend someone. It might not offend me but it might offend someone else. That happens a lot. It's people who think that someone else might be upset about it, so therefore you need to do something. that is a lot of the reason why books are challenged.
• [00:44:17.63] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Racism and offensive language are numero uno.
• [00:44:21.94] JOSIE PARKER: And it is regional.
• [00:44:30.79] AUDIENCE: The documentary, how did you decide who you were going to interview.
• [00:44:34.75] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Well some of that was strategic, and some of that was fortuitous. And I had a list of targets, people I thought would be important to put in the documentary. Oprah had said 300 times it was her favorite book so she was an obvious person to call. I knew I wanted a student of civil rights, or a civil rights leader. A person who is not in these clips that helped me greatly, sort of place the novel in context in the south, was a woman named Diane McWhorter who wrote a Pulitzer prize winning history of Birmingham, Alabama. So she was a must, and I got to her, and she said yes. I really wanted congressman John Lewis who said yes, but then his schedule never jibed. And Andrew Young said yes, so he ended up being in the documentary. I was looking for novelists who had clearly been affected by the book, and then I was looking for teachers, so I sort of hit pay dirt with both Lee Smith and Wally Lamb, because in addition to being novelists, they had also taught it in high school for like 25 years. And Wally also talked a great deal about how the novel taught him how to write a novel, which was very interesting to hear. One of my greatest finds was Mark Childress who I knew about only one of his novels. And I ran into him at a book convention where I was there to interview Allan Gurganus and Lee Smith. And he didn't just love the novel, he grew up in the town where Harper Lee was born. He read it on the front porch of Miss Wandy Biggs's house, two doors down from Nell Harper Lee's house. And it is the reason he's a writer. So he was just somebody that serendipitously I ran into. Anna Quindlen had written about the novel before, so I wanted her.
• [00:46:29.92] And then I had my list. Of course I want to do an interview with Harper Lee. That didn't seem to be likely. Oh yeah. But then I had friends and family that I was looking to to help me tell the story. And so I interviewed some close friends of hers in New York, her sister, her ministerial friend the reverend in town. So I had my people that I hoped to get and some said yes and some said no.
• [00:46:59.77] I tried very hard to get a few Hollywood types, but they were impossible to get a response from. For instance, my close reading of People Magazine captions told me that Jake, I never knew his name right, Gillianhaul or Gyllenhall, his dogs, when you see him running in People Magazine on the Malibu beaches, his dogs are named Atticus and Boo. So of course I immediately wrote to his handlers. And you send the email, and then two seconds later, ping, the answer is in your email box saying no, no, no, sorry, he's not available, he's on location. And you're like really? Because you really asked him? Those are some people who didn't talk to me.
• [00:47:43.15] AUDIENCE: Have you had a chance to hear what Harper Lee's reactions are to challenges.
• [00:47:49.63] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: No. I mean, absent her telling us anything. She wrote one-- oh yes, actually. She did write one very hilarious good letter to the Richmond, Virginia editor who wrote the editorial saying he would send one to every kid in the county. And she was very grateful for the stand he took. And I don't have the thing in front of me, but she wrote some fairly funny lines about why anybody would challenge it.
• [00:48:24.89] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:48:30.49] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: The letter to the Hanover county. Yeah. You should be able, yeah, you should be able to get it. And it's also in a book that I think is still in print by a woman named Claudia Durst Johnson called Understanding and Analyzing To Kill a Mockingbird, and it's in there, too.
• [00:48:49.00] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
• [00:48:51.13] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Yes, I think it was called the Richmond Virginia Dispatch. Does that sound right? Yeah, yeah.
• [00:49:03.04] JENNY HOFFMAN: Questions for Josie or Mary?
• [00:49:09.72] AUDIENCE: I'm just fascinated by Harper Lee, as everybody is who reads To Kill a Mockingbird and the fact that she hasn't really talked about since then. In your research for this, did you kind of walk away with more of a picture of her or her story of what led up to this? I mean she was involved in the movie, for example, wasn't she?
• [00:49:30.66] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Very.
• [00:49:31.70] AUDIENCE: And so then what happened? Do we know about why she just--
• [00:49:34.84] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Well I think not. She drew a line in the sand in 1964 and just said I'm not talking to reporters anymore. But not talking to the press shouldn't be confused with being a recluse, because she's led a very full life. When I went into this, when I started the documentary, I found it impossible to believe that anybody that wrote like this wasn't writing again. I mean that wasn't writing all the time. That anyone who could write like this would just stop. I found it impossible to believe. Now I find it believable. I mean I think I understand it a little bit more. And look, she was a 31 year old, shy person from Alabama who'd been working as an airline ticket reservationist for eight years when she got her friends, Michael and Joy Brown gave her enough money to quit her job for one year so she could try to get her short stories together and get an agent, which is what happened. She continued to work on the novel for two more years. The editor was detached from all her other duties to really pull the reigns together. And I think everything she had went into this novel. And then the success was just unbelievably overwhelming. 2 ad 1/2 million copies in the first year and a half, plus everyone, plus the Pulitzer prize, plus the movie, in huge succession. She did have a great time doing the movie. And she had a great relationship with Horton Foote and with Gregory Peck for their whole lives.
• [00:51:20.05] But her sister, I can tell you what Alice said about it. Alice said that as time went on, people are writing, people are asking, people are, and she's not getting anything else done, because there's so much demand for her. She also had the experience of being misquoted, which she didn't enjoy, as most people don't. And Alice said she had a second, more philosophical problem with it which is she didn't think that a writer's place in society was to be recognizable. And it really bothered her that she was sort of being looked at as some kind of entertainer. And then '64 on, I think that a second novel, I think under the best of circumstances, is really hard if you've put a lot of your own personal experiences into the first one. And I think a lot of doors were open. And not only can you not top what you've done, you don't want to disappoint yourself.
• [00:52:26.38] Wally Lamb was very, very good about this. He was a person who had written this novel that was destined for obscurity, basically. It was called She's Come Undone and it sold 900 copies. And then Oprah picked it for her book club. And suddenly he has millions upon millions of readers. Fortunately, his second novel was finished when she picked the first one. She goes ahead and picks the second one. Now he's just huge. And he was very honest about trying to write the third one, and he said, you know, you're just sitting there with every expectation weighing on you, with people writing to you and saying, are you done yet? Anna Quindlen says this really well. She says I don't know if she couldn't do it, but I prefer to think she wouldn't do it, write a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird. or publish something. And her sister said that she continued to write, but that she didn't, Alice's quote was, she didn't put herself under the burden that she had when she was writing To Kill a Mockingbird. Hemingway said we all only have one story to tell. And there is a critic named Leslie Fiedler who says everybody only has one book in them; they usually write seven or eight. I've come to kind of admire what she did with her life after it. Is there anything else that I can tell you?
• [00:54:03.31] AUDIENCE: My little follow up that I thought of then was, as you saying, talking to the press should not be confused with being a recluse. Did she ever mentor any other writers? or
• [00:54:14.59] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Yeah, Mark Childress sent her his first novel, but she wrote him a beautiful letter, which he won't show me, about his novel. And she, I think, is very supportive of other writers that she knows. She's also done unbelievably good works completely anonymously. Lots of people have gone to college on Harper Lee and have no idea.
• [00:54:44.96] JENNY HOFFMAN: Questions?
• [00:54:54.03] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: I don't think she was like a happening southern belle, really. Look, her sister was one of the first women admitted to the Alabama bar in 1943. Their father was a very progressive person, I think, who let those girls go their own way and who accepted them utterly. I don't think they were walking around curtsying, I don't. So they may not have been fantastic catches in their day.
• [00:55:32.43] AUDIENCE: Did her sister marry?
• [00:55:34.32] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: No, no. There were four kids, three sisters. One Louise, Weezy, married and had several kids. And their brother died tragically at 31. It was at Maxwell air force base. He had a couple of kids, too. But as I say, I think they were pretty independent, well educated people.
• [00:56:08.51] AUDIENCE: It's one of my favorite books. I'm just wondering with the election of President Obama and things like that, do you wonder the significance of this book going forward? Like for children, like my niece born a few years ago, is it going to become almost irrelevant, I hate to say that.
• [00:56:26.00] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: That's a discussion that's coming up more and more at school, which is we don't really need this book. It's sort of the reverse of the banning. It's no wrong longer relevant, we live in an Obama presidency. But I think this book is; about judgment, all kinds of judgment. whether you're judging Bob Ewell or Boo Radley, and as long as there's racial profiling and any kind of intolerance, I think that To Kill a Mockingbird still tells a story we all know is true. And so far, eighth graders, at least the ones that I watched, read it that same way. Those kids are absolutely haunted by the fact that Tom Robinson is shot 17 times, that it's over kill. At least in New York, it's like the Amadou Dialo case. It resonates a lot with them. So I'm not seeing it read without relevance. And I don't expect it to be any time soon, although I could be completely wrong about that. I certainly have been before.
• [00:57:45.13] JENNY HOFFMAN: And I see someone up here had a question?
• [00:57:51.88] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: You again?
• [00:57:56.34] AUDIENCE: I just wanted say I really liked your comments about why she maybe didn't write a second book. And my comment is The Naked and the Dead and Catcher in the Rye.
• [00:58:08.20] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Yes. Well, in the case of J.D. Salinger, at least we know from reading The New York Times since he died that there are 16 things in his vault that are going to come.
• [00:58:17.34] AUDIENCE: But they should have been. They're holding out.
• [00:58:19.71] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Well, yeah, I guess.
• [00:58:27.61] AUDIENCE: Back to, if I'm understanding it, when your documentary is all together, and your book. Let's say the book covers much of what's in the documentary, but goes beyond it.
• [00:58:42.85] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Yeah. The book, basically I took all the interviews with everybody I did it and I just edited them down for sense and comprehension. And I wrote a little section explaining everything I knew about the novel. So you get everybody. You get all of Oprah, you get all of Tom Brokaw, in their entirety in the book.
• [00:59:06.76] AUDIENCE: I believe you said you'll include some photos in the book as well.
• [00:59:10.93] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Yeah.
• [00:59:12.27] AUDIENCE: Of the family?
• [00:59:13.58] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Yep, of the parents in that town and the family.
• [00:59:21.95] JENNY HOFFMAN: Any other questions for Mary or Josie? Mary, thank you very much.
• [00:59:28.88] MARY MCDONOUGH MURPHY: Thank you all! Thanks!