A daughter of the South breaks free as a hit feminist novelist

She’s an elegant thing, really, this lovely Southern lady who caused such a ruckus a couple of years ago with the debut of her startling first novel, “The Secret Life of Bees.” Sue Monk Kidd, whose first piece of fiction shot quickly onto the New York Times bestseller list where it’s been planted for 85 weeks [selling more than 3.5 million copies], hardly knows what to attribute all this fortunate fame to.

“I’d just hoped my little story would find a nice audience somewhere, and I could continue writing fiction,” she says in a slight Dixie drawl. Sitting in the lobby of the Four Seasons Hotel, her Southern California stop on a 33-city book tour for her new book, “The Mermaid Chair,” she shakes her head. “Forget ‘wild,’ ” she says. “Never in my weirdest dreams could I imagine something so big.”

“Bees” -- the shorthand the book’s fans have adopted -- is set in the racial tumult of the ‘60s in a small, fictitious Georgia town. It chronicles the impassioned Lily, a 14-year-old in search of her lost mother -- and her lost self. It hit such a profound chord with readers, particularly women, it was -- and still is -- the sort of book people hand to one another and say, “You’ve got to read this.”

On this day, Kidd is in Los Angeles in a chic black pantsuit and large, luscious amethyst jewelry, along with her husband, Sandy, a retired marriage and family counselor, to read from “The Mermaid Chair.” Set on a fictitious barrier island called Egret off the South Carolina coast, it renews Kidd’s fascination with the elemental topic of her previous work: the journey of the female soul toward health in a deeply unhealthy and often antagonistic world.

In this one, Jessie Sullivan, a 42-year-old wife and mother, is in midlife crisis when her psychologically disturbed and devout Catholic mother begins mutilating herself. This brings Sullivan home and on a journey of self-discovery via love with a Benedictine monk from Egret’s monastery. The mermaid chair figures prominently as a spiritual icon, much like the bees and the Black Madonna in her first book.

The inevitable question and quandary: Did she feel any pressure to live up to the expectations “The Secret Life of Bees” had set while writing this one?

“If I tried to live up to the miracle that was ‘Bees,’ I couldn’t write a single sentence,” she replies. “I did have that paralysis for a few days when a friend innocently suggested that I should be afraid, after all. I just took my Lab out to the rocks and sea outside my house and by the time I came back, I felt it was OK.”

Currently in the No. 1 and No. 3 spots on the L.A. Times and New York Times bestseller lists, respectively, “The Mermaid Chair” has received warm reviews -- though some grouse that the book reworks her earlier female themes without the same dynamism. One online posting suggested it was penned with “a kind of ‘Bridges of Madison County’ glaze.” Regardless, the book has sold more than 500,000 copies its first month in print.

Kidd, 56, claims she doesn’t read reviews, good or bad [“the best advice my agent ever gave me was, ‘Don’t believe the good reviews or the bad reviews, just believe what your readers say’ ”], and doesn’t troll Anne Rice-like on Amazon.com to check out consumer reviews.

“It is all about the work and in that I’m very confident,” says Kidd, her arms flashing silver bracelets. “I’ve been writing for a long time, and I know my voice. I’m ‘in my skin,’ as they say. This work is a much more complex story, in many ways, than ‘The Secret Life of Bees.’ But, yes, some of the themes are similar, which I didn’t realize until I was finished -- honest!

“What I’m most interested in,” she adds, “is the transformation and movement of the soul, the untold vulnerability of the human heart, how redemption comes from community, not this rugged individualism we’re so imbued with. It’s a message that’s good to be out there.”

Kidd, who says she’s wanted to be a writer since early childhood, was raised in Sylvester, a tiny southern Georgia town. It’s the kind of place where she walked to Grandma’s house for weekly manners lessons, and where her 82-year-old parents and two of her three brothers still live.

Though she was raised a strict Southern Baptist, she describes herself now as “an orthodox eclectic.” Although the South, she notes, never leaves a writer, nor does a Southern Baptist childhood. She recalls with laughter such wonders as the ‘salvation gloves’ -- white gloves that had the five points of evangelism on the fingers, like crib notes, and lessons on good marriages, with women placed firmly behind men and far behind God.

What hurt her most, she recalls, was how God seemed to “everywhere be male, and women were so far down at second place. But it was the kind of hurt girls just swallow and learn to live with, until it can’t be lived with any longer,” which gave rise to her own life crisis as she turned 30.

“I’d taken the traditional role,” she sighs. “I wasn’t brave enough to say I’m going to write for a living, so I studied nursing,” working through part of her 20s in nursing -- all while marrying and having two children.

“On my 30th birthday, I announced at breakfast to my husband and kids sitting in their highchairs that my life was going to change, and I was going to become a writer.” She laughs at the thought. “But that was an important turning point for me even if no one else in the room had the slightest notion of what I was on about.”

Popular as a nonfiction mainstream Christian writer for Guidepost magazine, Kidd also wrote the spiritual memoirs “God’s Joyful Surprise,” “When the Heart Waits” and “The Dance of the Dissident Daughter.” They detail her inner transformation from dutiful patriarchal daughter and Confederate Gracious Lady to “loudmouthed feminist spiritual seeker.” The last book, full of tender anger, is a journey toward embracing feminist theology and the Divine Feminine.

The rumbles that arose from her change in direction were initially seismic and her relationship with her traditionally Baptist husband took a beating. “I don’t think he understood the depths of my yearnings, but to his credit, he rolled with the punches,” she says. “Of course, when a wife of 20 years wakes up, it’s scary. He often wished I’d cease and desist but that never happened. We’ve both changed, for the better, I think.”

It was that search, that need for an “inner homecoming to the feminine self,” that drove her writing, particularly “Dance of the Dissident Daughter.” “To me, it’s not a luxury,” she says of that fierce longing to become her true self, it was a necessity. It is a theme strongly present in both her works of fiction.

She suggests women react so strongly to her characters because of this elemental and universal feminine quest. After all, the characters who inhabit her work are earthy, fleshy women, so dissimilar to the images perpetuated by Hollywood.

Yet, Hollywood has come calling on “The Secret Life of Bees,” “though it hasn’t been formally green-lit yet, and I’m learning that’s an important word in Los Angeles,” Kidd says, smiling. “It’s not really in my hands, anyhow. What clout do I have?” she giggles and shrugs, a Georgia girl truly believing she has none.

She claims her memoirs liberated her future fictional characters: “It’s a strange thing about writing a memoir,” she says. “In writing about yourself you can somehow liberate yourself from yourself -- and then plumb your imagination in fiction. People ask me will I write more memoir? I think so. Some people just have a need to record their lives.

“It all comes down to being mindful, really,” she says. “Mindful that I’m alive in a very mysterious and astonishing world, and I want to be present to it all: my relationships, my work as a writer. When I write, I pray, I think, but not in the way some people think of prayer.

“Thomas Merton once wrote that the birds were his prayer; the natural world around him -- how everything can be an experience of the divine. And I’d say I aspire to that. But mostly, I just want to tell a good story.”