by Sue Monk Kidd
One day when I was a school librarian, a copy of Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees mysteriously appeared in my work mailbox. It had been published more than a dozen years earlier; I was vaguely aware that it had made a big splash and by then had already been made into a film, but I had never read it. Since I was the “Book Lady” at school, it was common that orphaned books naturally made their way to me, usually anonymously like this one did, but this arrival soon revealed itself as the work once again of my Divine Librarian.
Monk is a deeply spiritual novelist, and the primary message of that novel for me was this: we each have a physical mother to whom we were born, but one of our life’s tasks is to lift from her all of the impossible expectations and unreasonable blame for all the ways in which she inevitably failed us, because she is or was just a flawed human being like the rest of us. We must instead seek and find the divine mother energy in our own heart and soul that can pick up where our human mother by necessity left off, and depend on that energy to nourish and guide us in ways our human mother never could have, while being grateful that she did the best she could. My Divine Librarian somehow knew that that message was exactly what I needed to hear at that time in my life: as a mother myself, as a daughter, and as the loved one of other children of other mothers. Reading that book at the time it arrived was the perfect example of the message it carried. I felt completely taken care of and guided.
So needless to say, I am a big fan of Sue Monk Kidd! I found Writing Creativity and Soul on the New Books shelf at the library (just published last month), and ordered the audio edition on the Libby app. It is the memoir of her life as a writer, a compendium of her inspirations and teachers, and her guidebook to the craft. I did not know that The Secret Life of Bees was her debut novel, published in her fifties, which as a writer myself I find astonishing, encouraging, and a little intimidating! This was a great read — if you are not a writer yourself some of it would be pretty “inside baseball,” but if you are reading this review you are likely a reader, and an appreciator of the craft. Now that I am reminded of this author I am happy to know there are books of hers I haven’t read, all of which can be found on her Goodreads profile page — they are now all going on my list.