On today’s show, it’s Writers on a New England Stage with Sue Monk Kidd, recorded live at The Music Hall in Portsmouth. The author of The Secret Life of Bees explores the roots of American racism with The Invention of Wings, a novel about the unlikely alliance between a southern woman and a slave.
"I don’t think we’ve resolved this wound. It’s a deep and bitter wound in America. And until we can fully resolve that, I don’t know how we’re ever going to change the human heart with this matter."
We’ll talk with her about that legacy, growing up in the south, and why a white novelist would dare to write as a black slave.
"We’re at a place where we have to begin to empathetically tell stories across divides and bridges, and that we should be more concerned with inclusion than appropriation."
Broadcast Sponsored by Fiduciary Trust of New England
Writers on a New England Stage is a partnership of NHPR and The Music Hall in Portsmouth.
From the Publisher:
From the celebrated author of The Secret Life of Bees, The Invention of Wings is a magnificent novel about two unforgettable American women. Writing at the height of her narrative and imaginative gifts, Sue Monk Kidd presents a masterpiece of hope, daring, the quest for freedom, and the desire to have a voice in the world. Hetty “Handful” Grimke, an urban slave in early nineteenth century Charleston, yearns for life beyond the suffocating walls that enclose her within the wealthy Grimke household. The Grimke’s daughter, Sarah, has known from an early age she is meant to do something large in the world, but she is hemmed in by the limits imposed on women.
