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Did Mills meet Mockingbird?

Harper Lee has chosen to step out of her self-imposed, almost 5-decade long silence, to reach out to the media and deny her cooperation for an intriguing new book written by journalist-author Marja Mills, about a wonderful 18-months that she got close to the famed one-book Pulitzer awardee and her elder sister, Alice. The controversy is likely to be good for the book though as the world sits up and wonders why Lee is distancing herself from the book when she did have a friendship with the author.

America’s most reclusive author, Harper Lee, the lady who has spent the last fifty years of her life avoiding all media, preferring to spend a life in isolation in the town where she was born, has startled and intrigued the world as she stepped out of her self-imposed silence recently to launch a scathing attack on the Marja Mills, the author of a new book that tantalisingly lifts the veil around the secret life of the author of To Kill A Mockingbird, possibly the single most important book that changed the social fabric of America.

Mills, a former Chicago Tribune reporter moved in 2001 to Lee’s childhood town of Monroeville where Lee grew up and continues to live and struck up a friendship with Lee’s elder sister Alice and gradually that friendship expanded to include Nelle (the author is known to her friends by that name) herself according to the author who launched her account of her the time she spent with the iconic writer, over an 18-month period when she lived next door to the Lee sisters.

The Mockingbird Next Door: Life With Harper Lee is a memoir about the fascinating time she spent with the two sisters and of her memory of sitting in a sunlit kitchen with the famed author and discussing, among other things, Truman Capote, Lee’s childhood friend who had a great impact on her life.

If controversy and media attention is what fuels the success of a book, Mills could not have asked for a better launch. Over the last fortnight not a day has passed when she has not been in some part of the media talking about the memorable years that she spent in close contact with Lee and her sister, in what she insists was a long and trusting relationship that gave her access to their home next door, their family stories and their friends.

Mills has vivid memories of the time she spent with the two sisters, going off for breakfast or grocery shopping and also of the first time she met with the notoriously people-shy Nelle.

The phone rang in my little room at the Best Western motel on the outskirts of Monroeville, and I picked it up. “Hello?”

“Miss Mills, this is Harper Lee. You’ve made quite an impression on Miss Alice; I wonder if we might meet.”

“She had said this will be for a visit, not an interview, so I knew this was not this interview with Harper Lee that people had been seeking all those years. ... It was thrilling and ... it was just unnerving not knowing what to expect,” says Mills. It was therefore confusing and surprising when Lee came out strongly against her one-time friend, releasing a statement earlier this week: “Miss Mills befriended my elderly sister, Alice. It did not take long to discover Marja’s true mission; another book about Harper Lee. I was hurt, angry and saddened, but not surprised. I immediately cut off all contact with Miss Mills, leaving town whenever she headed this way. [...] Rest assured, as long as I am alive any book purporting to be with my cooperation is a falsehood.”

A bewildered Mills is now dealing with the controversy that has erupted from the iconic author’s statement.

“I can only speak to the truth, that Nelle Harper Lee and Alice F. Lee were aware I was writing this book and my friendship with both of them continued during and after my time in Monroeville. The stories they shared with me that I recount in the book speak for themselves. The written letter I have from Alice Lee, which she sent May 2011 in response to the original letter issued in Nelle’s name, makes clear that Nelle Harper Lee and Alice gave me their blessing.... In addition, Nelle’s good friend, Tom Butts, who I had the pleasure of getting to know during the course of writing this book and who remains a friend to this day, is also on record in support of my work.”

Mills is referring here to the Lee’s 2011 denial that she encouraged the author to write this book. At that time Lee’s elder sister Alice had written to Mills saying she (Lee) could not see or hear properly and was unable to remember stuff and that was possibly why she had signed the statement denying her blessing for the book.

The entire controversy, meanwhile, is making the literary world as well as book lovers wonder why the famed author chose to come out of her reclusion at this point. What has added to the mystery surrounding Lee’s life is her failure to write anything else after she wrote her only book. Much of her life she has had to live with suggestions in the media that the celebrated book was written not by her but ghost written by her pal, Truman Capote.

At the cost of sounding like a contrarian, we would like to toss this idea into the public space. If, as Mills says, the Lee sisters were good friends of hers and they had a trusting relationship, is this Lee’s way of helping her friend? Knowing how fascinated and intrigued the world is with everything concerning her life, she probably knows that a controversy concerning her will ensure the book will land on the top of the best-seller list in no time at all. Is that what is happening here? Is she sitting in her Monreville house right now, having a coffee, watching talk show hosts interview her friend and smiling to herself?

We will never know.

But what we do know is what Mills has to say about her memoir: “This doesn’t examine every part of [Lee’s] life beginning to end. It’s really more a chance for readers to have this extraordinary experience, which was what it felt like to sit at the kitchen table having coffee with Nelle Harper and talking about Truman Capote and literature… this was never gonna be a biography, but this is the book that [the Lee sisters] very much helped me shape. And [Harper Lee] was very clear. She would say to me, “Now you put that in there,” meaning put that in the book. Or, “Now that’s off the record,” and she knew I would respect that. I didn’t feel entitled to more than she wanted to tell me.”

The book might not have Harper Lee’s blessings but thankfully for Mills her publisher, Penguin, is standing behind her and offering full support.

— sudhamenon2006@gmail.com