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Sue Monk Kidd
Sue Monk Kidd was born on August 12, 1948, in Sylvester, Georgia, where her family has lived for four generations (Blais 1). She grew up in the 1950s and 60s in Southwest Georgia. She lived in Sylvester, a small town tucked among the pine-lands and peanut fields.She graduated with a B.S. degree from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth in 1970 with a major in nursing. However, things changed over time, and now she has become a writer. Today, Sue Monk Kidd is living in a salt marsh near Charleston, South Carolina with her husband, Sandy, and black lab, Lily (Kidd, "Life of Bees" 1-2).
Kidd states that when she was growing up, their most plentiful resource, next to family roots, was stories. Ms. Kidd has loved writing stories throughout her lifetime. However, when she was about sixteen, for no known reason, she completely stopped writing. She never even thought about writing again until her English professor asked her why she was a nursing major, when she was born to write. Around the age thirty, shortly after she married, her interest in writing began to show up again. She enrolled in writing classes ready to create something out of her imagination. In 1997, she began to write her first novel, The Secret Life of Bees, set in South Carolina in 1964. It was sold to Viking press in 2000 and published January 28, 2002. Todat, she still spends the majority of her time either writing or reading (Kidd, "Life of Bees" 1-2).
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Why The Secret Life of Bees?
Kidd was a teenager during that extraordinary era. She still has memories of freedom voter registration drives, the race to the moon, and many others. Her goal was to give an authentic rendering of the black experience, as told through the eyes of 14-year-old Lily, who is white. For Kidd, the book is "layered with many levels" -- the sanctuary and power of women, the civil rights movement, mysteries between mothers and daughters, and the divine Black Madonna (Blais 1-2).
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| Sue Monk Kidd's first book |
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