The world calls her Harper Lee. I do too, but only when I’m with people. Privately, when I think of her — and that is embarrassingly often — I call her Nelle. That’s because the real name of the woman who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird is Nelle Harper Lee, simply Nelle to friends. And I want to be her friend. Badly.

So you can imagine the cocktail of emotions that coursed through me when I learnt that 55 years after the publication of her first and only novel, Nelle is coming out with a sequel, set 20 years on, in the 1950s. The tomboy Scout is now a grown woman, who comes back from New York to Maycomb and grapples with her father Atticus’s views on society, among other things.

Ah, Atticus. While Nelle’s first novel (wow, is that how Mockingbird will be referred to from now?!) is Scout’s coming-of-age story and a searing commentary on race relations in the American South, my hero remains Scout’s lawyer father Atticus Finch. I read Mockingbird aged 13 and precociously informed my mother that when I am a parent, I’ll be one like Atticus. That hasn’t changed in the two decades between then and now.

I have never been to America, but I know that whenever I go, I will make a trip to Monroeville in Alabama, which served as the model for the fictional Maycomb where Scout grows up, befriends Dill and has her Boo Radley adventures with Dill and her older brother Jem.

Monroeville is the sleepy little town where Nelle lived with her father A.C. Lee and elder sister Alice Lee. A.C. Lee and Alice, both lawyers, were the inspiration behind Atticus, while Nelle modelled Scout after herself. In the new book, Go Set A Watchman, Scout comes back from New York. I immediately connect the dots to the fact that Nelle had herself shifted to New York to write and even held a job there. Even after she moved back to Monroeville to care for Alice, she kept disappearing to the Big Apple for a few months every year. In New York, Gregory Peck, who won an Oscar for playing Atticus, was Nelle’s friend.

Speaking of friends, there was a real-life inspiration for Dill too – the famous writer and filmmaker, Truman Capote. He used to come for his holidays to an aunt in Monroeville, just as Dill does in the book, and Nelle and he became buddies, a friendship that grew into adulthood. Nelle even helped Truman research the Clutter family massacre for writing In Cold Blood, though she was reportedly miffed that he didn’t acknowledge her contribution sufficiently. The friendship didn’t end well and Nelle is said to have said some pretty harsh things about Truman in later years. Will the new novel have Dill? Will Scout fall out with Dill, just like Nelle and Truman? Oh God no, do I even want to read this book?!

And what about Boo Radley, the mystery man of Mockingbird? Arthur Boo Radley clearly had some form of autism, we can tell that now. Will Watchman watch over an ageing Boo as well?

There’s also the matter of consent. Harper Lee is 88, with severely impaired eyesight and hearing, and lives in an assisted living centre near Monroeville. She only communicates through her lawyer and there was much legal wrangling over consent when journalist Marja Mills published what she claimed was an authorised biography of Nelle recently. I wonder if Nelle really wanted her very first work, unedited and clearly unworthy of publishing back then, out in the world, a world she shunned since 1965 because it hounded her too much? 
Well, even as all these thoughts and doubts swirl in my head, I am pre-ordering my copy of the Watchman. Hell, when it comes to Nelle, as Nerdfighters would say, ‘Frankly, I’d read your grocery lists’! 

 

Lee apart, here are five other authors we wish had written more than one novel