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Viking, 2005

Sue Monk Kidd spoke recently in Raleigh, North Carolina on the penultimate evening of a 33-city, 51-day nationwide book tour for The Mermaid Chair, her second novel. Sponsored by Quail Ridge Books, one of the nation's finest independent bookstores, she appeared in the Christina and Seby Jones Chapel at Meredith College. The Chapel was packed with some 400 fans, filling the main floor, the balcony and parts of the floor.

There was an almost palpable buzz of excitement as the crowd awaited the Queen Bee. Standing in the pulpit under the overarching vault, she was backed by the exposed pipes of the organ. It was an appropriate setting given the underlying, but subtle, religiosity of her books, including two highly introspective memoirs.

The Secret Life of Bees, Kidd's first novel, continues to be a phenomenon. To date, it has sold more than 3.25 million copies, and shows no signs of slowing. She noted that when she began her tour for Bees in 2002, perhaps 12 people, maybe 20, would show up. In Raleigh at Quail Ridge Books, 90 showed up and really made her feel that her novel was on the way.

At age 42 Jessie Sullivan, the protagonist of The Mermaid Chair, falls in love with a Benedictine monk, Brother Thomas (Whit in his previous life). This situation fits her theory of what to do in a novel: "take a bad situation and make it worse." The novel explores the relationships between Jessie and her husband Hugh, Jessie and Brother Thomas, Jessie and her mother, and Jessie's search for something else.

This "something else" is linked with Kidd's exploration of the sacred feminine quest as outlined in her memoir When the Heart Waits. In Bees Lilly needed a big lap to fall into; in Chair, Jessie needed a home within herself, not just within her family. Kidd noted that no Southern novel can exist without a family. Add in Kidd's sense of place, and you have the elements basic to a Southern novel.

The inspiration for this novel came from a chance comment from a friend who had just come back from Cornwall, England, where she saw a mermaid chair in a church sanctuary. Kidd said to her, "I'm going to write a novel, and it'll be called The Mermaid Chair." She had no thoughts of characters, just an image of a chair in a church. The creative life, she said, provides vivid, provocative images she wants to "play with."

She envisioned dualities above and below, the church and the mermaid, the sensual and the spiritual. She saw a married woman ("Make it worse and more interesting!") for whom love has become a crisis of the soul, a summons to a place inside her self. Jessie is searching for self-belonging, self-completion. The summons is to dive into her self and swim her way home. Kidd tried to figure out for Jessie the confluence of authentic love and freedom at the same time.

Kidd characterized her favorite scene as beginning on Hepzibah's porch. The women enter the ocean together, tying knots in a string, metaphorically and literally binding themselves together. Despite all this emphasis on women, men are not peripheral to the story, she says. Hugh, Jessie's husband, is enlightened in many ways. Whit is in a theological crisis, and goes to a monastery to confront the crisis. Jessie's father, unlike Lilly's father in Bees, poured goodness and love into his family.

The Mermaid Chair explores the theme of marriage through the motifs of a crisis in faith, coping with loss, and ordinary married love versus sublime soul-mate love. Her work was informed by lines from a poem by Rilke: "To love is to learn to love. To love is to endure." Lines from a David White poem ("I was told once in a whisper that it cuts things together") are reflected in the glue and irritants/solvents in Jessie and Hugh's marriage. Aren't married couples told to "cleave" to one another? This is an interesting idea since "cleave" means both to cut apart and hold together.

The Mermaid Chair is, ultimately, a vision quest. Jessie is trying to find herself; Brother Thomas (Whit) is trying to find his place and work through his doubts. Jessie's mother has lost her way, her self, because she is sick. Nevertheless, she is a link between Jessie and the monastery, and a terrible secret which has afflicted Jessie since her childhood.