An Ode to Miss Nelle Lee

My first time with Harper Lee: My oft-underappreciated Sophomore English Teacher, Ms. Black (who will forever remain insanely lovable to me and to all else lovably insane) assigned us the book To Kill a Mockingbird. I had no prior knowledge of what it was other than the source of many attempted puns on the title and the fact that it had no substantial tutorial to offer on how exactly to kill a mockingbird. It was just another title I had been associated with peripherally throughout my life. I remember Miss Black stopping my world whenever she spoke about the man, Atticus Finch: Courageous, decent, honorable, moral, a paragon of virtue. At the time I had been reading every Dune book I could get my hands on and was a huge subscriber to the Atreides school of thought of honor so I was very interested in getting to know this Atticus I heard so much about. We had six weeks of our semester to get acquainted with this man, but to Miss Black we had not only six weeks, but the next six decades of our lives to fall in love with this man as she had.

For me the love was instant. Not just of Atticus, but of Scout, Jem, Dill, Tom Robinson, Mrs. Dubose, and especially Boo Radley. I was so captivated I read the entire book in two weeks. Atticus was the first man other than my father who I truly loved. He was bigger than any actor I wanted to aspire to be, bigger than any author whose career I wanted to replicate and surpass, and far greater than any person I had ever met in my life. At the age of 16, I already placed myself in his larger-than-life shoes. I sought out to fit the image of this man so bestowed with admiration in the hearts of lawyers, fathers, politicians, school children, and pets alike. He was the dream role I could never play, but would never stop auditioning for.I wanted to be Atticus Finch so badly, I carried that weight of expectation on me for nearly 10 years. Through this I realized that my drive to emulate my great literary hero was made possible through this great author. It is a testament to her undeniable strength as a writer and an empathizer of the human heart that I can read Boo Radley's last scene and still be brought to tears ten years later. She was the rest of my high school life and sometime beyond that. Her book became a focal point of the first play I ever wrote and directed, and her characters became touchstones to my personality and self-evaluation. I was given a 50th anniversary edition of her novel as a college graduation gift. The world cried out to give us more of her yet she remained literature's greatest unobtainable lover of the 21st century. I was one among the billions of suitors. As a writer, she came in and out of my life silently, yet forever made a sound impression.

10 years later...

My second time with Harper Lee: I was a bookseller at Barnes and Nobles when I had heard the news that she was going to publish another novel for the first time in 50 years. I was JUBULANT. I was going out on another date with Harper Lee! A woman with children. Would she still be the same woman I met on our first rendezvous all those years ago? How much have her children changed since I first met them? What would I wear? I had heard much dissent about the new racist Atticus in the months leading up to the release of To Kill A Mockingbird. As the months became weeks and days I had the most frightening of all epiphanies: What if the man I had placed above all others my entire life, the human being I wanted to be since I was a kid, is less than the hero I made him out to be? What if Atticus is a fraud? It wasn't a question of whether or not I was afraid of finding out. I needed to know. I read all of Go Set A Watchman in three days. I heard the collective sound of millions of hearts around the world ripping at the seams and sinews desperately holding on the broken pieces. We were on the same page as Scout: Her pain was our pain, we shared and empathized with her disillusionment. Our Atticus was fallible; he was flawed, he wasn't perfect. For me, the five stages of grief were never more openly present in a novel than this one. Harper Lee, the woman who I had fallen madly in love with through her work, had broken my heart in prose.

About a week later...

My third time with Harper Lee: I had my eyes on a new biography written on Harper Lee over the last year called The Mockingbird Next Door. The only biography of it's kind given consent by the reclusive author, one of the last legendary recluses of our time. I had my time to come to terms with the Atticus Harper had written, and the lessons I had learned from her through that. When I met Harper Lee and her children as a young teenager, I had seen them--as children do--as an idealized version of who they were. I had fallen in love with the best parts of themselves and outright neglected to even acknowledge the possibility there may be negative sides, human sides, multifaceted sides. I had placed my hero on a pedestal and in doing so I learned the same lesson as Scout had learned:  Even our most revered hero's are as human as we are. Our Atticus was fallible; he was flawed; he wasn't perfect, but I still love him regardless. I dug into this last book "by" Harper Lee to get to know the woman whose characters had motivated, challenged, and inspired me for the last decade of my life. In doing so I learned how she was raised, how she grew up, who her sister was, how she lived her life, why she wrote, and why Harper Lee does what Harper Lee damn well pleases. As the best of writers do, I fell in love with her all over again.

Seven months later...

My last time with Harper Lee: I found out Harper Lee died today. I didn't cry as I always thought I would do, but perhaps the reality hasn't quite hit me yet. I'm more awed by how often she has been by my side all these years, quietly changing my life, teaching me how to aspire, how to accept reality, how to "walk in someone else's skin," and how to unconditionally love. I still love Mr. Atticus Finch, as much as I love someone whose lifestyle isn't agreeable to mine, but whom I am irrevocably changed for the better by. Nowadays I'm more content and driven than ever to fit no other man's shoes but my own. It is the greatest testament to Harper Lee's legacy as an artist, that she created the most inspirational and unobtainable hero of all time, and within the same lifetime, brought him down to the status of man for everyone to realize we are capable of being our own best hero (or something like that, this is a blog, not a Deepak Chopra book).

 She was the last of the living high school book authors. For eight years I watched from the digital sidelines as news of Ray Bradbury, J.D. Salinger, and other legendary talents I had grown up with transitioned from those I know to those I knew, knowing that someday my favorite high school author would be joining them. In my opinion, she was the best of all of them. Like most great artists, I never had the pleasure of meeting Harper Lee except through her work, but like all people who come into contact with a great artist's work, I had the pleasure of experiencing Harper Lee. Three times. Of all the relationships I have ever had, hers has been the longest. She was the first woman I ever let into my heart, and among the first to change my life. Thank you, Miss Nelle.

~Michael~