The Truth of Tides & Mockingbirds by Amber Leigh Williams

Gregory Peck and Harper Lee

The literary world has lost a couple of icons over the last few months. As a girl, I spent several years with my family on a quiet street in Monroeville, Alabama. It is known as the literary capital of Alabama because the late, great Harper Lee herself was born and raised there.

Before she wrote her southern gothic and Pulizer-worthy novel, To Kill a Mockingbird (published in 1960), she went to Huntington College in Montgomery before attending the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. (My grandfather later coached basketball at Huntington and went on to earn his doctorate from Alabama.) She became close friends with fellow author Truman Capote. Both fashioned a fictional character after the other. She also befriended actor Gregory Peck who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Atticus Finch in the film adaptation of Mockingbird. Peck’s grandson was admittedly named after her and his son tells the story of how Peck wore a pocket watch that belonged to Lee’s father and was later gifted to him by the author the night he won the Academy Award. (Many scholars hold that Lee’s father, a lawyer, was the inspiration behind Atticus Finch.)

After Mockingbird’s success, Lee widely withdrew from public life and didn’t publish another novel until the recent sequel Go Set the Watchman in 2015, though she did write several articles and essays in between. In 2007, she was awarded the highest civilian award in the United States, the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2010, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts. In a letter to Oprah Winfrey in 2006, Lee wrote, “Now, 75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.” If the literary world could coin its own patron saint, this lady would be on the short list. 

I often wonder if I ever sat down to dinner in a restaurant with my family in Monroeville and Harper Lee was only a few tables away. Or if I ever accompanied my mother to the grocery store where Harper Lee, too, was shopping. It seems likely. To this day, Monroeville maintains more of a small town than a city feel. When I read To Kill a Mockingbird in 8th grade, Lee quickly became one of the many authors I admired. Knowing she, too, started life in Monroeville helped encourage me to one day pursue my dreams of publication. If Harper could do it, why couldn’t I? Although I never knew or met her, her death in February felt personal.

Last month, the news of Pat Conroy’s death also came as a blow. A poignant, leading voice in southern literature, he had a turbulent childhood, developed an early love of sports, and became a teacher, much like Tom Wingo, the lead character of his fifth novel, The Prince of Tides (published in 1986). In 1998, he married author Cassandra King, his third wife, who he lived alongside in Beaufort, South Carolina until his passing at the age of 70.

After hearing of Conroy’s death, I consulted my dog-eared copy of The Prince of Tides, much as I had turned to my To Kill a Mockingbird paperback the month before. While I remembered Mockingbird and vividly how I felt about it, The Prince of Tides was another story. I tried to understand why I had no real memory of what its pages held or whether they had impacted me positively or negatively so I decided to give it another go.

At first, The Prince of Tides somewhat mirrors another favorite book, Boy’s Life by Robert R. McCammon. Both take place in the south. Both tell of turbulent events in the small town life of young boys. Both are written in beautiful hands. Conroy's writing in particular took my breath away for the second time. The first chapter of The Prince of Tides flowed through me and I was easily gripped by the story. However, gripping quickly became heart-wrenching. I couldn’t stop reading, but I remembered why I had forgotten it—or chosen to forget it. It’s painful—a deeply, deeply painful rendering my former adolescent self was clearly not ready to endure. Hence, the blocking out process that followed....

It occurred to me after finishing The Prince of Tides that most of the books I read in high school were along the same vein. I ruminated over this with my sister as we counted up the novels and plays that had come to us via our state education. For starters, as freshmen, we read ill-fated Romeo and Juliet. Then we progressed onto The Crucible, Our Town, Death of a Salesman, Les Misérables, The Count of Monte Cristo, Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Their Eyes Were Watching God, The Great Gatsby, The Grapes of Wrath, All the King’s Men, The Scarlet Letter…. We noted there were a few light-hearted romps in between. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, for instance. But as early as jr. high, my reading list included heavy subject matter the likes of The Diary of Anne Frank, Number the Stars, The Hatchet, and Farewell to Manzanar. While I enjoyed a great many of these books, looking back, it’s really no wonder that I lavished Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility when I encountered them in 12th Grade Literature 0r that I turned to the lovely escape of romance novels in my free time.

However, while my friends and I very often grumbled about how little our public school educations were preparing us for the reality that was set to befall us after graduation, I realize now in light of all this that perhaps we were wrong. While, yes, the art of balancing a checkbook has become somewhat archaic and the painful Algebra III and Pre-Cal courses I endured (with tutors) have done me little good thus far, the literary requirements are another story. By large, these tales of misfortune and woe were a subtle training ground for the more hard-hitting realities of life as well as a glimpse into the complexities of human nature.

As a child, school taught me my love of books and words. Through these books, I grew to understand more about the world than anything else until I entered into adult life. Thanks to those bright, wordy stars like Harper and Pat's, I began a lifelong love affair with all things literary and this is my toast to them. Cheers!

Amber Leigh Williams is a Harlequin Superromance author who lives on the Gulf Coast. A southern girl at heart, she lives for beach days, the smell of real books, and spending time with her husband and their two young children. When she’s not keeping up with rambunctious little ones (and two large dogs), she can usually be found reading a good book or cooking up something new in her kitchen. Amber is represented by the D4EO Literary Agency. Find out more about Amber and her writing at www.amberleighwilliams.com!