“There’s two really frightening parts about being a writer,” Kathryn smiles, “facing the page and facing your audience; they’re both hard but we have to do both of them. “I was that little nerdy kid writing little stories,” she laughs, “I wrote my first story in third grade, called The Little Ant. Kathryn instead hails another Mississippi writer. The rescue came through Julie Grau, of Spiegel & Grau, the independent New York publisher that eventually brought The Calamity Club into the world. “I went back to the scrappier writer that I was when I wrote The Help,” Kathryn explains, before adding, “It’s harder to find a good editor than it is a man!