By Jennifer Brett

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Kathryn Stockett’s debut novel, the summer’s literary sleeper hit and darling of book clubs everywhere, has been steadily marching up The New York Times Bestseller List.

She never thought anyone would read it.

“I’m floored,” said Stockett, author of the beautiful, heartbreaking and wildly popular book “The Help.”

“I don’t even know sometimes how to respond. Strangers call me from out of the blue. People e-mail me from south Alabama to South Africa. I just got an e-mail from New Zealand,” she said.

For the handful of you who have neither read “The Help” nor gotten pulled into an animated conversation among its devotees, it is set in Jackson, Miss., at the cusp of the civil rights era. Its protagonists are two maids, the loving Aibileen and sassy Minny, and the young writer, Skeeter, who reaches across class and racial boundaries to chronicle their experience.

“Skeeter was the hardest character for me to write,” Stockett said of a child of privilege who breaks with her Junior League buddies in befriending Aibileen and Minny. “She was dealing with such a tricky subject. I had to write her a couple of different ways. On the one hand, I needed her to sound naive enough to approach such a taboo subject. On the other hand, I didn’t want her to be stupid.”

Stockett appears with author Susan Rebecca White at a new Southern authors session at the AJC Decatur Book Festival. A Jackson native who lived in New York for years before relocating to Atlanta, Stockett began writing the book as a creative outlet. “I wrote it purely for me and finally had the guts to show it to my mother and my writing group,” she said. “I was terrified when I realized it was going to be published.”

Stockett drew the most inspiration from her family’s maid, a loving woman named Demetrie, who helped raise her. Some of Stockett’s distant relatives objected to parts of the book, in which some of the town’s wealthy white women install separate toilets in their homes for their African-American domestic employees or loll by the pool at their segregated country club while maids sweat in their uniforms.

“The stories that mirror the truth a little too much,” Stockett explained.

The film rights to “The Help” have been optioned by filmmaker and fellow Mississippian Tate Taylor, and Stockett hopes to see it on screen in a few years. Given that it took her five years to write the book and nearly 50 rejections before she had anyone interested in publishing “The Help,” it was pure serendipity that its surge in popularity coincided with one of the summer’s big race-relations headlines. It was No. 8 on the Times’ best-seller list the week Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home by a white police officer investigating a reported burglary, and has since climbed to No. 3.

“I never intended to teach anybody anything,” Stockett said. “I’m not the right person to be setting an example to anyone. If it helps open their eyes, that’s wonderful.

“I’m not one to harbor on the past and moan and groan about how things were. We can look back at where we’ve been and shake our heads and be really proud of the progress we’ve made.”

Decatur Book Fest

Kathryn Stockett, author of “The Help”

Book festival appearance: 3 p.m. Saturday, “New Voices of the South,” Decatur Presbyterian Sanctuary Stage

Web site: www.kathrynstockett.com