How Bees and Mermaid are Alike and “The House of the Mother Within”

When people discover I've written a new novel - “The Mermaid Chair” - often the first question they ask me is: 'Will it be similar to The Secret Life of Bees?'

My answer is: 'No and yes'

Mostly no- because outwardly the stories in the two novels couldn't be more different. One is a fourteen year old girl's coming of age story, which explores mothers and daughters, race relations, and the magic of finding family in unexpected places. The other is a love story about a 42 year old woman and deals with women's awakenings, marriage, and the powerful intersections of spiritual and sensual love.

So how could I ever include yes in my answer? Because inwardly the stories are surprisingly alike. At the heart of both novels lies a motif of sacred feminine quest. In The Secret Life of Bees, for instance, Lily runs away from home in search of her mother and a place of love and nurture. But in a larger sense, she is yearning for a divine mothering presence, a big, eternal, feminine lap to climb into. Lily is really searching for home, in both a literal and symbolic way. In “The Mermaid Chair”, Jessie also flees home in search of something profoundly sacred- her own feminine soul. She yearns for home, too, but in a more complex way than Lily. She's trying to come home to herself, to the place inside of deep self-belonging.

I was nearly halfway finished with writing “The Mermaid Chair” before it hit me that both Lily and Jessie had to leave home in order to find home. That's a very interesting paradox, and perhaps it says something about what I believe it takes to be radically transformed. Don't we in some way have to leave the normal context of our lives? I don't mean this literally. We don't have run away to a small Southern town like Lily, or go off to a remote Low Country island like Jessie, but simply step outside of our typical way of seeing and understanding. At any rate, as a novelist, I seem to be more than just a little fascinated with the paradox.

I'm equally fascinated at how sacred feminine quests are aided and abetted by communities of women, which happens to be another way the novels are alike. Both contain a circle of women who are bonded together in ways that transcend ordinary friendships. In The Secret Life of Bees, there are the calendar sisters and the Daughters of Mary, whose rituals around the Black Madonna bind them together. In “The Mermaid Chair”, you'll find a tiny group of island women whose cohesion grows out of a ritual they enact by the sea. In both stories the women play a significant role in bringing the heroines 'home.' Where would Lily be without her 'hive' of women? Similarly, Jessie finds her resolution amid a 'hive' of her own.

When you read “The Mermaid Chair”, I imagine you're going to feel like it's worlds away from The Secret Life of Bees, maybe even galaxies away, but I wouldn't be surprised if you also get the quiet, haunting feeling that you've been there before.

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Speaking of Lily's quest, I want to show you an unusual piece of art that sits in my study. It's a sculpture by Salinda Dahl called 'House for Finding the Mother Within.' I saw it at an art show last winter in North Carolina, in which all the art was inspired by images from The Secret Life of Bees. This piece is an imaginative impression of the pink house in the novel. I love the way the roof serves as the robe of a Madonna figure who crowns the house, but the centerpiece is the Black Madonna peering out through the window and the glorious way she fills up the entire house. When I first saw the sculpture, I was reminded of the image from Alice in Wonderland, in which Alice drank a potion that made her grow so large her head popped through the roof and her arms and legs came through the windows. I bought Dahl's pink house because it suggested to me in a playful way the largeness and grandeur of the Mother within. This is what Lily found on her quest- the big, eternal, feminine lap.