A Look At the Author

Sue Monk Kidd was born and raised in Sylvester, Georgia.  As a teenager, she was influenced by Henry David Thoreau's Walden and Kate Chopin's The Awakening.  Kidd had always known that one day she would be a writer, but she was afraid of failure and the culture of the 1960s and decided to become a nurse.  She went to Texas Christian University where she received a Nursing degree in 1970.  She worked as a registered nurse throughout her twenties.  Not long after, she married Sanford Kidd, known as Sandy, and had two children, Bob and Ann.

When she was 30 years old, Kidd became a freelance writer.  She started off working on non-fiction pieces about her life experiences.  Kidd then went on to write about Christian spirituality and then, in her early forties, feminist theology.

When Kidd enrolled in a graduate writing seminar and visited writers’ conferences, her desire to write non fiction novels returned.  In 1997 she began her first non fiction novel, The Secret Life of Bees.

Kidd drew her inspiration for The Secret Life of Bees from the honeybees that lived in a wall of her house in Georgia while she was growing up.  She remembers the humming sound of the bees and the honey that seeped out of the wall.  She was able to use her experience to imagine a young girl lying in bed with bees sifting through the cracks in the wall and the thoughts that may have surrounded her life.  The personal experience provided a background for the novel, but none of the characters in the book were drawn specifically from her own life; however, she did draw from details and memories of her adolescent years during the 1960s for the actions and mannerisms of many of the characters.