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"  Good Housekeeping: Your titles are so evocative \u2014 did this one come from a poem or another source?Sue Monk Kidd: I like to have a title before I start writing. When The Invention of Wings popped into my head, my imagination sort of lit up. It wasn&amp;#039;t until I was under way with writing the book, however, that I discovered an African-American folktale about people in Africa being able to fly and losing their wings when captured into slavery. That notion began to slip into my story in different ways. Sometimes, while writing, I listened to songs the slaves sang: &amp;quot;Now let me fly/now let me fly way up high.&amp;quot; The title suggests the sweeping social movements that began erupting at the time the novel is set \u2014 abolition and women&amp;#039;s rights \u2014 but the real essence of the title is the individual and personal ways my characters invent their freedom. GH: In your acknowledgments, you say that Judy Chicago&amp;#039;s famous artwork The Dinner Party helped spark the story. Why did it grab you?SMK: I first saw The Dinner Party in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. While perusing the Heritage Panels, which honor 999 women who have made important contributions to Western history, I came upon the names of two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimk\u00E9. Later, I was astonished to discover they were from Charleston, SC, the city in which I was then living. Somehow, I&amp;#039;d never heard of them. They were from a wealthy slaveholding family, moving in the elite circles of society, yet they became the first female abolition agents in America. They were, arguably, the most radical females ever to come out of the antebellum South. As I read about their unlikely metamorphosis, I became certain theirs was the story I wanted to tell. RELATED: Add These Books to Your Must-Read List GH: Your story&amp;#039;s African-American heroine has a memorable name.SMK: She is named Handful, but perhaps not for the reason one might first imagine \u2014 Handful is her &amp;quot;basket name.&amp;quot; Naming a child carries with it the power to confer identity, so it isn&amp;#039;t surprising that slave owners often did the official naming themselves. In what I believe to have been a form of resistance, some enslaved parents in South Carolina gave their child a second name, one based on the way the child looked, the day of the week, the weather, or simply how the world seemed when the baby was laid in her basket. When Handful was born, she was tiny and premature, a handful. She will, though, live up to the other implied meaning of her name: She will also become a handful. GH: There&amp;#039;s been Oscar buzz around the film adaptation of Solomon Northup&amp;#039;s memoir Twelve Years a Slave; did you come across equivalent stories by emancipated African-American women of that period?SMK: While researching my novel, I read Twelve Years a Slave, along with other first-person slave narratives from the 19th century. Each of them was riveting and harrowing in its own way, but I was perhaps most affected by Harriet Jacobs&amp;#039; Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In it, she tells the story of the exploitation and brutality she faced daily as an enslaved woman. After running away, she lived in a tiny crawl space above a storeroom for nearly seven years until she fled north, eventually reuniting with her children. Her endurance, courage, and longing for freedom still haunt me. Sue Monk Kidd is the author of three novels: The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair, and The Invention of Wings, which will be published by Viking in January 2014. She and her family live in Southwest Florida. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/life/entertainment/a19613/sue-monk-kidd-interview/>