Marja mills the mockingbird next door
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The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee
"One journalist's memoir of her personal friendship with Harper Lee and her sister, drawing on the extraordinary access they gave her to share the story of their lives. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of the best loved novels of the twentieth century. But for the last fifty years, the novel's celebrated author, Harper Lee, has said almost nothing on the record. Journalists have trekked to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee, known by her friends as Nelle, has lived with her sister, Alice, for decades, trying and failing to get an interview with the author. But in 2001, the Lee sisters opened their door for Chicago Tribune reporter Marja Mills. It was the beginning of a long conversation-and a friendship that has continued ever since. In 2004, with the Lees' encouragement, Mills moved into the house next door to the sisters. She spent the next eighteen months there, talking and sharing stories over meals and daily drives in the countryside. Along with members of the Lees' tight inner circle, the sisters and Mills would go fishing, feed the ducks, go to the Laundromat, watch the Crimson Tide, drink coffee at McDonald's, and explore all over lower Alabama. Nelle shared her love of history, literatu
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Interview get away Milwaukee Defeat Television’s “I Remember”:
A New Royalty Times, USA Today, existing National Indie bestseller
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The Mockingbird Next Door: Life with Harper Lee
If it were possible to give this book zero stars, I would, but since doing so doesn't affect the overall rating, I must reluctantly give it one undeserved star. This is a book that never should have been published both because of the circumstances of its writing and because the content of the book itself is worthless and uninteresting. The author Marja Mills and the publisher, Penguin Press, claim that the book was written with the blessing and cooperation of Harper Lee. At the time that I read it, I wasn't aware that Lee has twice categorically denied that claim, first in 2011 when Penguin announced the book's acquisition and again in 2014 immediately after the book's release.
According to Mills, a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune, in 2001 she went to Monroeville, Alabama, where a then-76-year-old Harper Lee, known to her friends by her first name Nelle, lived with her 91-year-old sister Alice. The purpose of Mills's visit was to do research on To Kill a Mockingbird, which had been selected by the Chicago Public Library's "One Book, One Chicago" program (essentially, a city-wide book club). Despite Nelle's decades-long a