Author of Mountain Brook series premieres latest installment
Mountain Brook native and author Katherine Clark has revisited her hometown several times through her books in the Mountain Brook series, but this October she will return in person.
As part of the Southern Women’s Show at the Birmingham-Jefferson Convention Complex, Clark will participate in the Southern Authors Showcase. While all four of her books will be available, Clark’s focus will be on her newest book, “The Ex-Suicide.”
This novel focuses on a concept developed by one of her favorite novelists, Walker Percy.
“For him, an ex-suicide is someone who has come to the very brink of committing suicide but has decided, ‘You know what? I think I’ll live. I think I’ll not do this. I think I’ll recommit to living,’” Clark said. “Walker Percy’s philosophy was that those people who have actually been through the depths of despair and come out on the other side are in some ways better off than the people who have never arrived at the abyss.”
Her novel is once again based in Mountain Brook, focusing on a man who grew up in the area — in fact, in the home in which Walker Percy grew up. While the main character, Hamilton Whitmire, and his family are entirely fictional, Clark has him face the ghosts of a real-life event: the suicide of Percy’s father in the attic of their Mountain Brook home.
LeRoy Pratt Percy was the president of the Birmingham Country Club, and their home was just across the street. His suicide is representative of a larger struggle that Whitmire confronts in the novel — the fact that social status and money do not always lead to happiness.
Whitmire returns home at 37 to a mother who hopes he will take over the family business. While he could easily have success through his family, he knows that will not fulfill him.
“He’s got all this parental pressure to be something other than what he is and live up to expectations he doesn’t respect,” Clark said, adding that money has never solved Whitmire’s problems, including his depression.
Whitmire becomes a teacher at a fictional historically black college in Birmingham, where, for the first time, he encounters the plight of the black community. This is the first novel in which Clark discusses the race-based division Mountain Brook faces, but it is something she said she sees as an important issue to include.
“With each novel, I tried to push myself further and further, and so it’s an issue I’ve wanted to explore, but I just hadn’t felt capable, I hadn’t felt qualified. Then I hit upon this idea of using a black college, which is something I did have experience with,” said Clark, who taught at Dillard University in New Orleans for six years.
As he is forced to face the effects racism and segregation have had on other Birmingham communities, Whitmire’s depression grows. But in the end, Whitmire forges forward to create his own purpose.
“I have my character at the end, there’s a hint that he’s forging a professional alliance with one of the other professors at the school, and that just sort of was my hope for the future,” Clark said, “that this is something that is possible, but in a city like Birmingham we have to go out of our way to make things.”
Clark will be at the Spotlight Stage at the Southern Women’s Show on Oct. 7 at 3:30 p.m. For more information on the conference, go to southernshows.com/wbi/, and for more information on Clark’s series, go to katherineclarkbooks.com.