The Idea for The Secret Life of Bees

The Secret Life of Bees started with several images. The first and most compelling image was of bees that lived inside a bedroom wall and flew out at night. The image came not from my imagination, but from my memory. Actually, I’d forgotten all about this piece of my history until one evening when my husband and I were sitting around with friends telling stories about meeting our prospective in-laws. It was along the lines of “You think that’s bad, listen to this.” My husband won the day with his story of visiting my family’s home in Georgia- a big house out in the country. He explained how he was lying in bed sound asleep when a “horde” of bees flew out of a crack in the wall, making so much racket, they woke him up. This brought back memories of growing up in a house in which bees lived in the wall of a room, which my mother turned into a guest bedroom. The bees lived there over twenty years and yes, they did occasionally fly out at night. Growing up I often heard bee hum vibrating within the wall, and I recall my mother cleaning up the honey that used to leak out of the cracks, run down the wall and puddle on the floor. When I heard my husband tell the story of staying in our infamous guest bedroom, I got an image in my mind of a girl lying in bed at night while bees seeped out of cracks in the wall and flew circles around the room. The image took up residence in my imagination and I began asking questions about it. Who is this girl? The girl turned out to be Lily Melissa Owens.