Tulsa native Billie Letts, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller, Where the Heart Is visited Shawnee as a keynote speaker for the Red Dirt Book Festival, an event that draws Oklahoma writers and vendors to celebrate Oklahoma authors and poets every other year.
Where the Heart Is sold more than three million copies worldwide after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book of the month club. It later became a movie starring Natalie Portman and Ashley Judd in which Portman starred as a pregnant 17 year old girl who is abandoned by the baby’s father. She finds herself living in a small town Wal-Mart until the night she delivers her baby. The story is about how the simple people of an Oklahoma town take her in and how she learns to trust people again while struggling to make a life for herself and her child.
Billie Letts is the author of several screen plays and three other novels, The Honk and Holler Opening Soon, Shoot the Moon, and Made in the USA. Her first novel was based on several short stories her husband called “Tales from Wal-Mart” and after an editor encouraged her pursue it as a novel, she wrote Where the Heart Is.
When Oprah Winfrey called to give her the good news, Letts was in total shock. “It never entered my mind. I thought you had to be somebody,” she smiled and continued soberly, “and I wasn’t anybody. I didn’t expect people outside our culture to get it. So it was a huge surprise.”
But people did get it and they told her about it. “I got letters from people from all over the world. A person from Bulgaria where they don’t even have a Wal-Mart and I thought, ‘how can they identify with this character?’ I figured it must have been that they found some connection through her loneliness, her anxiety and fear of being left alone in a strange place with no money or anyone to help her,” said Letts.
Letts was awarded the prestigious Walker Percy Award in 1994 and in 1999 she was given the Oklahoma Book Award for fiction. For a celebrity, award winning author whose first book reached an international audience, Letts is pretty humble about it all. “I never could have imagined myself with this kind of reputation and it still seems strange to me. It always surprises me when people ask me for my autograph. I want to say, ‘I’m really nobody.’”
Like many Oklahomans who find prestige and success, she hasn’t forgotten where she came from. In fact, all of her books are set in Oklahoma towns with Oklahoma characters. When I asked her why she said, “It’s what I know. It’s the voice I hear when I write dialogue. It’s my voice.”
She talked about the reasons why she’s proud to be an “Okie” and why she believes Oklahomans inspire people from other cultures. “I think first and foremost we survived the Depression and the Dustbowl where we were hit so hard. We’re Okies, we’re resilient and we come back. We have a way of doing that,” said Letts, citing the Murrah Bombing and the May 3rd tornado. “We have an ability to laugh at ourselves. We tell stories on ourselves that don’t always make us look good but silly or foolish but we laugh about them. We tend to open up and lay ourselves out there and say, ‘this is who I am, this what I do and I hope you like it.’”
Letts said those values, the influences of her Oklahoma upbringing and her life played a large part in the development of the characters in her books with which people identify. Letts was born in Tulsa and raised by working class parents who were uneducated, like many parents from the Depression era. Like Lett’s main character in Where the Heart Is, they were survivors. “My family members were survivors. They could have found work other places but they stayed.”
Letts, who didn’t become an author until age 54, said her career as an English teacher at Southeastern Oklahoma State University also nurtured her writing skills. “When I started teaching, I wasn’t a professor but an instructor so I got stuck with all the composition classes. I had lots of papers to read and grade and through the problems my students encountered while writing, I learned how to avoid certain pitfalls.”
Billie isn’t the only talented one in her family. Her late husband was a writer, an educator and a busy actor who starred in more than forty plays and movies. Her oldest son Shawn is musician and composer in Singapore; her younger son Tracy, playwright and actor, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for drama.
Although Letts has not written anything since her husband died in 2008, she promised to write again next year. No doubt her audience eagerly anticipates the next novel she will publish, inspiring readers everywhere to learn from our do-or-die Oklahoma spirit.