The real story behind Harper Lee’s lost true crime book | Books | The Guardian

"But all of that was long in the past by the time Burns shot and killed Maxwell. At the time, Lee was living, as she had been for most of her adult life, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, hiding in plain sight so successfully that her building’s door buzzer could read “Lee-H” without causing anyone to ring it. Her novel had won the Pulitzer prize, sold millions of copies, and made her extravagantly wealthy, but success did not suit Lee. She lived as frugally as if she were still a starving artist, was allergic to the press and publicity, chafed at the ongoing interest in her private life, and struggled to live up to the critical and popular expectations for her work. In one forlorn letter, she told a friend that “Harper Lee thrives, but at the expense of Nelle” – the name she had gone by as a child, and that those closest to her still used.

By the 70s, Lee’s friends worried about her drinking and her emotional volatility, while everyone worried about her struggles with writing. When she discussed her work, she sounded like some self-mortifying mystic, valorising suffering and solitude: “To be a serious writer requires discipline that is iron fisted,” she once said. “It’s sitting down and doing it whether you think you have it in you or not. Every day. Alone. Without interruption. Contrary to what most people think, there is no glamour in writing. In fact, it’s heartbreak most of the time.”

That heartbreak was obvious to those who knew her. Her neighbours had learned that a late-night knock on the door was likely to be Lee, made brazen by alcohol and looking for more of it; at least once, she confided to one of them that she had just impulsively thrown 300 pages down the incinerator. She told stories about other manuscripts, too, including one that was allegedly stolen from her apartment, but mostly she avoided any talk of writing. Family and friends knew to avoid the subject, too, not only with her but with the world; at most, they would say that Lee was always at work on something. For more than a decade, though, what she was writing, if she was actually writing anything at all, remained a mystery."

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The real story behind Harper Lee’s lost true crime book | Books | The Guardian