Why success as a writer became a life sentence for Harper Lee

GEORGE Best is sitting up in a hotel bed with a gorgeous blonde beside him, when the waiter arrives with a bottle of vintage champagne. The waiter looks at the former soccer star and asks: “George, where did it all go wrong?”

Best used to tell that story about himself, and oh, how we laughed.

If anybody were to ask that of Harper Lee, who wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, one of the most successful and critically acclaimed books in literary history, she could honestly say that she got lucky precisely twice in her life. Once with her sister. Once with a married couple she befriended, in the middle of the last century. Other than that, it has been abuse, invasion, alcohol, and everything else public success has to deliver.