The movie The Help has been out almost a month by now, but the surrounding hubbub seems in no way to be subsiding. Heated discussions about the film and its portrayal of the early civil rights era have raged across the internet, the style sections of the newspaper, and public radio call-in programs.

Based on the wildly successful bestseller by Jackson, Mississippi-born writer Kathryn Stockett, the movie tracks the lives of black domestics in segregationist, early-1960s Jackson, the oppression and hardships that they face, and the efforts of a pixie-ish, slightly avant-garde young Southern white woman to get these women to tell their stories. At least, so I’m told.

Last Sunday, one of my best friends in the world, who has a Ph.D. in African-American History, led an after-church discussion about the movie (and book) The Help at her conservative Presbyterian Church in America congregation. I’m curious to catch up with her sometime this week and hear about the discussion and what was said.

But I didn’t attend, because I haven’t seen the movie.

Haven’t read the book; haven’t seen the movie: It’s a very strange position to be in, as a female and as a native Mississippian. “I’ll bet you just looooove The Help!” beaming strangers periodically started saying to me, a couple of years ago, and maybe that was what hardened my resistance to reading the novel.

My monthly neighborhood book club read and adored it (want to weigh in here, guys? You know who you are), but I pleaded exhaustion from taking care of the still-new baby and skipped coming that month.

Another writer-friend, Susan, who actually grew up in Jackson at the time, said to me when I asked her about it that she had loved the book/movie and found it to be poignantly true to the town she remembered: “I WAS THERE!” she noted in a Facebook message. I’m delighted that a youngish writer has such a huge success—in this publishing market!—and it’s always good when people actually focus on Mississippi, rather than simply make it the brunt of jokes about illiteracy, relatives intermarrying, or obesity. I trust Susan, and the whole thing is certainly a cultural phenomenon that’s probably worth sampling.

But still, somehow, I’m just not yet buying. The prospect of going to see it is like facing up to a drunken, seldom-seen relative at Christmastime. It’s easier to pretend that they are safely in the past.

Some of it, I’m sure, is rooted in my own embarrassment/shame about how (white) Southerners appear to non-Southerners, and my first encounter, at boarding school in the Northeast, with fellow students who made fun of my accent and asked if my relatives had ever lynched anybody.

It drives me crazy to see the ways that white Southerners are too often portrayed—broadly drawn and talk-y, nattering on about manners and sterling-silver table settings and what-will-other-people-think? in their pastel full-skirted dresses.

(Not that, in theory, there’s anything wrong with that: My sterling pattern is Lunt’s William and Mary.)

In addition, contrary to what is supposedly the movie’s feel-good liberal audience message (“I’m the kind of white person who would have stood up against racism!”) I’m told by a friend down South that the book/movie have actually engendered a kind of reverse effect among some upper-middle class populations, who look at the book/movie and fantasize about how great it would be to have a full-time maid.

It’s not that I’m not susceptible to maid-romanticism itself—although being born in 1968, I came up right at the end of the full-time-maid era: My mother always told the story of how when my grandmother’s father committed suicide, it was the maid, nobody else, onto whom Big Mama collapsed, sobbing, when she got the news.

Our family employed “Ethel” for some twenty years, but laid her off when I was two or three years old. My father suddenly had four children at once in college. And things were changing. “Caroline is the one who got me fired!” my mother told me Ethel used to say.

But my own, real maid story involves Mary, whose last name I don’t even know and who was the housekeeper for my favorite uncle in Bogalusa, Louisiana. I’d go visit for a week or so every summer, and unlike my cousin Julie who’d play with neighbors down the steaming summer street, I’d sit in the air-conditioned living room and talk to Mary all day long.

She was tall and looked partly Native American—and of all things, she was from Roxbury in Boston, with an accent I will henceforth and forever recognize as “Boston-native-African-American” (and heard when I actually lived there).

She’d come to Louisiana, she said, when her husband-to-be had said that he was “going to take her to L.A.,” but didn’t tell her which L.A. it was. She had—and maybe this is where The Help really does hit home—a college degree.

She wore a blue polyester pantsuit as her uniform, and white nurse’s shoes. She’d put down the dust mop, sit down across from me, and start telling me stories. Nothing too complicated—I remember one about her making a peach cobbler for one of her “families,” accidentally using self-rising flour, and finding a mess of batter bubbling out of the oven.

I treasure those times talking, and until she died a few years ago, I’m told she’d ask after me, and I always continued to pray and think of her.

It wasn’t equality, it wasn’t change, but it was an adult and a child, in the middle of their circumstances, talking to one another across the living room.

And it shaped me for the vastly changed world I came to live in after.