Dwight Garner reviews Marja Mills’s The Mockingbird next Door.  At least now why know why Harper Lee never wrote another novel.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/18/books/the-mockingbird-next-door-by-marja-mills.html?_r=0

Here’s Alison Flood at the Guardian on that same question as well as on  Lee and Capote.

Covering why Lee never wrote another novel after To Kill a Mockingbird – “it was hard to live up to the ‘impossible expectations’ raised by her first, and Nelle hated the publicity and hoopla”, writes McAlpin – Mills also details the friendship between Lee and Truman Capote, and their falling out. “Truman was a psychopath, honey. He thought the rules that apply to everybody else didn’t apply to him,” Lee told Mills, according to the author.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/15/harper-lee-new-memoir-blessing-falsehood-mockingbird

And so much for the theory that The Mockingbird next Door grew out of a friendship: Lee first made her objections to the book clear in 2011, when she issued a statement via the Monroeville law firm Barnett, Bugg, Lee and Carter where Alice works, saying that she had “not willingly participated in any book written or to be written by Marja Mills”. “Neither have I authorised such a book. Any claims otherwise are false,” wrote the Pulitzer prize-winning author at the time. A new statement, released on Monday in the US and published online in full by Entertainment Weekly, saw Lee write that “Miss Mills befriended my elderly sister, Alice. It did not take long to discover Marja’s true mission; another book about Harper Lee. I was hurt, angry and saddened, but not surprised. I immediately cut off all contact with Miss Mills, leaving town whenever she headed this way.”