What Barbara Kingsolver Believes the Novel Can Do
Barbara Kingsolver always struggles with beginnings. “I write probably one hundred pages to get to page one of any novel,” she told me recently. “Not all at once—like, eight or nine pages a day. And then the next day I start over completely.” She’s looking for the voice and the tone that she wants, the vein of silver in the mine that she’s digging, and ten novels into her career, at age seventy-one, it hasn’t got any easier. “I still begin with the feeling that this is just a load of crap,” she said. “Every single time, I think, This is going to suck.” For each book, “there’s page minus one hundred to page zero.”
Her new novel, “Partita,” was even harder to start than most, but she eventually found her way to three different beginnings, each with a heading borrowed from classical music: Overture, Prelude, and Allemande. Like Kingsolver, the narrator of “Partita” once had a promising career ahead of her as a pianist, and she thinks in musical terms. I have in mind to ask Kingsolver about a fourth beginning to the novel—a “Note on the Music” that prefaces those other beginnings, directing readers to a “Listening List” with selections from Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Ravel, and Miriam Makeba—but, before I can do so, she insists that I eat some more cucumbers. We picked a basket full of them from her garden the day before, and today she’s cut some into spears and bathed them in balsamic vinegar.
It’s almost pickling time in southwest Virginia—late July, on what Kingsolver calls a “dog breath” day, hot and humid, with the threat of thunderstorms in all directions. Although it’s lunchtime, what sun there is still hasn’t fully cleared the holler where Kingsolver lives; light flashes here and there between the leafy branches of all the maples, oaks, and poplars, illuminating various patches of the two hundred and forty acres that she shares with her husband, their Border collie, a flock of guinea fowl and laying hens, and a herd of Icelandic sheep. Readers of Kingsolver know this farm from her memoir, “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life,” which describes her family’s efforts to eat only what they or their neighbors could grow or raise. The book makes an environmental and civic case for doing so, but it’s also true that Kingsolver doesn’t like to go too far from home. “My family has this running joke,” she says, explaining her love for this part of Appalachia and her stubborn reluctance to abandon it. “ ‘How long since Mom left the holler?’ ”
The answer today turns out to be not that long, and not just because she went to the post office in the nearby town of Meadowview or to the farmers’ market in Abingdon. Kingsolver and her husband have recently returned from Greece, where she taught a writing workshop in Patmos before they toured the Pindus Mountains and the monasteries of Meteora and paid a visit to the old neighborhood in Athens where she’d lived for a few vagabond months during college. They take a trip together whenever she finishes a book. Otherwise, if she had her way, she’d seldom leave the farm.
“I’m as extreme an introvert as they make,” she says, moving strands of gray hair away from her face. Kingsolver has hazel eyes that follow you from behind round scholarly glasses, and, although that self-characterization may contain a touch of hyperbole, she does seem to have roughly the same attentiveness, curiosity, and social needs as an owl. “I’ve learned to be comfortable in front of an audience,” she tells me. “When I was a kid and we’d play that game of wishing for our superpowers, the one I always wished for was invisibility. And I still wish for invisibility.”
That desire is somewhat at odds with Kingsolver’s career. She’s published nineteen books—in addition to the novels and the memoir, there’s a story collection, a children’s book, a photography book, a work of narrative nonfiction, two volumes of essays, and two poetry collections—which have cumulatively sold more than twenty million copies in this country alone. She’s won most of the major literary prizes, some of them twice, and her commercial success has launched her into a tier of celebrity rare for novelists, with her work appearing in “Jeopardy!” clues and crossword-puzzle answers and her name bantered about by characters on “The Sopranos” and “King of the Hill.” Her last novel made her more visible than ever: “Demon Copperhead,” the story of a dirt-poor Appalachian boy orphaned by the opioid epidemic, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023, sat on the Times best-seller list for more than a year, and was voted the best book of the twenty-first century by the newspaper’s readers.
Kingsolver talks about that novel’s success as we rock in parallel chairs on the front porch of her hundred-year-old farmhouse, sipping coffee and watching butterflies and birds through its cloister-like arches. She relays the history of those arches like a fairy tale: how they were made by the original owner’s eleven children, each of them paid ten cents a day to help their father soak boards in the creek and bend them into shape, covering the arched wood and framed flower boxes with mortar and river stones that he’d gathered by the trunkful while working for the railroad on the Nolichucky River in Tennessee. “You can see the little ones got a little sloppy down at the bottom,” she says, laughing.
Kingsolver can turn anything into a story, so I’m surprised to learn that she struggled with writer’s block after “Demon Copperhead.” “I think it should actually be called writer’s fear,” she says. She had the idea for her next book, but she couldn’t stop worrying about whether readers would like it, and how it would do, and other things that real artists are supposed to at least pretend not to care about. She was well and truly stuck when a Substack post, of all things, got her writing again.
The headline was “Barbara Kingsolver Is a Fraud,” a charge that literary critics have debated, usually in more polite terms, for most of her career, but not the sort of proposition I expected Kingsolver to entertain. “I had to know why,” she says, explaining her decision to click on the link. “Maybe I am a fraud!” The writer of the post “had done her Wiki research,” she recalls. “She had read my dad was a doctor, so obviously I had to be in the country-club set. What would I know about working-class people? And I went to college on a piano scholarship, but how could any working-class person ever play classical piano? That pissed me off.”
Kingsolver writes what she calls socially engaged fiction, novels in the tradition of Charles Dickens and John Steinbeck that take on whatever political, economic, or cultural issue she feels a moral urgency to address. Her books, like theirs, are sometimes knocked as preachy and sentimental, but Kingsolver says it wasn’t the criticism of her work that irked her as much as the stereotypes about people on the margins of American life. “There are assumptions in both directions,” she told me. “Rural working-class people don’t necessarily feel at home in a concert hall, and therefore they might not support the N.E.A., because of all the snooty people who look down on us. And those snooty people think, How could someone from Appalachia know anything about classical music?”
Kingsolver has always believed that the arts belong to everyone, and has spent her life writing books that she hopes can be read by anyone. “Partita” clicked into place when she realized that its narrator, the daughter of a dairy farmer, would need to justify her musical ambitions not only to her family and to herself but to her peers at the conservatory she attends and to the man with whom she falls in love, a Marxist organizer who has his own doubts about the purpose of the arts. A smaller and more intimate novel than “Demon Copperhead,” it nonetheless addresses, in Kingsolver’s usual manner, a host of politically charged topics, among them abortion rights and access to health care. More strikingly, it wrestles with the questions that have fuelled her whole career—namely, who is art for, what makes it good, and what can it actually accomplish?
There’s a difference between beginnings and origins. Kingsolver came into the world in 1955 in Annapolis, Maryland, where her father, Wendell, was stationed after being drafted into the Navy, and where her mother, Virginia, suffered from what was likely postpartum depression. Far from home and raising two children while her husband was busy in the service, Ginny, as she was known, struggled to bond with Barbara, her second baby. The family soon moved to Kentucky, where Kingsolver’s parents, high-school sweethearts, had been born and raised, and settled in the small town of Carlisle, where another daughter was born. Dr. Wendell, as everyone called him, opened a medical practice for the people he thought most needed one, and Kingsolver grew up surrounded by alfalfa and tobacco fields and neighbors who made their living working them. Her parents were founding members of a Disciples of Christ church and the Kentucky chapter of the Sierra Club, and they raised their children in the gap between God and His green earth.
As Kingsolver tells it, she and her siblings—older brother Robert and younger sister Ann—grew up as wild as Peter Pan or Pippi Longstocking. They tried to tame a baby snapping turtle in a pickle jar, caught crawfish with their bare hands and cooked them over a campfire, counted to a million together in the back seat of the family’s VW bus, and divided the encyclopedia into shares with the aim of collectively reading the whole thing. But it wasn’t just facts that interested Kingsolver. “Barbara was a wonderful storyteller as a child,” Ann recalls. By age ten, Kingsolver had a “menu” of recurring characters from which she’d let her little sister pick each night: the Maya stories, the Henry stories, the Annie stories, all of which grew new chapters whenever needed.
Dr. Wendell sought to serve the impoverished and imposed a kind of poverty on his own family: the kids wore hand-me-down and homemade clothes; much of what they ate came from their garden or whatever food his patients had brought for barter. “The spiritual truth my father lived by is that your value is not what you have but what you do,” Kingsolver says. Exceptions were made for books, travel, and musical instruments. “Our dad took literature very seriously,” Robert recalls, “and every Friday night, we’d sit down by the fire in the winter or out on the porch in the summer, and he would read novels to us, classics like Robert Louis Stevenson or Jack London.” The family also had a hi-fi, which is how Kingsolver first heard the classical compositions that form the repertoire of “Partita,” and a piano, which she and her mother both played, plus a bass and a flute for her sister and guitars for her father and her brother.
Kingsolver’s parents aspired to live a humble life in an even humbler part of the country, but they were set apart by their education, and so was she, not always in ways that benefitted her. She remembers being bullied by students and teachers alike, first for learning how to read so early—she figured it out at three, when the word “o-r-a-n-g-e,” in one of her father’s newspapers, tempted her like Augustine’s pear—then for reading more than people thought a girl should. Once, in middle school, her teacher abandoned her desk and had Kingsolver lead the lessons. “I wasn’t just the teacher’s pet, I was her emotional-support animal,” Kingsolver says. “She was in the back painting her fingernails and reading romance novels, and I was up front talking about Lord Halifax.”
Around this time, Kingsolver was accused of cheating in a regional essay contest. “They rejected her essay,” Robert tells me, “and sent it back and said, Obviously this girl had her parents write her essay, no seventh grader could write this.” Kingsolver, furious over the false accusation and offended because she felt she was already a better writer than both of her parents, sent a letter of protest with supporting evidence from her teacher. “The judges reconsidered, I won, and my authorship was never questioned again,” she recounts.
Early on, Kingsolver fantasized about ways of getting out of school, and when she was in the second grade the Lord, or at least Dr. Wendell, provided: the family spent half that year on the Wamba River in the Republic of the Congo. “A colleague of his told him, ‘Yes, the people of eastern Kentucky need you, but the people in Congo need you even more,’ ” Kingsolver says. It was the first of a handful of medical mission trips he undertook with his family—first to Congo, then to St. Lucia, and later to the rural coast of Newfoundland. In the village of Kikongo, the kids picked up Kituba and learned not to pick up spitting vipers, got close but not too close to the leper colony nearby, and made a treasure hunt out of searching for the parachuted packages of medical supplies that aid workers dropped off every month by plane. Those supplies were essential—penicillin, antivenom, surgical tools—but never enough.
“I think my father just thought it would be a grand adventure for all of us,” she says. “He was a real believer in what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” It fell to Ginny, she adds, “to keep us all alive.” Kingsolver never felt close to her mother, but she could see how hard it was for her. “She loved him, but being a mother and a housewife was not her thing. As soon as I knew that people—adults, I mean—had feelings, I knew that hers were not good. He was doing all this to save lives. She was doing it because she’d gotten married at nineteen, and, even though she was completely dismayed by most of it, whatever he said, she did. I decided then I didn’t want to be a wife, because it was obvious wives got a really bad deal.”
Kingsolver likes to say that she learned the power of prose after an essay she wrote about the need for a new elementary school ran in the local newspaper ahead of a successful tax levy. She is pleased to take a little credit for the overdue upgrade. But one of her first awards for the sort of ventriloquism that would shape her career came from channelling a woman like her mother. When the girls in her high school were sent to participate in the Betty Crocker Search for the All-American Homemaker of Tomorrow exam, Kingsolver closed her eyes and imagined the antithesis of what she wanted for her life, then began to write.
In truth, the 1973 winner for Nicholas County High School wanted to be anything but a homemaker. She stuffed her days with Drama Club, Speech Club, French Club, Honor Society, and whatever else she thought might help her escape the miserable domesticity she knew from Scrubgrass Road. A benevolent librarian had taught her the Dewey decimal system, and she found her way to categories like “323.34: Women’s Rights and Feminism”: the novels of Gordimer, Nadine; Lessing, Doris; and Woolf, Virginia; later, the polemics of Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and Gloria Steinem.
Those women provided a genealogy of aspirations and ideas from which Kingsolver fashioned herself and her sense of the world. A piano scholarship landed her at DePauw University, in Greencastle, Indiana, though she soon switched her major from music to zoology. She dropped her accent just as quickly, changed her clothes, and leaned into a life as far from Carlisle as she could.
Alongside her classes, Kingsolver marched for abortion rights and against the Vietnam War, and worked as a housecleaner and a typesetter. She sent self-righteous letters home to her mother “on the great freedom women could experience if only they would throw off the bondage of housewifely servitude.” But she did not reveal in those letters that she’d been raped in her sophomore year, by a man she’d met a few nights before, worried her mother would say that it was her own fault for going to a bar. Kingsolver cut off her waist-length hair and started wearing combat boots and an Army overcoat. Somehow, even as the world collapsed into a “knot of nothingness,” it also opened wider than ever: she moved abroad the next year, first spending a semester in Greece, where she trained as an archeologist’s assistant, then heading to France and to England, where she found work on a Viking dig in York. After that, she cobbled together whatever other gigs she could until her visa ran out: copy editor, translator, even art model. She soon stopped telling her parents where she was. “My mother deserved the daughter who ran away,” she says.
Whatever Kingsolver studied, wherever she went, she filled notebooks with poems and stories and kept a diary, as she had been doing since she was seven years old, when she opened the lock on the little red one she’d been given for Christmas before leaving for Congo and carefully crafted words that now seem as if they were meant to be read: “When I first saw Africa I thought it was a cloud.” In her early twenties, she wanted to write “War and Peace” but figured she’d settle for “Cannery Row.” When neither materialized, she enrolled in graduate school, but not for creative writing: she earned a master’s degree in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where she studied subterranean termites—specifically, why it is they behave so altruistically toward one another.
She dropped out of the Ph.D. program she was in to take a job as a technical writer in the university’s Office of Arid Lands Studies, and began dating a quiet, lanky chemistry professor named Joseph Hoffmann. The pair wrote a few science papers together, mostly related to his research on alternative uses for native desert plants; they collaborated on political work as well, volunteering with the sanctuary movement to provide support to refugees and to document human-rights violations along the border. She and Hoffmann married in 1985, sending her parents a postcard from Spain: “Having a wonderful time. Weather’s great. Got married. Wish you were here.”
Back in Arizona, she quit her day job and freelanced full time, writing for local newspapers, literary journals, and left-leaning magazines. She got a break when some outlets sent her to report on copper miners and mill workers striking against the Phelps Dodge Corporation over wages. She was supposed to file a few quick stories, but the strike dragged on, and Kingsolver kept talking to the workers; eventually, they started introducing her to others as “the gal that’s writing the book about us.”
Kingsolver wrote that book, “Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983,” about the wives, daughters, and sisters of the miners, who formed a picket line when the men were prohibited from doing so. But no one wanted to publish it. She’d found an agent in a directory at the public library, Frances Goldin, whom she chose because her entry had indicated that her agency would not represent “pornography or ageist, sexist, racist, or homophobic material.” Kingsolver emphasizes how radical that was for the time, and how heartened she is that literary culture has caught up to the mission-driven agency, whose marquee clients were Adrienne Rich and Dorothy Allison. Although Goldin couldn’t sell Kingsolver’s book, the pair grew close, and Goldin, already beloved at Pride parades for the sign she carried in support of her two lesbian daughters, became a kind of surrogate mother to the author.
When Kingsolver got pregnant, in 1986, she developed severe insomnia, and used those “extra hours” to write fiction. It came slowly until she began drawing on aspects of herself that she’d spent nearly fifteen years suppressing. “I was in this little writing group,” she tells me, “and there were four other women writing stories and sharing them with each other, and I kept sharing these stories about all these people who lived around Dog Doo Park”—the nickname her characters gave to their small urban park—“and one of the women said, ‘These people don’t seem like they’re from anywhere.’ ”
Kingsolver, chastened and inspired, apprenticed herself to the working-class characters of Bobbie Ann Mason and the neo-agrarian works of Wendell Berry. Those Kentucky authors helped her find the voice of Taylor Greer, the narrator of “The Bean Trees.” “I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine’s father over the top of the Standard Oil sign,” it begins. “I’m not lying. He got stuck up there.” A prolonged pregnancy gave Kingsolver more time to finish; instead of opting for induction when her due date passed, she waited out her baby for another three weeks, long enough to send the manuscript off to Goldin with a note: “I’m sorry, you probably don’t want this. I think it’s a novel.”
The day that Kingsolver came home from the hospital with her daughter Camille, there was a message on the answering machine from Goldin with two offers for the book. The novel, published in 1988, foreshadowed the career to come by taking on, with disarming frankness, everything from child abuse to transracial adoption. It also divided critics in ways that her work has done ever since. “Only a Dickensian villain could fail to like this book,” Carolyn See wrote in the Los Angeles Times, adding that “this novel goes beyond ordinary storytelling in its noble intent.” But that intent seemed like a flaw to others: a reviewer in the New York Times lamented Kingsolver’s “overmanipulation” of characters, from the unfailingly honorable victims to the impossibly perfect heroine, saying that the book, for all its virtues, sometimes read like “an upbeat novel for teenagers.”
Although “The Bean Trees” sold modestly, book clubs and independent booksellers adored it and kept it in print. But, while Kingsolver’s professional life was taking shape, her personal life began falling apart. “When the attention started coming to me, not to him—that was not in the contract,” she tells me. In the early nineties, she and Hoffmann moved with Camille to the Canary Islands for a year, partly because Kingsolver, who had been protesting the Gulf War, wanted a break from American politics, but also because she and Hoffmann were trying to reset their life. When that failed, they divorced. “A nonfunctioning marriage,” Kingsolver wrote not long afterward, “is a slow asphyxiation. It is waking up despised each morning, listening to the pulse of your own loneliness before the radio begins to blare its raucous gospel that you’re nothing if you aren’t loved.”
Kingsolver still has insomnia but doesn’t write in those late-night hours anymore. Instead, she keeps a special stack of books by her bed which she essentially uses as soporifics, and which she diplomatically asks me not to name. Despite all the lost sleep, she gets up early to write, which she does in a long and gorgeously renovated L-shaped office she jokes should have a plaque for Oprah Winfrey, who has twice chosen Kingsolver novels for her book club. Every edge, ledge, and surface is covered with books, pictures of her children, and cards from her grandchildren, plus art, letters, and tchotchkes from her readers—everyone, she says, from prisoners to Presidents.
She works at a standing desk, taking a break whenever her feet fall asleep. She generally wakes up with a few sentences, occasionally even whole paragraphs, in mind, and starts typing; after she gets those written up, she reads what she wrote the day before, often aloud, and keeps doing it over and over until she’s satisfied, which can sometimes take dozens of drafts. These days, her process can be slow for another reason: she suffers from Dupuytren’s contracture, a painful disease that causes the tissues of the palms to thicken and tighten, forming hard cords that curl the fingers until they cannot lie flat. She has had corrective surgery on both hands and is grateful to still be able to play the piano and to knit. Some days, she can type only with one hand, but she quips that, much of the time, you really just need one finger: “Whenever people ask for writing advice, I say, Fall in love with your Delete key.”
Kingsolver tends to alternate between smaller novels and grander ones. Two years after “The Bean Trees,” she published “Animal Dreams,” which is not only about a woman who moves home to take care of her ailing father but also about her sister, who has been murdered by the Contras in Nicaragua while trying to help the Sandinistas grow cotton. That was followed quickly by “Pigs in Heaven,” in 1993, which returned to Taylor Greer and her adopted Cherokee daughter, Turtle. By then, Kingsolver was already well into the decade she spent writing what she came to call the D.A.B.: the Damned Africa Book.
The rest of the world would know it as “The Poisonwood Bible.” The novel is narrated by the five female members of the Price family of Bethlehem, Georgia, who collectively tell the tragic story of Western intervention in Congo. It occupied the Times best-seller list for more than six months, largely thanks to its gripping sweep, but also because of Kingsolver’s knack for producing the right book for the moment. It appeared in 1998, a few months after the Congolese President, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, banished Rwandan and Ugandan troops from the country, leading his former allies to support rebel uprisings, and eventually pulling some two dozen armed groups and nine African countries into the deadliest conflict since the Second World War. But some critics found the book as preposterous as the Betty Crocker cake mixes the Prices tote with them across the Atlantic. In The New Republic, Lee Siegel crowned Kingsolver “the queen of Nice Writing,” arguing that she offered a no-calorie version of life’s real tragedies, whether it was colonialism in Africa or American imperialism in Latin America. “Kingsolver does not exactly outrage me, because she is so damn nice; but she is becoming outrageous,” he wrote. “With the publication of ‘The Poisonwood Bible,’ this easy, humorous, competent, syrupy writer has been elevated to the ranks of the greatest political novelists of our time.”
“The Poisonwood Bible” drew on the experiences of Kingsolver’s family; she was finally able to finish it because she’d made a new family of her own. In 1993, divorced and raising her daughter alone, she accepted a teaching fellowship on the condition that she be placed on a college campus near enough to eastern Kentucky that her relatives could help with child care. She wound up at Emory & Henry University, in Virginia’s western highlands, where one day she got a phone call from Steven Hopp, a professor whose class on global wildlife conservation she had agreed to visit. Hopp asked what she’d be talking about, and, when she realized that she hadn’t planned anything, she made up a lecture based on a title the fellowship coördinator had chosen for her: “Ecofeminism and Personal Responsibility.”
What happened next remains a source of amicable contention thirty-three years later. Hopp tells me his version of the story while the three of us walk the timber road of their farm looking for mushrooms. Trumpets are in season, their dark, earthy umber contrasting almost comically with the neon-pink basket that Kingsolver carries. Irrespective of any sentence she might be in the middle of, she bounds ahead whenever she sees a big cap, to try to get it before Hopp can. He, meanwhile, is happy to lose the foraging competition in order to win the argument about their first meeting. He claims that during their initial conversation he made awkward small talk while inwardly worrying she might deliver a lecture on ridding the world of men. She claims that he told her, “Good luck parlaying that into an hour.” “In my defense,” Hopp interrupts, “I don’t think I would’ve known what the word ‘parlay’ meant.”
Kingsolver, in any case, parlayed it into a marriage. After the lecture, Hopp invited her to his farm, near Meadowview, where they walked the same trail the three of us are walking now. “The Jane Austen version would be ‘He had a beautiful farm; unpolluted acres,’ ” Kingsolver jokes. It was the night before she was supposed to leave town and they found that they couldn’t stop talking—they built a campfire, looked for glowworms, played music, and stayed up until daybreak. “I said, ‘I haven’t had this much fun in forever,’ ” Kingsolver remembers. “And he said, ‘Really? I have this much fun every day.’ ”
She returned to Tucson, but not before she and Hopp exchanged numbers; they got married, she says, when their telephone bills exceeded their mortgages. Hopp transferred to the University of Arizona, but they returned to southwestern Virginia every summer, and when Kingsolver’s daughter finished high school they relocated to Hopp’s farm full time. By then, they’d had a daughter, Lily, and they soon finished renovating the old farmhouse that had come with the property.
One of the most conspicuous luxuries there now is a Steinway piano. Kingsolver used to play with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band of best-selling authors who perform rock-and-roll covers to benefit literacy and free-speech advocacy groups at glamorous venues such as the annual convention of the American Booksellers Association. “Barbara was like a bad girl from the Shangri-Las,” the novelist Amy Tan told me, recalling the outrageous outfits she and the other Remainderettes wore. Stephen King, a guitarist and sometime vocalist for the Remainders, described Kingsolver as “gorgeous and dryly funny,” adding, “I can remember her once saying, ‘I’m back here trapped in triplet hell.’ Talking about that rock beat, you know.”
Hopp is a drummer and guitarist, and he and Kingsolver have played music together from the beginning. “Ours is an egalitarian marriage,” Kingsolver explains while giving me a tour of their curing barn, which the chickens and guineas call home, and where practically all the other open space is taken up by this year’s garlic, onion, and shallot crop, drying on a rack almost the size of the Reflecting Pool, though already significantly less green. “He’s so supportive—the extrovert to my introvert,” she says. Hopp is also the first reader of her drafts and, at least during my visit, the baker of bread, maker of salads, brewer of coffee, checker of weather, and acquirer of U.S.D.A. land-use data on their farm when I ask about its acreage. No one is more surprised than Kingsolver by how happy she is living in Appalachia and being someone’s wife, though her husband is likelier to be called Mr. Kingsolver than she is Mrs. Hopp.
When “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” came out, in 2007, some quipped that Kingsolver had always been trying to make her readers eat their vegetables. It’s difficult to summarize or even catalogue all the issues she has tackled in her work. An abridged list would include the complexities of tribal law, in “Pigs in Heaven”; the sanctuary movement, in “Animal Dreams”; censorship and artistic freedom, in “The Lacuna,” her 2009 novel about Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the House Un-American Activities Committee; climate change and religious fundamentalism, in “Flight Behavior,” from 2012; and the kitchen sink, in “Unsheltered,” from 2018, which takes on evolution, poverty, racism, globalization, higher education, miscarriage, utopias, dystopias, and nearly everything else that was plaguing and polarizing America circa both 1875 and 2015. The critic Dwight Garner called the last “dead on arrival” in the Times, diagnosing a fault similar to one that had split readers of “The Lacuna”—a feeling that the novels were really each two distinct books, with a superior story crowded out by a lesser one.
“There was always a condescension toward Barbara and her work from literary circles,” Sam Stoloff, who took over Frances Goldin’s agency when Goldin died, told me when I asked about Kingsolver’s reception. “Barbara’s theory is always a prejudice against rural people, but I think there’s more to it than that. She straddles the line between commercial and literary fiction, and part of the condescension is people feeling she’s too popular. I also think it has to do with wearing her politics on her sleeve.”
Kingsolver has never lived in N.Y.C. and doesn’t have an M.F.A., and she says she doesn’t feel beholden to what either urbane readers or workshop leaders think a novel should or shouldn’t do. “I never wanted to be one of the cool kids,” she tells me, and, despite a keen awareness of the critical conversation about her work, her way of defending herself has been to make more of it. She delights in finding the right metaphor (relationships that “harden like arteries,” a pregnant woman who feels like “a universe with ankles”) and deploying aphorisms (“The wonder is that you could start life with nothing, end with nothing, and lose so much in between”) in just the appropriate tone and register for her wildly variable casts, which range from farmers, mechanics, and entomologists to fictional mid-century novelists. She has written in the first person, the third person, and an omniscient no person; she has written allegories, books within books, and collages of reportage real and imagined, plus epistolary novels, sestinas, and sonnets.
Kingsolver says that writing a poem is like “riding a unicycle, and the art is in balancing one idea,” but that her novels are more like station wagons that she fills up and then throws some other ideas on top of or tows a few more behind. That maximalist approach was out of synch with American literature for much of her career, but eventually the culture, at least when it came to fiction, veered in the direction her station wagons have always been driving.
For a long time, one of the things Kingsolver could neither let go of nor commit to the page was another kind of D.A.B.: a Damned Appalachia Book. She wanted to write a novel about the opioid epidemic and what it had done to the place she calls home, yet struggled to find a voice for it. In 2018, exhausted after the international tour for “Unsheltered,” she checked herself into Bleak House, a bed-and-breakfast that operates out of Dickens’s summer house in Kent, looking over Viking Bay, where guests are booked into such rooms as the Copperfield Bridal Suite and Little Dorrit’s Classic Double. Kingsolver didn’t get a character, though, she got the author himself: the Charles Dickens Room, and its adjoining study, complete with his old writing desk. That’s where she was sitting when, one night, unable to write and on the verge of sleep, she heard the ghost of Dickens say, “Let the child speak.”
Kingsolver still identifies as a scientist; she doesn’t believe in ghosts or talking with dead people, even beloved authors, which made the whole experience particularly bizarre. Perhaps it was a waking dream, she says, or a little glitch in her brain. In any case, she obeyed, conjuring, in the months that followed, one of the few child narrators to elbow their way into the American canon: Damon Fields, a Melungeon boy who becomes known as Demon Copperhead. Born in the caul to a teen-age mother high on pills and passed out on the floor of her trailer, Demon makes the best of an almost entirely unsupervised childhood, digging for sassafras and avoiding snakes, playing Nintendo Duck Hunt and wishing to be Wolverine. Next door is his best friend, Matt Peggot, a.k.a. Maggot. Everyone in this novel has a nickname—Fast Forward, Humvee, Hammerhead, Extra Eye, Baggy Eyes, U-Haul, Creaky, Swap-Out—partly because comedy is one of the only coins in this impoverished realm, but also because no one ever leaves or leaves behind their reputation. “Here,” Demon says, “all we can ever be is everything we’ve been.”
Plenty of novelists swear by Word, Scrivener, or Google Docs, but Kingsolver used an Excel spreadsheet to outline every chapter of “David Copperfield,” then marched Demon through a parallel plot. Somehow, the result doesn’t feel formulaic; it’s fierce and feral and, most improbably, fully original. Take the paragraph below, from soon after Kingsolver explains, in breath-catching detail, how Maggot’s mother ended up in Goochland prison for almost “Lorena Bobbiting” the boy’s father, and a few moments before she gives a Zola-like account of bringing in a tobacco crop, complete with the nicotine poisoning that can come with it. This is Demon, on getting to Elk Knob Elementary School from the farm where his case manager has temporarily placed him:
The slang, the syntax, the specificity, the sociology, all compressed, black-hole style, onto a school bus—Kingsolver keeps this up for five hundred pages, from Demon’s dashing “First, I got myself born” to an ending too good to spoil. Reading the book is like watching one of those mothers who lift up a car to rescue their child from underneath. Kingsolver wrote “Demon Copperhead,” she says, out of the grief and the anger she feels for what has happened to Appalachia, a colony of sorts within America where one extractive industry after another robbed its natural resources—first timber, then coal, then tobacco—until Purdue Pharma came peddling cures for all the pain those earlier industries had left behind.
Because of her Zip Code, Kingsolver has long been a kind of MAGA whisperer, an unofficial Ambassador of Real America. She hopes that that gig ends soon, and dismisses the possibility of Trumpism having a successor, insisting that the President has cultivated a cult of personality, not a lasting political movement. (“He chose a Vice-President with the charisma of a turd,” she adds.) America’s divisions, she says, are not attributable to any one person, and “Demon Copperhead” wasn’t intended to explain why half the country voted for Trump and was about to do so again. It was an elegy for the generation of children being raised by their mawmaws or thrown into foster care because their parents were dead from overdoses or locked away for selling pills, a rebuke of the well-meaning policymakers and nonprofit directors whose arrogance masquerades as helpfulness. It is, finally, an apologia for rural life by someone who came from and willingly returned to it.
Kingsolver’s daughters, Camille and Lily, both live near their mother, and her two grandchildren visit all the time. One of Kingsolver’s favorite local restaurants is a Mexican joint where she enjoys the Asian-pear Martinis and the grandkids enjoy the balloon artist who’s there every Tuesday. Camille’s husband runs Snow’s Fine Meats & Provisions, a butcher shop in Abingdon; while we ate a lunch from there one day, Lily and her husband came by to use the printer. Both daughters contributed to “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” and both have continued to collaborate with their mother: Camille’s work as a community mental-health counsellor and her familiarity with the foster system helped inform “Demon Copperhead,” and Lily’s training in science education led to her co-writing the children’s book “Coyote’s Wild Home.”
“I didn’t really expect my girls would be able to come back here after college, but I’m glad they could,” Kingsolver says. “I couldn’t get far enough away from my family.” When her mother died, in 2013, Kingsolver wrote, in a poem, “While we spoke kindly, / mostly, my mother and I did not love one another. / Ever, not even when I was a baby.” It was through reading old correspondence that Kingsolver learned about her mother’s postpartum depression. “For the first twenty-five years of my life, until therapy, I thought it was my fault,” she says. “How could a mother not love her child?” In the poem’s final line, with the last of her mother’s breaths drawn and a “wild stampede” of a storm outside quieted, Kingsolver writes, “Here begins my life as no one’s bad daughter.”
After Dr. Wendell died, in the spring of 2024, Kingsolver finally felt free to write about her origins. “I needed both my parents to be gone before I could write this,” she says of “Partita.” Its narrator, Livia Bohusz, is a small-town girl from Tennessee who learns to play piano at church, practicing endless hours for one recital after another, culminating in a guest appearance with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and then a scholarship to the Indiana University School of Music. Her ambitions are fuelled not only by a desire to perfect her talents but by desperation to escape her family: a brother whose suicide torments those who survived him; a mother who terrorizes her, emotionally and physically, for everything, including her musical gifts; a “Cross-to-Bear Methodist” father who is too cowed to protect his daughter or publicly champion her talents. “A child can’t hate her mother without putting the load-bearing walls of the known world at risk,” Livia confides in one early chapter. “I settled for hating her shoes.”
Plenty of people in “Partita” question whether the daughter of a dairy farmer could ever earn her place in the world of Satie and Schubert, and plenty of people who care for Livia don’t understand the universe of meaning she finds in eighty-eight keys. As she taps out Bach with her fingers on the back of a boyfriend’s shoulders one night, he asks her if she’s happy when she’s playing the piano. “I have no idea,” she tells him. “When I’m playing, I’m not me anymore. I go inside the music and disappear in there.”
That boyfriend is Sigurd, the Marxist organizer whose beliefs make Livia question hers. He disrupts her trajectory in other ways as well, and, in true Kingsolverish style, their affair draws a variety of crises down on Livia’s head. Kingsolver knows that it’s a lot to fit in. In one scene, Livia explains to Sigurd, and to us, that a partita “will never be all happy rondos, or all andantes in a minor key. You’ll usually have a prelude, a thrilling allemande, maybe a slow, sexy sarabande—the contrast is the point. The parts are all different, and the artist’s work is to make them all add up to a something that feels whole.”
Kingsolver can play a partita, too, but as much as she’s used her life as inspiration for this novel, she is emphatic about being its author, not its protagonist. “I think it’s similar to acting,” she tells me, “in that actors play all kinds of different characters that they would never be, including murderers. No one says, ‘Is this based on your own mother?’ To inhabit a character, they pull something from inside themselves that helps them understand that character, and that’s exactly how I would put it. I have written as many different kinds of people as Meryl Streep has played and more, and most of them are very different from me.”
So although Livia escapes Appalachia on a music scholarship, as Kingsolver did, and also returns there, she does so chastened, like the heroine of a Nathaniel Hawthorne or a Thomas Hardy novel, not like the world-famous artist Kingsolver has become. But the consolations of art do not depend on achievement, and that might be Kingsolver’s most direct riposte to her critics. Back home, Livia takes long walks with her sister-in-law, Mickie, the latest in a line of truthtelling public-school teachers from Kingsolver’s books. A former literature major, Mickie—or, per the Steele County High School Yearbook, Mrs. Michaela Barnes, A.P. English—finds meaning in pressing Dickens and Longfellow on farm kids, not so that they can become novelists or poets but so that they have a storehouse of beauty to sustain them for the rest of their lives. When a dispirited Livia is wondering what good there is in music, Mickie, like a windup Mary Oliver, tells her, “The point of art is to help you like your life better.”
I ask Kingsolver if she agrees with Mickie, and she says she isn’t sure. This claim about art is the kind of thing that would enrage her detractors, although it’s easy to imagine the credo tattooed on the arms of M.F.A. students and italicized in their bios on TikTok. “I haven’t Updiked,” Kingsolver tells me one day proudly, noting that, although she gets older with every book tour, her audiences seem to stay at least relatively young. Foster kids have written to her about how much they love Demon, new classes of students read about the Price family every semester, and Kingsolver still hears regularly from parents and grandparents who, moved by “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” have tried their own version of that book’s experiment, whether on hobby farms or with whatever pots they can plant on their front stoops or fire escapes.
These days, “nice” isn’t the withering critique it once was. The novelist Richard Powers, a friend of Kingsolver’s, told me, “All the qualities that are there in the books are magnified in fact—wisdom wrapped in warmth, commitment to community, wry pragmatism, a reverence for place.” Certainly, her life is like her work in at least one respect: it is far more difficult to dismiss once you’ve actually engaged with it.
During my visit, Kingsolver dumps the leftover water from our drinking glasses into one of her plants before answering a question I’ve asked her about charity. “The whole idea of charity is condescending,” she says. She prefers the category of generosity, because giving in that spirit lacks the coercive expectations of charity, the implicit hope that the recipient will become more like the donor. After Kingsolver’s advances grew large enough to support her family, she began passing along her royalties: one novel endowed the Bellwether Prize, which offered twenty-five thousand dollars and a publishing contract for socially engaged works of fiction; one of the essay collections contributes to the Environmental Defense Fund, Habitat for Humanity, and Heifer International; another novel became the engine for a new medical scholarship for Congolese students, named in memory of her father.
For fifteen years, Hopp ran Harvest Table, a restaurant in Meadowview serving food and selling goods sourced from a few hundred local farmers and craftspeople. It made no money, but embodied the principles he and Kingsolver had articulated in “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,” serving grits made from Appalachian dent corn and burgers that came from nearby beef herds. Hopp closed Harvest Table in 2022 and Kingsolver sunsetted the Bellwether Prize in 2023, not because they gave up on their convictions, she says, but because they were becoming so widely shared: there are more locavores than ever, and the types of books the Bellwether championed (Jamila Minnicks’s “Moonrise Over New Jessup,” Hillary Jordan’s “Mudbound,” Lisa Ko’s “The Leavers”) no longer need as much help getting published.
After “Demon Copperhead” came out, Kingsolver convened some of the social workers and medical professionals who had helped her while she was researching the book by sharing their experiences of providing addiction and recovery care. Many came from Lee County, which is both where the book is set and one of the counties most ravaged by the opioid epidemic. Over breakfast at Shoney’s, she asked what she should do with her avalanche of royalties. To a person, they told her that what the region most needed was a recovery house for women—something small enough to let its residents feel like family and unhurried enough that they could really get back on their feet, whether they came from prison or the streets. Kingsolver and Hopp opened one: Higher Ground Women’s Recovery Residence, which, so far, has served more than a dozen women in Pennington Gap, Virginia, offering sober housing, education, and support for up to two years. When the women living in “The House That Demon Built” needed more opportunities for employment, Kingsolver and Hopp donated funds to buy the property next door, which will soon become Second Chances Thrift Store.
“Attention and money just feel like things you have to hold a mirror up to, directing them somewhere else,” Kingsolver tells me. “I guess partly I don’t want to be the tall weed that gets cut, and, partly because of my raising, I just don’t want to get too full of myself.” We’re cooling off from today’s walk in the woods, resting for a while in the oversized Arts and Crafts-style chairs in her sitting room, opposite the piano, with some of the music mentioned in “Partita” still on the rack. The chair Kingsolver has chosen is the one where she knits almost daily, using the wool of her own sheep, seventy-five pounds or so of which she and Hopp harvest every year, then take to a solar-powered mill where it’s spun into yarn.
Kingsolver picks up the sweater she’s in the thick of to show me her progress. But I’m distracted by what’s behind her: a broken window, stretching almost from floor to ceiling, the glass thoroughly fractured yet refusing to come apart, a dense spiderweb of cracks with the blur of her terraced vegetable garden behind it. “I forgot you’re looking at me with the backdrop of the shatter,” she says. Someone would be coming by soon to see about replacing the window, but in the meantime, ever since Hopp cracked it by kicking up a rock with his weed trimmer, Kingsolver has studied its brokenness, taping both sides to keep the glass together, admiring how it scatters the sunlight.
She turns back to look at it in the middle of a long answer to a question I’ve asked about reconciling her happiness with the injustices of the world. She ticks off just a few of the day’s news stories—the aftermath of an earthquake in Venezuela, the energy crisis in Cuba, the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza—and observes how easy it is to be overwhelmed by any one of these tragedies, and how easy it is to be distracted from them, too. “We are not wired for this,” she says of the endless scroll of suffering that people confront nowadays. “The machine is not built to handle all this information. There are limits to the human mind, a limit to the number of people the human animal evolved to care for.”
One antidote to this, she insists, is the novel. “Novels draw you into human conflicts the way our brains are wired to experience them—as feelings, and there’s a big difference between information and feeling. We enter into the realities of other people through emotion, not information, and that’s what a great novel does.” The newspaper, the home page, the grid, the feed: “A novel isn’t a few seconds and then on to something else—the hodgepodge of randomness, equating things that are not equivalent. A novel brings you into the one-to-one, the intimacy of human relationships and human conflicts, for hours at a time.”
Kingsolver says, “I’ll keep writing for as long as I can. Until I can’t remember words.” She doesn’t give a hoot about A.I., and she tells me that the same share of people read fiction today as they did in Cervantes’s time, so we should quit worrying about the end of reading. All she can do, she says, is what she’s always done: craft a novel, from page negative one hundred to page zero, then onward to the end. ♦