Barbara Kingsolver got the offer on her first novel the same day her first daughter was born. She came home from the hospital to a blinking answering machine, and the book came out the week that same baby learned to walk. Almost forty years later, she has a Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Foundation’s medal for a lifetime of work, and a recovery house for women in Lee County, Virginia, built with her Demon Copperhead royalties. She has been one of my literary heroes and true life mentors for decades, and I still cannot believe I got to talk with her.
We talk about what publishing looked like in 1988 versus now, why a slow-building career was a gift to a young mom, and the stubborn hand condition we both live with that ended her public book signings. She walks us through October on her farm in southern Appalachia, where the tomatoes are canned, the peppers are roasted, and she is the one who gets the call when a lamb gets stuck. And she makes the case that rural people are close to half of this country but almost none of what we see on screen, which is why she writes books that work as mirrors for her neighbors and windows for everybody else.
Then we get into Partita, her new novel. Livia was a piano prodigy from east Tennessee who became a small-town piano teacher instead. In her fifties, the first love who derailed her calls and asks to see her, and she has seven days to decide. Barbara built the whole book like a Bach partita, with movements named for old dances and a listening list in the front. She tells us how a small-town girl fell for classical music on her living room floor, why nobody in America wants to talk about class, why revision is where art lives, and about the practice room scene her pianist friend had been waiting her whole life to read.
Thought-provoking Quotes:
I became a novelist and a mom the same day. (Barbara Kingsolver)
I need my hands to write books. If you let me keep them, I will write you more books. (Barbara Kingsolver)
Rural people are close to half of the population of this country, but we are just about zero percent of what you see on television, in the movies, or in the news. (Barbara Kingsolver)
I want to write these books that are both mirrors for the people who need to see themselves and windows for the people who don’t know. (Barbara Kingsolver)
When you’re in the flow state making something beautiful, that is love too. It’s another kind of love. (Barbara Kingsolver)
I love revision. I feel like revision is where art really lives. (Barbara Kingsolver)
When I’ve finished a book to my absolute satisfaction and send it out into the world, the work of it is only half done. (Barbara Kingsolver)
When I closed Demon Copperhead, I remember thinking, I have just read a masterpiece. (Jen Hatmaker)
Some people ask me, how can you be optimistic in these times? And I say, look who I’m dealing with. (Barbara Kingsolver)
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