Interview with Barbara Kingsolver

What happens when you've done everything right, but you can't pay your bills?

That's one of the questions Barbara Kingsolver probes in her new novel, Unsheltered. Weaving between the present and the past, it follows two families in Vineland, New Jersey, living in different moments of cultural crisis.

The main story, set in the present, revolves around a couple, Willa and Iano, whose lives are rocked by job loss and tragedy. Despite years working in magazines (Willa) and academia (Iano), they find themselves middle-aged, living in an old house that's falling apart, and barely able to make ends meet. As Willa learns more about her home's history, the book travels back in time to tell the story of Thatcher Greenwood, a science teacher in Vineland in the late 1800s whose enthusiasm for Charles Darwin's controversial new theory of evolution endangers his livelihood and reputation.

Unsheltered is an ambitious, timely novel that explores some of today's most politically charged topics, including globalization and the decline of the American dream. None of this will surprise Kingsolver fans, as she is known for addressing social issues in her writing: colonialism in The Poisonwood Bible, climate change in Flight Behavior, and food production in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, to name just a few of the hefty topics she's tackled in her 30-year career. Kingsolver talked to Goodreads contributor Kerry Shaw about her latest novel. Their conversation has been edited.



Goodreads: I've read that you begin your novels by asking questions, but was there an "aha moment" or an experience that made you want to write this book?

Barbara Kingsolver: The question in this case was, "What in the heck is going on?" How can it be that all of the rules—about what kind of leaders people admire and elect to public office, and how we behave as citizens of the world—no longer seem to apply. All the rules seem to be changing. And not only that, but larger, biological rules about our home, the idea that the poles would always be covered with ice, and that there would always be more fish in the sea. All these things that I've always counted on suddenly were no longer true. But it wasn't an "aha moment." I'd say it was a couple of "aha years" when I understood that I needed to write about how people behave in moments of cultural crisis.

GR: When did you start writing Unsheltered?

BK: About three years ago, I had an outline in my mind of what the narrative arc would be. So I was writing in real time during the primaries when this new, very strange kind of leadership was coming up on the horizon, and none of us could believe it would really go anywhere. This character who's called "The Bullhorn" in my novel…I was watching that happen and writing about it in real time. And I was thinking the whole time, "Oh, by the time this book comes out, nobody's going to remember that guy." Well… [Laughs]

GR: I'm curious about the chronology because you've mentioned being interested in the decline of civil discourse, and I wonder if it's only gotten worse since you began writing this book, making your questions all the more germane today.

BK: Yes. The way history has played out has been really good for the book, really bad for the world. But I'm excited to be releasing this into the world right now because it's asking questions that I really believe in. And that's what a novel does: It doesn't propose solutions—it asks questions. Your hope is that it will lead people to question themselves or each other or to have conversations.

GR: Do you have a theory as to why discourse is so difficult now?

BK: Yes, it's a book. [Laughs] I purposefully choose questions that aren't easily answered, and try to address them in 400 or 500 pages because a simple question wouldn't make a very good novel. But really that's another way of asking, "How do people behave in moments of cultural crisis?"

One of the things you can count on is that people will be very afraid, and they will cleave to leaders who reassure them, even if those leaders behave like tyrannical bullies. When we're afraid, we look for protection. One of the things this book is about is how desperately we hold on to our old world views, even when they no longer serve us, and how we overlook a lot of things to find reassurance.

GR: Your novel alternates between present and past. Can you talk about that choice?

BK: It's really hard to understand a crisis when you're living through it. I thought I'd have a shot at understanding this moment if I tried to step back and look at it through a historical lens, comparing it with some previous moment when people were similarly challenged.

There were various options: the Black Death, the Dark Ages. But I chose the 1870s because I wanted to stay in one place. Really early on, I devised this literary device of having two sets of characters living in the same house. So I had to choose another time in history that had knowable characters and a knowable place. The Dark Ages wouldn't have worked—there was no house I could really construct that could conceivably still be standing in modern times. So I settled on post-Civil War Vineland, New Jersey, and modern Vineland, New Jersey, after considering and discarding many other locations and time periods.

GR: How did you land on New Jersey, living where you do in rural Virginia?

BK: Purely by chance. It's not a place I'd ever known or thought very much about. But I had settled on this time period of the 1870s, and a big part of that era's existential crisis was caused by the writings of Charles Darwin. Not just Darwin, but a number of his colleagues who were simultaneously coming to the conclusion that humans were not separate from the natural world—we belong to the natural world. We're all so accustomed to that idea now. It's hard to imagine how threatening it was to people who'd never imagined any scenario other than the one in which God created them to rule over the rest of creation.

I was casting around for important advocates of Darwin in the U.S. in the 1870s, and happened to cross the name of one of his correspondents, Mary Treat [a character in the novel]. I was surprised because I didn't know anything about her. When I started looking, I discovered that nobody knew anything about her! She had never been the subject of any biography. Her Wikipedia page had just two sentences, though that's changed now, I'm happy to say.

I had a hunch that if she'd left any papers, they would be in the town where she'd lived, Vineland. I called up the Historical Society there and found that they had a gold mine. I went there and spent days just reading her letters, her personal papers, as well as her published papers. It was astounding to me when the wonderful curator, Pat Martinelli, brought out this box and said, "Well, here you go!" And it was letters from Darwin. Not copies, not facsimiles, but actual letters in manila folders.

It was really thrilling to find this character and discover that she'd led such an interesting life, and that her town, Vineland, was the perfect setting. So much of what I put on the page—many of the things she says and does—came straight from her own writings.

GR: I know that a big theme in Unsheltered is the American dream. For me, it also looks at how the burden of taking care of a family falls on the woman. That could be because the protagonist is a woman, but I saw Willa absorbing the stress of every generation—her children, her grandchild, and her father-in-law. What do you make of that?

BK: I think it's really emblematic of our time. Yes, the gender conversation is there. But there's also this presumption that has carried us forward in our present paradigm—the idea that each generation will be a little better off than the one before. So it should be pretty easy to take care of the elders, while the younger people are becoming self-sufficient, and then it'll be their turn to take care of Willa, in this case.

But those presumptions aren't working anymore. Things that Willa and Iano did to guarantee their security failed them. Expecting their kids to do the same things is also a failure because the paradigm is not working anymore. A lot of Willa's frustration is that she still believes things should be different. It's hard for her to see her kids as anything but failures because the things that were supposed to happen aren't happening.

So it's not that I decided to also throw in the "Sandwiched Generation Woman" and add that as a theme. It's all part of the same theme: What happens in a culture, what happens in history, what happens in the family, when people are still following rules that don't apply anymore?

GR: Who are your favorite characters to write?

BK: I always enjoy the villains, like Nick [the elderly father-in-law]. The greatest challenge, I think, for the novelist is that we have to love every one of our characters, even those who behave horribly, because we have to understand them. Otherwise, they won't be convincing. Even the worst bully believes he's a good guy. Nobody gets up in the morning and says, "I'm going to be a bad guy today." Well, maybe they do, but they mean it in a positive way, thinking, "I'm going to do this because the world needs this."

Part of the problem in our modern polarized moment, when we're finding it really difficult to converge across political and geographic divides, is that we're so eager to reduce our enemies into cardboard stereotypes. And I'm really, really familiar with that because I live in Appalachia—my heritage, family, and culture are from here. Whenever I've left this region, I've encountered people who look at Appalachia and see cardboard stereotypes. So I've lived my whole life with an incentive to flesh out characters who people might see as not necessarily the enemy, but lesser than.

GR: You once said in an interview that you limit your exposure to the type of stuff you don't want to write. You said, "I'm enough of a biologist to know that whatever comes in will, in some form, come back out." What do you expose yourself to?

BK: Well, of course, I read research materials for content and not style. I have a really high tolerance for soporific or even poorly written material if it contains information I need to know for something I'm writing. That said, I'm always reading fiction, at every stage of my life, no matter what else I'm doing. My rule is that I read fiction that is so good, I wish I could have written it myself. And I avoid the other kind.

GR: Well, I won't ask you to name the other kind! Are there writers you love to read?

BK: The trouble I have with that question is that there are so many! I can tell you what's literally and truly on my nightstand right now: Southernmost by Silas House, Dopesick by Beth Macy. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Shepherd's Life by James Rebanks, Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, King Leopold's Ghost by Adam Hochschild, The Body in the Clouds by Ashley Hay, Only Killers and Thieves by Paul Howarth, and then a whole bunch of poetry, because I like to read poetry, like the last thing at night. It cleans up your brain, makes it better, fills it with really beautiful words.

GR: On that note, I noticed that you're not on Twitter.

BK: Ah, right. That's not what I want to go to bed with in my brain, for sure. Some of my favorite poets are Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, Wendell Berry. Not to say that's an exhaustive list of my favorite authors—I wouldn't even say that all of them are my favorite authors. But that's what I'm reading right now. And all of them are recommendable.

GR: Whom do you trust in terms of what to read?

BK: I read reviews. I have friends whose taste I absolutely trust. Ann Patchett is a genius at knowing what her friends would like to read. Usually the book she sends me will be my favorite book of the year. We all need friends like that, and I try to be a friend like that. Also, I begin a lot more books than I finish. If I'm reading a book for pleasure, I'll give it 30 pages. If I'm reviewing it, obviously, or if it's research, then I'll plow through. But otherwise, I give a book 30 pages, and if I'm still remembering at that point that I'm me, reading the book, I'll put it down. I have reached that point in life where I've probably read more books than I'll get to read in the future. So I just want to make sure they're all the right books.

GR: You have wonderful writing advice on your website. What's the one tip you find yourself giving the most to people who hope to write a book someday?

BK: Well, this one you've probably heard or read. Don't smoke, and observe posted speed limits, because good writing comes from wisdom. And the longer you live, the more likely you are to accumulate wisdom.