SOURCE: “Novel Beginning,” in Chicago Tribune, September 16, 1993, p. D13.

[In the following interview, Kingsolver discusses her life, literary beginnings, and Pigs in Heaven.]

Barbara Kingsolver arrived for lunch so promptly as to be early, a refreshing gesture from someone who was soon casually confessing that her writing career began with an enormous white lie.

The lie occurred some years ago, before Kingsolver had published her three novels and one book of short stories, and before her latest book, Pigs in Heaven, made its gently opinionated author a bona fide literary success. Back then, Kingsolver was a graduate student at the University of Arizona, studying the social life of termites.

“It's a very interesting question if you're in this special filed of population biology,” Kingsolver said. “But if you're not, and most people aren't, it's very difficult to understand what it has to do with the state of the union.”

Her thesis was to have been called “Kin Selection Among Heterotermes Aureus,” but the whole thing was making her increasingly dispirited, she said.

She was growing tired of the grinding lab work, the academic back-stabbing, the struggles to keep her subjects alive (termites are very sensitive to temperature changes). So she decided to quit and take her first writing job, as a science writer for the university. Fine for her, dismaying for her academic advisers.

“My thesis committee was really mad at me—they all thought I had great potential—so I felt under great pressure to come up with a legitimate excuse,” said Kingsolver, 38.

“I can't say what it was—I'm too with a family member who is still embarrassed—but it had to do alive. I made up a terrible lie involving a car accident and a permanent disability, and said I needed to take another job to support my unnamed, maimed relative.”

Until now, Kingsolver's career has been quietly successful, gaining momentum with each book. Independent booksellers have nominated her three times for their Abby Award, which they give to the book they most enjoyed recommending and selling to their customers.

Pigs in Heaven is her first book on the New York Times best-seller list. The novel tackles so many personal and public issues that it defies easy description. But at the heart it is an account of a custody battle between a white woman who adopted an abused, terrified little Indian girl left behind at a roadside rest stop, and the Cherokee nation, whose members identify the girl as one of their own and fight to get her back.

It ends with a Solomonic compromise that is either fatally contrived or wonderfully creative, depending on how you see it.

Women are undeniably Kingsolver's biggest fans. Some men seem puzzled by her appeal, pigeonholing her as a touchy-feely women's author even as their sisters, mothers, girlfriends and wives read, reread, borrow, lend and discuss her books.

Kingsolver, who lives in Tucson, writes books with strong idealistic messages, about the environment, the working poor, Central American refugees, single motherhood, and Indian rights.

Her books show a droll wit and an intricate understanding of the almost imperceptible subtleties of relationships. They feature exceptionally strong women who act unexpectedly, if emphatically, and who aren't so sure they need men around. This seems, in part, to be wishful thinking on Kingsolver's part: she has just undergone a wrenching divorce from her husband, a chemistry professor.

“I don't much enjoy being single,” she said, her voice cracking a little and becoming even more measured. “I hear it's supposed to be fun, but what it means is that you fix dinner and you do the dishes and you bring in the groceries and you balance the checkbook, and you do it all while you're on a book tour.”

Being a novelist seems to have been the remotest of career possibilities for Kingsolver when she was growing up, gawky and string-bean thin and different from everyone else, in rural Kentucky.

“I wanted to read Anna Karenina and everybody else wanted to do stuff in the back of cars,” she said. School was decidedly unchallenging. She recalled that the only math and science courses offered were called “Math” and “Science” and so, rather than stay home and become a tobacco farmer's wife, she fled to DePauw University in Greencastle, Ind., winning a music scholarship.

“I was trained in classical piano, but it dawned on me that classical pianists compete for six job openings a year, and the rest of us get to play ‘Blue Moon’ in a hotel lobby,” she said. So she switched to biology.

After arriving in Arizona, embracing and then abandoning her termite studies, Kingsolver took the science-writing job, addressing such topics as the potential of gopher weed as a fuel crop for the university. All the while, she wrote poetry and short stories, showing them to no one.

About a decade ago she entered a short-story contest held by a Phoenix newspaper, The New Times, which she described as “one of those free weekly alternative papers that's arts oriented and does investigative pieces like uncovering the dirt on the city council.”

Months passed by and nothing came of it, until more than a year later, when a friend congratulated her—she had won and nobody had told her.

More short stories were published (a compilation is called Homeland); then in 1988 came The Bean Trees, which she wrote during the chronic insomnia of pregnancy, and Animal Dreams.

She says that she writes easily and fluidly, as if writing a screenplay for a movie in her head, and that she thinks of her characters as house guests who have come to stay for a spell. Her daughter, Camille, 6, was a big help with Pigs in Heaven, providing her mother with useful child's-eye-view observations.

Kingsolver said that she had expected some questioning of the adoption issues in her Pigs in Heaven, but she seemed taken aback later on in the day when two enraged women got up at a mostly cozy reading at Shakespeare & Company on the Upper West Side to noisily condemn her book for, they said, endorsing the notion that adoption is bad for children.

But she says she is used to taking criticism, even from the most unexpected sources. Early in the summer, for instance, she appeared on a television call-in show to discuss her book and her work. “One guy in New Mexico was listening in his pickup truck,” Kingsolver said.

“He pulled over to the side of the road to call and tell me that I was all wrong.” He didn't say exactly what he meant.

“What could I say? ‘Get back in your pickup truck, sir, and have a nice day.’”