Barbara Kingsolver's experience of being 'drawn and quartered' by the US conservative media in 2001 was so traumatic she stopped writing entirely – thankfully, she found the courage to return, writes KATE HOLMQUIST
BECOMING A scapegoat for the American right-wing post 9/11 came as a “complete surprise” to novelist Barbara Kingsolver. “I got the most terrifying hate mail . . . a vat of bile.” Death threats against her and her daughters, then aged four and 14, forced her to engage security professionals and to treat mail-opening as an exercise in harm reduction.
Kingsolver provoked right-wing rage in 2001 by questioning the prevailing desire, led by George W Bush, for violent retaliation in response to the bombing of the World Trade Center. “Other people were giving blood, so I thought I would give words. I wanted to give comfort to my countrymen during that time of panic and bewilderment. I wrote a handful of newspaper pieces expressing the view that this was the time for Americans to take stock of ourselves. I was asking, who are we? What do we want to be and how can we together become our best selves?”
She believed that it was unproductive to answer fundamentalist violence from the Muslim world with more fundamentalist violence from the US Christian right-wing, which isn’t her idea of what Christianity means anyway.
Her experience of being "drawn and quartered" by the US conservative media was so traumatic that Kingsolver decided to stop writing entirely. "I can't tell you how frightening it was. I felt so profoundly misunderstood. . . it was a dark winter." Fortunately for readers of her stunning 2009 novel The Lacuna, now out in paperback, she grabbed her courage in 2002 and started writing again, succoured by letters that began to trickle in from people offering support.
“I made a vow to use the experience to make something really important. I began to think about a novelist, a writer who would be persecuted for nothing he had written in his novels, but for the circumstances he found himself in. I had always been interested in testing the relationship between art and politics.”
The Lacuna,a dazzling and provocative exploration of art, politics, love, death and redemption, took seven years to write during full-time writing days nearly 365 days a year, with a break only to write a non-fiction book, Animal, Vegetable Mineral: A Year of Food Life, which grew out of Kingsolver's original career as an ecologist and scientist.
In The Lacuna, Kingsolver used her personal experience of persecution to create a compelling protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, who is himself misunderstood and victimised by the anti-communist witch-hunt – The House Un-American Activities Committee – in the 1940s and 1950s.
She was led to the McCarthy era by her desire to explore why it is in 2010 that a large part of America is uncomfortable with challenging the status quo, ironic considering that the founding fathers, such as Thomas Jefferson, were all about creating a new society in reaction to the conservatism of Europe. She found the roots of today’s conservative American paranoia in what became, 60 years ago, FBI head J Edgar Hoover’s version of the Stasi, with neighbour tattling against neighbour. The lingering legacy of the witch-hunts is that America became “very uncomfortable with self-criticism or self-evaluation. . . the American flag has been usurped by unquestioning people who need to believe that everything about the US is perfect.”
The Lacunabrings the reader into the epicentre of the Mexican revolution through the story of a boy, Harrison Shepherd, the son of a US diplomat who is brought from Washington DC to Mexico by his hapless Mexican mother. Effectively abandoned by her, he finds himself hired as teenage cook and secretary to the unpredictable and manipulative artist Frida Kahlo and her husband, the legendary muralist and womaniser Diego Rivera. When exiled Bolshevik leader Lev Trotsky comes to stay, Shepherd witnesses the collision of Mexican art, communism and US paranoia – a story that unravels his later life as a bestselling author of romantic historical fiction.
To read The Lacunais to feel through Harrison's eyes that Kahlo, Diego and Trotsky have become personal friends, so intimate are these psychological portraits and so detailed are the descriptions of their lives, art, homes, travels, food and even their reading material, with actual newspaper reports from the time used in some passages. "I hated killing off Trotsky," Kingsolver says with a smile.
A self-confessed auto-didact obsessed with research, she exhaustively researches her books, spending years in the pursuit of every detail.
For Lacuna,she used newspaper archives, visits to Mexico (she lived nearby in Arizona for many years), "mountains" of reading about the Mexican revolution and letters between Diego and Trotsky. (A previous acclaimed novel, The Poisonwood Bible, published a decade ago, also used the approach of intensive research, creating a vivid world of missionaries and revolutionaries in the Congo.)
Next she creates a detailed map of the book, with flow-charts, then revising her way through as many as 12 drafts, honing the setting, the characters and the story. The final published book feels effortlessly written for the reader. “I take the approach of a scientist,” she says. “You are taking in a lot of information, but you don’t want it to read like it’s hard work, you want to be like the ballerina who seems to appear weightless when in fact her knees are hurting.”
A slim, youthful woman in her late 40s with greying hair, Kingsolver – the daughter of a physician – got a doctorate in evolutionary biology and the genetics of social behaviour in her early 20s, with a dissertation on termites. She did lab-work and scientific writing, but also wrote poetry and short stories that sold to literary journals and magazines, again and again, encouraging her to take up freelance writing full-time. This led to seven novels, two collections of essays, one of poetry, and two non-fiction books.
A constant reader from childhood, she never took a creative writing course and doesn’t believe in them: “The only thing that will teach you about writing is literature.” And the only thing that will teach you about life, she adds, is living it. Her first husband, who she married at 23 after a period of living with him, died of a severe mental and physical illness. As a single mother, she was the sole breadwinner and couldn’t afford health insurance.
Life is a bit easier now in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia at the home she shares with her second husband, near her childhood home. “I’m a very hard worker. I wake up at four or five in the morning and start right to work. I’ve done three or four hours work before anyone else in the house is awake. Then I walk my 14-year-old daughter to the school bus, and work as hard as I can until I have to stop. When I’m in the grip of a novel, I never want to stop. I feel very lucky that for 20 years I’ve written books for a living and not many of us get to do that.”
She credits her agent of 20 years, Francis Goldin. “She told me from the beginning, don’t worry about the marketplace. You have interesting ideas. You have a very unusual perspective. You write about things most people would not consider marketable, but I don’t care. Send your writing to me and don’t feel pressured to become more commercial.” She has worked with only two editors at Harper Collins in her career.
“The only bit of advice I would give anyone is learn as much as you can about the world because you have to have something to write about. You have to know something other people don’t know, to be worthy of their time.” She won’t give away the idea for the novel she is currently brewing, except to say that her work grows out of her passions and her worries. Her preoccupation these days is “how we humans can look at evidence of something terrible right in front of our faces and we can refuse to see it. I’m trying to figure out why.” She is already deep in research, which involves reading a lot of psychological material and consulting a circle of experts in an attempt to figure out the phenomenon of denial.
Put together her interest in ecology, biology and genetics with her passion for seeking out human truth, and perhaps there is a clue there to what her next book will be, or maybe not. But be prepared to wait several years while this scientist of literature figures it out with her research, her flow-charts and her passion.
The Lacunais published in the UK by Faber and Faber
