Famed for her provocative, socially aware fiction, Barbara Kingsolver holds an unusually stellar place in the global literary canon. A biologist before turning to writing, Kingsolver was awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2000 in recognition of her advocacy for human rights, social responsibility and the environment in American fiction. Every one of her books since the publication of her sixth, Pigs in Heaven , in 1993, has been a New York Times bestseller. But she remains perhaps best known outside the US for her 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible, which questioned US foreign policy in the Congo. She talked to around the time her latest novel, Flight Behaviour, was published last month.
That made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. But nobody wants to be right about this. The storm was like a gut punch to this country and the dimensions of what we're in for are terrifying. But at the same time it is interesting that people are now eager to talk about climate change in a way they perhaps weren't before. It has bothered me for a long time that we have this difficulty in the US speaking about climate change. It seems strange that a whole lot of people can look at the same set of facts and come away believing different things. So I wanted to write about that. Why is that? How does that work and where does that leave us? So the novel is not so much about climate change as it is about the non-conversation around climate change and what is the genesis of that.
I woke up one morning with an image in my head of this forested valley that looked like it was on fire. But it wasn't on fire; I knew it was this freak biological event. And suddenly, all of a piece, I had the setting, the plot, the characters. I knew of course I would have to do a lot of research and went to it straight away. But before that it seemed an impossible subject, I really had no idea how I would write about it. But I knew when I saw this image of all these butterflies that I had a novel in hand. It was magical and very rare. But because I'm a scientist who relies on rational explanations, I would say probably I had been working on this subject in the back of my mind for years, and I was just ready to get that image. I do cook ideas more or less subconsciously for a long time before I'm really ready to begin a novel.