Conversations with women (over 40): Barbara Kingsolver

The Pulitzer Prize winning author of Demon Copperhead talks discovering she was a “hillbilly”, finding love second time around and why life gets better with every decade

Ever since I started The Shift with Sam Baker podcast, I’ve been privileged to have the most incredible conversations with women (over 40). As regular podcast listeners will know, this started as a way to talk about the things nobody tells you about midlife, beginning with menopause. But as it’s progressed, the conversations have expanded to become about… everything. Whatever life means to you in that moment. Guests have ranged in age and experience from 39 to their mid-90s, and somehow, we’re on season 12 and well over 100 episodes in, so there are lots of incredible conversations to share.

As more of you join this community I’ve decided to start a new thing, where I share those conversations more widely here. Going forward, these transcripts will only be available to paying members, but the first one is free to read. I’m starting with one of my favourite conversations of this past year, with the phenomenal Pulitzer Prize (and double Women’s Prize) winning author Barbara Kingsolver, author of Demon Copperhead. I met Barbara, now 68, in her hotel room during a brief stay in Edinburgh this past June. She was passing through – she’d done an event in Morningside the night before and was about to embark on a week’s hiking, starting in the Highlands. (This is a transcript of our conversation, slightly edited to remove ums, ahs and y’knows! If you’d prefer to listen, you can hear it wherever you get your podcasts – a new series starts on Tuesday just fyi! – or paid subscribers can hear the audio above.)

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Sam: You were brilliant [at the event last night]. There was so much love in the room. It’s a long time since I've been to a book event and there’s been a queue up the road. How does that feel?
Barbara: One doesn't get used to it. It's funny because my life is divided into such very different parts. For 98% of my working life I'm alone, completely alone in a room with my my thoughts, with the people, you know, and the stories inside my head. And I like solitude, obviously.
Sam: Just as well!
Barbara: I think most novelists are introverted because that's where we live, that's our place and so, then, for the other 2% of your working life, to be thrust out into the world and meeting so many people and seeing my work has really become a part of their lives in often a really important way and they want to let me know that, it's a shock. It's a real shock to the system. And hard, in some ways, to meet that expectation, to absorb all of that emotion and gratitude and also pain, you know? I mean, people are telling me, 'your book was medicine for some some great ache in my life’. Just to be present to all that is very hard work. It’s a completely different kind of work than I usually do. And when it's all done, I feel so thankful that I got to do it because it reminds me that now I'm going back into that quiet place, but I'm not really alone in that room. This is a huge conversation I'm having and it's a good thing for me to take that back into the room: both the love – the rewarding sense that, yes, I am doing this for good reason –and also the responsibility of it, that people do need what I'm doing. It's good to feel valued isn’t it?
Sam: After that intense period with all those people wanting a piece of you, do you get introvert burnout?
Barbara: Every day! Because that’s what it means to be an introvert. Not that you dislike people at all, it’s that being with people requires energy. It's draining, it takes energy from you and it is physical and psychic work to be with people. No matter who they are. Even my own family. You know, if I'm at a family reunion there comes a point where I have to go find a quiet place and put a pillow over my head. So that's book tour! I go out and I meet my public and then I really do have to go back to my hotel room and put those pillows over my head. I just need to cocoon, because it’s such intense exposure and I have to recover every day in order to be ready to go and do it again. Sometimes I have to cocoon twice a day!
Sam: I get that totally. It took me a long time to understand that if you're an introvert, being around people – 'like you say, even people you love – takes it out of you. Whereas if you’re an extrovert, being around people puts it in.
Barbara: Exactly. It's as simple as that and it's hard to explain it without sounding mean. It’s just how we're made, it's how we're born and it cannot change. I was that shy kid growing up who always sat at the back of the classroom and never spoke, and always felt like that was wrong of me, I was the wrong kind of person, because that's how people talk. They say, ‘Barbara needs to bring herself out of her shell’, you know. It’s like a failure to be shy, to be that person who would rather watch than participate. There’s a wonderful book called Quiet by Susan Cain. My older daughter Camille – we’re all introverts and it's inherited, it’s genetic, you were born this way if you have introverted parents you will be an introvert.
Sam: Is Steven [her husband] an introvert, too? Because I just bumped into Steven leaving your hotel room and he seems very… Hi!
Barbara: He’s an extrovert! It’s such a good marriage because if I were married to someone like me we would never go out! He gets me out. I say No! No! And then I’m glad I did. It’s a really good balance in a relationship. But back to that book! Camille read it, and then she handed it to me and said, ‘Mom read this, it's about us and it will help you forgive yourself.’ That was like simplest way to put it and she was so right. It was so helpful to understand that this isn't something I'm doing, this is who I am, and your whole life long it's not going to change. American culture, especially, is very anti-introvert. The business model is, ‘Get everybody in a room and brainstorm and hustle!’ Businesses are set up that way and problem solving think tanks are set up that way, and we quiet people have a whole different way of working. I've worked it out. I have a job where I can just be alone and that's my way of problem solving, you know, write a novel. But another thing that I learned from that book is that introversion, as we were saying, it really just has to do with whether you gain energy from being around people or you lose energy; if you have to give energy to the project of being with people that will never change, but shyness can be changed. I used to be shy and now, obviously, I’m not. Being un-shy is something you can learn, like playing the piano or playing tennis, you learn it with practice. And I've had a lot of practice at speaking to large halls and and really opening myself to people who are being, in a weird way, fairly intimate with large groups of people. Because I’ve practiced it, I’ve learned how to do it. And people see that and they say, ‘Oh no, you're not introverted.’ But that's different. You can be an introverted public speaker, the difference is what you do afterwards. The bed, the pillows over the head!

Eleven, twelve, that's when it really starts to happen. Just as puberty is starting, that’s when girls start getting really socially adept at letting each other know who's in and who's out. It's a primate thing.

Sam: I get that totally. You were talking about when you were a little girl at school and not speaking up enough. I'd like to talk to your childhood, because your childhood is so integral to Demon Copperhead, isn’t it?
Barbara: Yeah, there’s more of me in Demon than most people would probably imagine. I could write that character because I have been bullied, I was a kid in school who didn't fit in, didn't have the right clothes. It was a peculiar situation, we only wore hand-me-downs. The town kids – well, this a tiny town, 1500 people in my town, but even at that there was a class distinction between the town kids, whose parents owned the grocery store or the drugstore or whatever, and the rural kids who rode the bus and got to school with mud on our shoes. It was just a very clear class distinction and there was no dating across that line, really seriously, it was rare even for there to be friendships across those lines. So, I was one of the country kids and I was shy and I was weird and I was bookish. I liked studying and learning stuff in a culture that really didn't value that, especially for boys but even for girls. Being the teacher's pet, being the smart one, did not make you popular. I didn't fit in, so I did get bullied quite a lot.
Sam: Was that other girls?
Barbara: Girls are the meanest! Sheesh. Starting in fifth, sixth grade they made sure I knew what a mess I was. 
Sam: I was that kid at school, too. No friends, standing on the edge of the playground… 
Barbara: Eleven, twelve, yeah, that's when it really starts to happen. Just as puberty is starting, that’s when girls start getting really socially adept at letting each other know who's in and who's out. It's a primate thing. I mean, monkeys do it, too. It’s part of our development, especially for females, to just really learn a lot about social capital and forming your alliances to give you power and advantage. I didn’t understand that at the time, but now I do. As a biologist I can see what was going on.
Sam: That doesn’t help when you’re eleven, does it? What was your puberty experience?
Barbara: Scary because I had a mother who didn't tell me anything – anything at all – she just wouldn't talk about stuff like that, so I went to my brother for information (he was two years older) and, bless his heart, he did his best, but he didn’t know anything either! I'm still very close to my brother. My brother has been my lifelong best friend and we survived together, we negotiated it. We lived out in the country, we didn't have playmates, we were a mile from any other family with kids our age so we were each other's companion in playing in the woods, collecting pets (we would catch animals and figure out how to keep them in the house!) and read. We would just take on projects together, like we just used the materials at hand. We had an Encyclopedia Britannica – you know that whole shelf of books was in the house, who knows where it came from!

Sam: It’s crazy isn't it, at that kind of time so many people had those. Where did they come from?!
Barbara: Who knows?! But that was all of knowledge in one place. So we made a deal where we would read them all. I started at A and he started at Z, and we work towards the middle, and we figured by the time we got to M and N between us we would know everything! That's the kind of stuff we did. We tried reading the Bible together – we were not a particularly churchy family but it was a churchy culture and place. And we didn't really know much about the Bible, so we thought, we should read this. And so we read it outloud to each other and, I mean, for little kids (I was probably nine and he was eleven) it's horrifying. I mean, it's people you know, men sleeping with their daughters or using them as bargaining tools. And a lot of slaying… it was horrifying. We thought, we're not getting the point of this…
Sam: Maybe you were!
Barbara: Maybe we were! The Old Testament is pretty fearsome and naturally that's where you're going to start, but we were already little scientists so this whole thing of the whole world created in seven days? That's baloney! We just didn’t buy it. But that was our attempt to become “churched” and it failed badly.
Sam: So you were a little scientist, but you were also really good at music, weren’t you? And now you are a global bestselling writer. So how did the little scientists make that journey?
Barbara: Well, I still feel like I'm the same me I've always been, I'm just a lot less shy. But I'm interested in the same things. I just was always interested in everything. I suppose wanting to read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica at age eleven pretty much sums it up! Music was just because of culture. I come from a place where people make music, a place and time. It’s not so true now and that's sad. I think kids grow up now, because they have such easy access to to music that even country kids get their music from their phones and they feel like you have to be a professional to do it. But Appalachian culture is a culture of makers, it's a really resourceful culture, so women make quilts and they make food and they make clothes and people make their own music and it was really common for people to get together and play music. That was something that happened in my childhood and I just played an instrument. We had a band at school and I played the clarinet and I played the piano. We had a piano at home and I begged to learn from a really early age. I just wanted to own that piano, you know, own it with my hands. So I started taking piano lessons from Miss Edith, the elderly lady in the town who taught me everything wrong! But at least I learned to read music and the basics. And then somehow there was a substitute (the deficits in the school system were vast, we really had so few resources in the school, but there were several times when a substitute would come in from the city for like a week and they would always find me. One of them was math, and she said, ‘Wow, you’re in seventh grade and I think you're really smart but your maths is like third grade level can I help?' And of course I was really embarrassed and I said, ‘well, sure’. I wasn't different from anyone else in the class but somehow she picked me out, and she gave me these texts and she gave me a little bit of special help and bam I figured out algebra!
A similar thing happened with music. It was this music teacher who just singled me out and said come upstairs - up in the attic of this old creaky school there was a piano – and she said, 'play some things for me’. And then she said, (I’ll never forget this!), ‘you are almost ruined beyond repair but I think I can save you!’ I felt so shamed but also so excited, like OK, save me!  Technically I was doing everything wrong, but she started coming for a period of time that she had, giving me lessons and I got so much better and I got so much intense pleasure from this that she persuaded my mom (I mean this was a great kindness from my mom who usually didn't have time for very much) to drive me to Lexington, a city an hour away, to a good teacher. 
That was what got me through high school as a lonely misfit kid. I just threw myself into piano and I met other people. My first boyfriend was also piano player. You know, I would be in these groups of kids who were accomplished at something, who didn't have to hide their intelligence or their passion or their skills, and that really did save me. So I got to I got to college on a music scholarship but really I just want to get to college and I wanted to take classes in everything. I was that kid who wants to major in everything. Anthropology? Wow! I could go on with that forever. Or evolutionary biology? Yes!I loved my literature classes, but pretty early on I switched over from music, which was not going to be a practical major, to the practical major biology because I figured I’m gonna have to have a job when this is all done…
Sam: And it’s not going to be concert pianist?
Barbara: It absolutely is not, no! Through all this I loved reading and writing so much, but the writing was very private. I just wrote poems and stories that I didn't show to anybody, but that compulsion to just keep learning new things and follow every new thing down the long alley to enlightenment, that's being a novelist. I've finally found the perfect job for me.
Sam: It’s that moment isn't it when, as a lonely kid, a kid who has to pretend not to be clever, when you don't have to pretend anymore; when you meet other people and you don't have to be quiet at the back of the class because you'll be told off by the teacher if you’re quiet at the back the class, but you'll be told off by the other kids if you say you know the answer.
Barbara: Exactly, exactly. Yeah that pretty much sums up my entire school experience. It was miserable actually. Now, looking back, I was very unhappy kid and probably depressed, but nobody had time to notice stuff like that. But the remedy for me was reading. I just would disappear into books because that gave me access to other lives.
Sam: When you got to college in Indiana on a scholarship did you feel like I've arrived I found my people or did you meet a whole new type of adversity?
Barbara: Yes and yes! Initially I was thinking my people are out there, that's why I worked so hard to get to go to college because almost nobody did and I was really on my own. I mean now, and even then probably in other schools, there were counselors who would help you sign up for the tests, but I had to figure all that out for myself and drive myself to take the SATs and stuff. But I really really wanted to go, thinking I would find my tribe. So it was so disappointing that, once I got there I was being ridiculed again, this time for being a hillbilly. And I’d never thought about being a hillbilly or a Kentuckian until I went to college and everybody laughed at the way I said certain words – well, all words! And my friends gave me this thing it was like a Hoosier passport that allowed a limited number of Kentuckians to cross the river into Indiana. You know and I laughed, hahahaha, but that's so mean. They didn't think it was mean because it was so standard to laugh at hillbillies, that I just thought, ‘OK, I I really am a joke’. I just kind of accepted it and tried to pass. I started changing my diction and started trying to be a more cosmopolitan person, whatever the heck that meant, something I imagined from from books I'd read.

And I was academically completely lost because I’d had such poor schooling I didn't have… I was a good writer because I’d read so many books I knew how to do that, but I didn't know the proper way to do footnotes in a term paper and all that. So I had to be that same kid who read the encyclopedia. I've always been an autodidact and I just kicked into high gear and spent a lot of time in the library quietly catching up. And the main thing I learned in college was how to teach myself whatever it is I'm missing, and that too is the skill of the novelist. I think the good thing about that, of always having been self taught, is that I have probably a ludicrous amount of confidence when I go into a subject. I just think, well, I'm going to create a character who teaches political science and I don't know anything about that, but I can learn all about it! When you write a novel you have to know everything that your characters know. You can’t just write, and then he said something very clever about economics! What he said has to be right because somebody reading you will know if you're wrong and they will tell you!
Sam: They so will!
Barbara: They SO will. When I step back and look at it I think that's so audacious that I think that I can just learn everything I need to know to create these novels about real things in the world, with people who know a lot of real things. But I just know I can do it. For the happy ending, I found good friends in college. I found the kind of friends who you stay up with all night talking about politics or history or Chaucer or whatever. I just I found those good friends and I felt, for the first time, like someone who belonged to a group. 
Sam: You went to college and then you did that young person thing of traveling and ended up in Tucson. What was it that made you go back to Appalachia, where you had not been that happy as a child?
Barbara: Yeah, I thought I'm getting out of here and then, once I did, I thought nobody thinks that's a good place to be! I loved my adventures, I still do. I love to travel. I love to see the world. I loved moving around Europe owning nothing more than what would fit in my backpack and doing these hand to mouth jobs just to learn language. I love languages. I loved learning French. I learned Greek. I learned Spanish. So I loved those experiences, and then I had to come back to the states at some point because it was getting hard to keep a work permit (that was the late 70s and things were starting to change as far as that). So I had to come back to the states and I chose Tuscon on a whim. I thought I’d try out the West and then I kind of got stuck there because I was at that age where life happens to you. You know, you get a job and then you get a boyfriend who turns into your partner and then you get a house and then you get kids… And so I had this life in Tucson. It was a very good life, I loved the people I met, I was learning. I became a politicized person their living close to the border of Mexico. I learned a whole new way of understanding the world and what one nation will do to another. So it was a really good time for growing up. But it never felt like home. I missed the landscape of my childhood. I just ached for trees, for green trees and grass and mossy creek and ferns, and just that landscape. You see, in childhood, all my happy time was spent in the woods and in the fields playing with my brother. That was the joy of childhood. And I think we imprint on the landscapes of our childhood in such a way that nothing else ever looks quite right. Honestly, Tuscon, the desert, as interesting and dramatic as it is, felt to me like a place that didn't want me living there. There’s not enough water, there are not enough resources there, you cannot grow enough food in the desert to support the city of Tucson. It increasingly felt immoral for me to stay there and I knew I had to get back to Appalachia. Whenever I did, there was something in me that, as soon as I would see those mountains and those forests, something in me just let out its breath, and I never felt at home until I was back there.

I couldn't go back to the little town where I was so unhappy and I would not raise my children there but, just by coincidence, by some strange twist of fate, I got this Lila Wallace Fellowship and I they sent me to this little college in Appalachia, where I was meant to spend two weeks. As a visiting writer I talked to all different classes and one of them was a class taught by professor Steven Hopp and we just fell for each other. In a completely platonic way, I guess, because we had a very short amount of time, I didn't know if he was married, he didn’t know if I was married, we didn't know anything about each other's personal lives, but we just loved talking. We had so many interests in common – music, nature, biology, everything. And so we just started this conversation that didn't end. And I went back to Tucson and we talked on the phone (we did figure out that neither of us was married!) and we talked on the phone every night for a year and then had to get married. But he lived on this beautiful farm in Emory Virginia which is geographically in every way the beauty of Appalachia but it's a little town that has a college so it's different from the town where I grew up, there’s enough diversity. My kids went to school with kids of professors who had moved there from Atlanta or England or just the presence of the college changed the culture of the school. There were enough kids there who valued education that my kids wouldn’t get bullied if they wanted to go to college. It was just the perfect place. So, yeah, when I moved to Steven’s farm I knew I'd found heaven. I don't want to live anywhere else ever again.
Sam: Is that where you still live?
Barbara: Yeah and honestly, when he saw how hard I was working ( I was giving a lecture every hour) he said, ‘If you have a couple hours free this afternoon I live on a farm, you can come out just for some farm therapy’. That was astute! The house at that time was what he could afford on a teacher's salary so it was nothing extravagant. It was a very run down hundred year old farmhouse, but the place is beautiful. It’s this wooded hollow and it has a creek running down it and it's full of bird song and full of life and I fell in love with the farm. So the Jane Austen version of the story would be that I married him for his farm! But it was both!
Sam: You got the farm too!
Barbara: Yes, but it was complicated to work out. We didn't immediately move there because I had ties in Tucson that I couldn't just leave, so for a number of years it was hard because we thought we'd have to sell the farm. And I just said, we’re not going to sell the farm. Whatever we have to do we will do to keep it. So we rented it to a family so that we could cover the mortgage and then for some time we lived in Tucson part of the year and then there in the summers in a little tiny cabin up in the woods behind the farmhouse. We worked it out so that we could get back here and now now that's where we live.
Sam: Could you imagine ever living in the city?
Barbara: I have lived in cities and this is the kind of city dweller I am: I have a pot of tomatoes growing on my balcony and, honestly, in Tucson I lived in the city, right downtown, for a long time, but I had to have a garden in my little postage stamp backyard. I love to visit cities but I visit them… it's like my Apache raid! I'll go in and I'll go to the museums and I'll go to the concerts and then I come home again. It was really interesting in Demon Copperhead to write about a city from the point of view of somebody who feels really horrified and oppressed by cities because I think people who are born and raised in cities think that we country folk are just so missing out. And they think we all want to be in cities and I can't tell you how many people have asked me, “how can you live out there in the middle of nowhere?" without the faintest clue that that is such a demeaning thing to say.
Sam: That’s so rude. It’s somewhere to you.
Barbara: It's everywhere to me! Plus I grow food and I have water and neighbours whose names I know. But to go inside of little Demon’s head and show people how this looks to us, to those of us who are accustomed to first of all looking in the eyes of every person we meet, how that feels to be among people who just don't look at you. How strange that is to be in an apartment that feels like, as he calls it, the doom castle. Do you know Duke Nukem? It's a video game where you're just in this maze and every door opens to another maze. It’s horrifying because you can't get out. And he says, ‘there was no outside anywhere, because I looked.’ Because outside, to him, is trees and pastures with cattle and it just felt so fake to him and scary that there was nothing but people and stuff made by people. And, sorry, but that's how it feels to me too. I'm old enough to not to panic because I know how I can get out! But it's so rare to see rural life at all in books, in film. I can tell you the last movie I saw about rural people, about farmers, and genuine farm life not fake farm life, was Minari. And I think that only got made because it was about Korean immigrants and so that was sort of like oh Korean immigrants, that's interesting. But we don't see farm life or rural life represented in any thoughtful, compassionate or even interested way, and so I don't blame people for thinking we don't exist, that our existences are nil, so that's that's a big part of what I have to do.
Sam: How does that feel to know that not only do a lot of people not know that this huge swathe of the country where you live not only doesn't exist but is looked down on?
Barbara: It’s really bad. It’s been bad for my whole life and it's interesting that nearly half of the population of the United States does not live in cities, so it's half of the population and two percent at most of what we see in film and TV and books and and newspapers. And we’re all so used to that we just accept it, but there's an immense amount of resentment and anger from rural people about how dismissed we are, about the cultural condescension towards us and it's been going on my whole life, this antipathy between rural and urban people, but it's gotten so much worse in the last decade or fifteen years, I guess, because rural people have just gotten so fed up with the government that dismisses and ignores them. The economies of small towns are just beyond despair, opportunities are so limited, the only money going into farming is going to the giant industrial farms not to people, not to family farms, and so people are so fed up with the government that does nothing for them that they vote for the guy who says “I'm on your side, I'm gonna blow it all up!” And I understand that. I didn't vote for him, but I understand why my neighbours did. They feel like he hears them. So because of that everything has gotten worse because now the urban people who already looked down on the on the country people now feel like they can do it with impunity because they voted for this really horrible guy.
Sam: In a way [Trump] legitimized that?
Barbara: Exactly. He legitimized their contempt, contempt is the right word. When I traveled around in the U. S. on my book tour – because of course I only went to cities – and people asked But what about the MAGA thing. And I have to say, let me tell you about the MAGA thing, let me tell you how it feels to be spoken of with that face you just made! We're mad! We’re mad and we express it in different ways and that was not a good one, because he didn't do a thing for rural people, he doesn't represent our values.
There’s also this thing, probably much like in the UK with the people who voted for Brexit,  even though it caused a lot of things to fall down around your ears, you don’t want to say, ‘Oh, I messed up.’ You'd rather say, ‘Oh it's the French!’ It’s really hard to own a mistake on that on that level, but some people are owning the mistake of Trump, he's not going to get elected again.
Sam: Fingers crossed.
Barbara: Knock wood!

I got to college where a lot of the girls wore designer things… It was just this whole new culture of clothing that I was never gonna understand or afford, so I went to the army surplus store and acquired this uniform. I got a pith helmet, this big green army coat, and I got known on campus as The Girl In The Green Pith Helmet. I just decided to make make a statement

Sam: do you feel like as you’ve got older you’ve got braver and more outspoken, more able to stand up in a book event and go, “that face you just made!” 
Barbara: Yeah I mean, I hate to disappoint people. That's just in me. I am a person who… I can disappoint people, I'm perfectly capable of it, but it's always hard for me to say, ‘No, I'm sorry, I can't come talk to your book club’. I don't want to do that.
Sam: Is that how you were brought up?
Barbara: Absolutely. Absolutely. And in a rural place, in small towns and country places, there's a sense to it. When someone asks you to do something there's a reciprocity to it. Yeah, you should help them, and there's gonna come a time when they'll return the favour. There's this thing we do when we take somebody a casserole, they always bring the dish back with the casserole in it. That’s just our tradition. And I think about that all the time with these thousands and thousands of requests I get. People ask me all the time to do things for them: will you blurb my book, will you talk to my club, will you… it's amazing the things that people want me to do for them. And I always think, I could bake that casserole but the dish is going to come back empty, if it comes back at all. It feels wrong to me to say no, so I have to recast it, this is a new situation. So it has gotten easier with practice, but it still will always feel wrong for me to disappoint people when they've asked something of me. But when someone is cruel or unkind, I don't hesitate to call them out. I think it was always that kind of person, once I got out of the oppression childhood. In college I created a new persona for myself, and she was very much like Angus in Demon Copperhead.
Sam: I love Angus.
Barbara: I do too. I had always been mocked for wearing the wrong clothes, for wearing hand-me-downs, then I got to college where a lot of the girls wore designer things – not gowns, we’re just talking what you wear to play tennis. It was just this whole new culture of clothing that I knew I was never gonna understand or afford, so I went to the army surplus store and acquired this uniform. I got a pith helmet, this big green army coat that came down to my feet because it was cold, and I got known on campus as The Girl In The Green Pith Helmet. I just decided to make make a statement of I am not trying to look like you and I'm not trying to be you and whoever wants to talk to me they'll be my friends. And so a little bit of that in your face, you can't scare me with your contempt, I cultivated that. I got it and I kind of have been that person ever since. I don't hesitate and my work to write things that will make people uncomfortable. I don't think about it. It's things that make me uncomfortable too. I go to the places where I think we all need to go and be a little uncomfortable and sort out what we might be doing wrong, how we might be doing this better.
Sam: So I want to ask you. You are 68, how does it feel to be a point in life when women are meant to have shuffled off and be minding their own business, to be at the top of your game? I mean there may be more game, it may be higher, but you've just won a Pulitzer, by the time this comes out we'll know whether or not you've won the Women’s Prize for the second time. [She did]. 
Barbara: I don't want to win that, that would that would be bad manners to win twice!
Sam: I think you should stuff your Southern manners on that particular front! I know you’re not Southern, Midwestern manners. But how does that feel, to be at this stage of your life and to be the best you’ve ever been, arguably.
Barbara: It feels fantastic. I feel very lucky to be healthy and especially to be lucky to be alive. It seems so obvious to me that a birthday is a victory. I mean what's the alternative to being 68? It's being dead! So how great is this that I get another year to do what I love. And the great advantage that writers have over, let's say, athletes or fashion models, actors even, is that we trade in wisdom. We’re not, thank God, selling our bodies, or our strength, or the elasticity of our skin, we're selling wisdom and that only comes with age. It’s exactly like scar tissue, you accrue it, through your mistakes and your bad falls and in the way that they heal. So it feels really wonderful to get to be this age, this place, doing what I love so much and connecting with people in a way that eleven year old Barbara never never imagined in her wildest dreams.
Sam: It would be amazing to time machine back…
Barbara: Just to tell her, hang in there, it’s gonna get so much better. 

THE QUESTIONS I ALWAYS ASK

What's your emotional age?
It's 68. 
I think it is too, you're in a good place.
Yeah and it took this long to get here! 

Can you give us a book recommendation? 
A book that was unusual for me and that I loved and I think everybody should read is The Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. I'm not a not a science fiction reader, generally speaking, I love Ursula Le Guin, but generally speaking I like literature that’s literally and that's anchored in real things and this book really is. It’s about climate change, it's set in the nearest future and I really recommend it. It's the first book I've read in years about climate change that left me feeling hopeful. That’s why you should read it.

What advice would you give younger women?
Please worry less about what other people think of you, they probably aren't thinking of you nearly as much as you are. Let it go.
How old were you when you learnt that yourself?
I've learned it a little better in a different way with each decade of life, and for exactly that reason each decade of life has gotten better.

Who’s your old bird role model, an older woman who inspires you?
There are several I didn't win the jackpot in the mothering department, but two women came into my life as mothers and meant everything to me. One was my literary agent Frances Goldin, who I found right in the beginning. It was to her that I sent my first manuscript. I sent it because her entry in the literary marketplace describing her agency was, we do not represent any work that is sexist, racist. ageist, homophobic or gratuitously violent. I realize this cuts me out of most of what's written but I can be proud of all my authors. 
What a woman!
That was her entry and I thought, well, if there's an agent for me, she is it. So I sent her my manuscript, she loved it, she placed it, she fiercely protected me financially, ethically, morally and she just became my Jewish mother. She took such good care of me. After I had my first child my marriage instantly fell apart, there was mental illness, it was just like my life fell apart. I was the sole supporter of of a baby trying to make a living as a writer and thinking there's no way I can get through this, and she called me every single night to help me know that I was crossing to a greener shore, that I was going to get through this and that it was worth it to leave this bad marriage and make a life for myself even if it was scary and hard financially. She was so there for me. When I was on book tour and would come to New York she would bake lasagna and bring it to my hotel room! She made me believe in myself as a writer and, in the dark times, she made me remember that a lot of other people believed in me, too. She was my agent until she died. We lost her during the pandemic. She was in her 90s and she lived an amazingly good life but it was a terrible loss.
And the other one was my mother-in-law. I hit the mother in law jackpot. Steven's mother was also mother to me and we also lost her during the pandemic. I could ask her for advice and she would give me good sound advice, without condescension. She would really think think about it and we could just talk about anything. The simplest way I’ve always put it is, I didn't win the lottery in the mothering department but then I did. 
Life is a package, isn't it? You know, I have terrible ankles, I've broken both my legs twice, each of them twice, I break easily, I have this terrible hand thing which is why I can't sign books anymore, but I like the brain so it's just like you get this package and you just embrace it.
Does your hand affect your writing? 
A flat hand is fine but I can't grip la pen or or stamp or anything like that, but I've had six surgeries on this hand to keep it functional so typing is fine. I’m lucky. Computer work, that matters. Signing books? I'm sorry but that's not that important. 

What’s your superpower?
Packing! 
It really is. I mean you are here for three weeks, you have done a week of back-to-back events and interviews ,you're about to go hiking so you have hiking shoes, and then you’ve got the Women’s Prize so you have lahdidah outfits and it all fits in a carry-on! How?
Well, you start with shoes. You’re really limited, you get two pair shoes and you really have to think that through. You bring laundry detergent so you can wash things in the sink. And for presentable events, silk. It really compresses and it doesn't wrinkle, so there are tricks, but mainly you don't need as much as you think you do. That's my rule: I have to fit everything in a carry on, because it's self sufficiency. I want to be able to to move through the world with nothing more than I can carry.

I always feel uncomfortable asking this question… 
And yet and yet you do! 
Yeah, I do! So how many fucks do you give?!
Um, half a dozen?! I mean there are days when I don't give one, but there are a lot of things I care about.

• Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver is brilliant, buy it!