Barbara Kingsolver on Love, the FBI and Feeding the Dog

Barbara Kingsolver, the 71-year-old Pulitzer winner, has described love as a moving target: "When you're 16, it feels like breaking the speed limit. A lot of years later, it feels like a warm bath."

The author of Demon Copperhead gave a candid interview covering everything from her earliest memory to four years of FBI surveillance. Her answers mix wit, defiance and plain-spoken honesty.

Born in Maryland, Kingsolver won a music scholarship to DePauw University in Indiana. She worked as a journalist before publishing her first novel, The Bean Trees, in 1988. Her award-winning books include The Poisonwood Bible, The Lacuna and Demon Copperhead.

What has she achieved?

Demon Copperhead, published in 2022, won the Pulitzer prize, the James Tait Black prize and the Women's prize for fiction. In 2025, Kingsolver founded the Higher Ground Women's Recovery Residence in Lee County, Virginia — the same county where the novel is set. Her latest novel is Partita. She lives in Virginia with her second husband and has two children.

What did she reveal about her life?

Her earliest memory is teaching herself to read at age three. "I was so covetous of whatever my father was getting from his newspaper, I picked it up after he set it aside and stared with fierce intention," she recalled. The first whole word she deciphered was "orange".

Her closest brush with the law was more serious. "In the 1980s I was phone-tapped and held under surveillance by the FBI for more than four years because of my (fully legal) work in human rights organisations," she said.

Asked when she was happiest, she pointed to the births of her children. "Those hormones are strong medicine: they erase all memory of recent gruelling events and crown you goddess, author of divine creation."

Other answers were blunt:

• Greatest fear: "Being on a transatlantic flight without a good book."
• Trait she most deplores: "Refusing to take responsibility." She added: "I can forgive anything, if the offender will just say, 'I did that. It was wrong, and I'm sorry.'"
• Herself in three words: "Adventurous. Hopeful. Grateful."
• Worst job: cleaning houses where whole families, including the children, called her "the cleaning girl" instead of learning her name.
• Last lie: "Yes, of course I fed the dog this morning" — told while hurriedly feeding the dog.

What does she think of fame?

Asked whether she would prefer more sex, money or fame, she replied: "Can we please add a happy marriage to this list?"

On who might play her in a film of her life, she noted: "I'm told surprisingly often that I resemble Meryl Streep. But I expect she's booked up."

She named no names when asked whom she most despises, but left little doubt. "The same one that a growing majority of my compatriots, and most of you reading this right now, would like never to see on their news feeds again," she said. "And the big, beautiful irony of it is, he could read this and have no idea whom we're talking about."

What does this change for readers? It shows Kingsolver, at 71 and with a new novel behind her, still unwilling to soften an opinion — and still measuring her life in precise, unsentimental words.