Barbara Kingsolver: Partita

Adriana Trigiani (0:05)

Welcome, dear listeners, to You Are What You Read. On today's episode of our podcast, we are thrilled to welcome the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver, with her brand new novel, Partita. This is the story of Livia Cable, and she has made her peace with her marriage and modest livelihood in the farm country where she grew up. Until a shocking phone call from an old lover shakes her to the core. If you've never read Barbara Kingsolver, Due Romance to this degree, I'm going to just say to you, buckle up. Decades earlier, this man knew her as Livia Bohush, a music conservatory student, estranged from her home and family, uncertain of anything except her passion for music and the promise of becoming an extraordinary pianist. His request now to see her again, stirs up all these old ghosts that she's kept at bay for a lifetime. It shifts between the past and the present. Livia's decision to meet or reject the reunion means confronting step by step in memories framed as musical dances, the experiences of childhood loss, abandonment, self-immolating passion, and a perilous attachment to a man who broke her belief in love and ruptured the course of her life.

Our author, Barbara Kingsolver, is the author of ten best-selling works of fiction, including the novels Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, and The Poisonwood Bible, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead. Barbara is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has received the National Humanities Medal, and most recently, the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

And what makes Barbara Barbara is she is the founder of the Higher Ground Women's Recovery Residence in Pennington Gap, Virginia, where women come together in community and residence and heal themselves from all addictions. And recently, she and Steven, her husband, have added a whole component of a shop where the women get jobs, have jobs. So it's a multi-level healing process, and I have been there and I have seen it. And it is a testament to community and sacrifice and love. Ladies and gentlemen, I am so proud to introduce to you on this podcast, the great Barbara Kingsolver.

This is a beautiful love story, a reckoning of childhood story. And this beautiful golden thread of music. Uh-huh. I don't think a lot of people know that you're a pianist.

Barbara Kingsolver (3:11)

I play piano anyway. And I was a pianist at one time. Yeah, when I was young, I loved playing the piano. It's kind of how I survived my teenage years. You know, we all need something to escape into. And for me, that was books, it was reading. And it was music. And I actually kind of by accident got a music scholarship. So my first year of college, I was a music major. So yes, there was a short period of my life when I was completely immersed in that world. And it was, I figured out it was not for me.

For several reasons. One is I wasn't good enough to, it's a really competitive world to make it as a professional, a concert pianist. There's like, what, like six of those in the United States or something. But also it's a very, it's such a focused world. You know, you have to spend so much time in practice, in ensembles, in performance. You just don't have time for other things. And I was the kind of kid who wanted to major in everything. I just, there were too many other things I loved to do. So I left that world and, you know, studied other things. And finally found my way to the perfect job for the person who wants to major in everything, right?

Because as a novelist, you have to, you have to burrow into so many different kinds of people and of knowledge. So, yeah, it wasn't the life for me, but I spent enough time in it that I really enjoyed going back in there and writing about it.

And it kind of surprised me that I've never written about music before or musicians in this way. It was a nice discovery.

Adriana Trigiani (5:10)

So we as your readers, we found out something new about you reading this book. And people say to me, what are the vibes of this book? And I found it so recognizable, immediately relatable.

I loved Livia. But she survives a very fraught childhood and relationships with her parents.

Barbara Kingsolver (5:38)

Yeah.

Adriana Trigiani (5:38)

She maintains kind of a generous spirit about it, although she's very honest about it. And I wrote this question down and I said, I'm going to ask you this.

Barbara Kingsolver (5:48)