"Why is it that a lot of us feel like the fine arts belong to fancy people in cities?" asks Barbara Kingsolver. "Why is it that a lot of the people of this country might not even feel welcome in a concert hall or a museum?" Her new novel <i>Partita</i> is about a classical pianist.(Evan Kafka / Harper)Barbara Kingsolver has a big, beautiful piano in the living room of her house in southwestern Virginia. And on the piano there are stacks of the music she's working on — books that she's had since childhood, with her handwritten notes written in pencil. But she's still not prepared to play on the day we visit. "I've just been through another hand issue," she says. She has Dupuytren's contracture, which forces her fingers to bend, creating a fist. Every couple years she has to have a surgery to fix it, but it never really goes back to "normal," she tells us. The medical condition informs her latest novel, Partita. Her doctor gets a special thanks in the acknowledgements. It's her 19th novel — her first after the Pulitzer Prize-winning Demon Copperhead, which is a re-telling of Charles Dickens' David Copperfield but set in Appalachia during the beginnings of the opioid crisis. While that book was a big statement on behalf of Appalachia, the new one is a bit tighter in scope. Maybe even a bit more personal. It's about a woman named Livia, a skilled classical pianist whose life and career path gets rocked by 1. an extremely charming and sexy guy, and 2. an accident. When we visited with Kingsolver in September, she talked about how she fell in love with classical piano as a kid, how class and art clash, and how to continue in the face of "career-limiting injuries." Music was a huge part of your life, or is a huge part of your life. But I'm not sure you've written much about it and put it into your fiction until now. Why now?(Harper)I'm not sure. It's true, music is really important to me and has been since I was really young. I played piano all the time when I was growing up. Piano was the thing that really got me through high school in terms of, you know, escaping a difficult adolescence, which is something most of us want to do. Music was how I got to college just kind of on a fluke. I got a music scholarship, so I did study classical piano really intensely for one year in college. And I quickly figured out that I was not going to be one of the 10 people in the United States who would make it as a concert pianist. I wasn't, you know, of that caliber. And also, the life was too narrow for me. Every elective class that I took in college, whether it was English comp or anthropology or organic chemistry, was really exciting to me. I just always said, Oh, I want to major in this. And, you know, eventually found my way to the wonderful career of novelist in which we get to major in everything. When I began this novel, for some reason, well, I set out to write a love story, and I had the idea of having my protagonist be a really serious musician who was really in love with her art, in love with creating music. And then when she falls in love with a person, those two passions conflict. I also felt it was really timely. A lot of what this novel is about is the question of why do we need art? What good is music? What does it do for us? Because right now in our culture, as far as people feel economically insecure, we're experiencing cuts, a withdrawal of resources from the arts at every level, from the NEA all the way down to second grade music classes. And I think this is a dangerous trend for us to think of art as expendable. So I wanted to ask those questions and invite the reader to ask those questions. What is it good for? Why do we need it?Livia goes to college for music. And there she feels like a fish out of water a bit. Did that comport with your experience in college?Well, I grew up in a really little town in Kentucky. I did not know anybody else who loved to play the piano as much as I did growing up. I didn't know anybody else who loved reading books as much as I did. I was a weird kid, but there are you know, there are kids in little towns everywhere who are like that, who, for whatever reason, fall in love with literature, with books. And there are class barriers to pursuing a life in the arts. And that's another thing I wanted to explore in this novel is the question of class and art and why is it that a lot of us feel like the fine arts belong to fancy people in cities? Why is it that a lot of the people of this country might not even feel welcome in a concert hall or a museum? The divisions in this country between urban and rural have divided us, even in terms of what kind of art we're allowed, what kind of music that we feel allowed to love.Speaking of class. So while she's at school, Livia meets a guy named … Sigurd? … Who … You know, I laughed a lot. He's the type of guy who literally reads Marx as foreplay? Yeah. laughs. Literally reads Marx as foreplay, yeah … he's just that sexy. He's awesome. He's a handful, but he's really charismatic. He's one of those people who is kind of a born leader. We've all run into them. There's something about him that people want to follow, that people want to impress. And this is really the first time she's ever fallen in love. And she's mainly just overwhelmed that he's interested in her, that he seems so attentive to her and to admire her and appreciate her and, really, want to get her in bed, which is entirely mutual. But he's also really driven in his own way. I really wanted to design this dialectic — to use a word Sigurd would use — in which they are both really kind of mission driven people in completely different directions and they just don't understand each other. And also they're really pretty young, but it's one of those situations of first love, last love for Livia that some people are unlucky enough to experience in which you fall in love so hard with someone the first time that you just have the feeling it's never going to happen again. At least not like that. That forever after you're going to have to settle for less. And this is where we find her at the beginning of the novel, kind of in the middle of her life, suddenly jolted by it by a phone call from Sigurd. She hasn't heard from him for over 20 years, and he appears out of nowhere, wanting to see her again. And it kind of throws her back into a reevaluation of this whole affair.Besides class, it is Livia's brother, Cyrus' suicide that is the big breaking point of undergirding the entire novel. You learn that literally in the first sentence. It's a serious undertaking to write about suicide. And I didn't do it lightly. In different decades of my life, I've lost four people close, close to me by suicide. And in two of those cases, I was the last person, or as far as I know, the last person to talk with them. So I've spent a lot of time thinking about this kind of loss, which leaves us with a whole lot to carry compared with other griefs, a lot of doubts, a lot of wishful thinking that there might have been something we could have done differently. So that's a part of what Livia is carrying through this story. And I hope that I've been able to put a lifetime of processing that kind of loss into some kind of wisdom on the page that might be helpful to other people, because there are a whole lot of us in the world who have lost someone to suicide.So you have Dupuytren's contracture I do.For folks that don't know, can you tell us what it is and how long you've had it? Since birth, I guess it's an inherited condition that causes the fascia in the hands to contract. So the goal of Dupuytren's contracture is to make your hands into fists. It runs in my family. It's almost common in this region because it's more common among Scots-Irish people. It comes from northern European ancestry. They call it the Viking Disease because apparently a lot of Vikings had it. What it means for me is I have to have surgeries every few years to open my hands back up so that I can play the piano. It ultimately damages some of your joints so that they can't fully straighten. I have a great hand surgeon and a great team at the University of Virginia hand center who've kept my hands functional for the last 15 years.And so it affects your typing, I'm guessing. Which means ... is there a time limit? Like, are you looking down when it's … I try not to think about that. … Well. You know, I accommodate I mean, this, this, this finger has taken over most of the job of this one. It's affected my piano playing, of course. And I can't play all the pieces that I used to play. One of the things I wrote about in this novel is the frustration of after an injury. And this is, you know, something that people experience, not just, you know, as pianists, but in sports, in all kinds of physical work, there are career ending injuries and there are career limiting injuries. And one of the things we have to deal with afterward is accepting that we will never be what we once were. And I guess that's you know, you could extend that to aging in general. We have to live with bodies that can't do what they used to do. And how do we handle that? I think we live in a culture that really loves to pretend that isn't true. Pretend that there are no limitations or that we shouldn't have to accept limitations. But there is also a kind of freedom to be found on the other side of realizing we are still all of the people we have been in our lives. They're all just different."I have had this long career and this opportunity to expand, to know more and to take more risks on the page and to look back at all those different writers I've been, you know, in my in my 30s, in my 40s," says Kingsolver. She's pictured above in November 1992.(AP)And I think about that as a writer. Writers are so lucky. For us, it's kind of the opposite. The longer we live, the more wisdom we have. I mean, if we've been lucky enough to have lots of bad experiences and lived through them and then figure out figure out what mistakes we won't make again, you know, and I think that when people go to to fiction, when we go when we go to books of fiction, we're looking for entertainment maybe or escape. But I think really we're looking for wisdom. And when I look at the careers and the works of writers I love, I see that growth. I see that expansion. And, you know, the books that Doris Lessing wrote in her 70s and 80s were marvels. And they were very different from the books that she wrote in her 20s and 30s. And this is something, as a writer I'm really aware of and really grateful for that I have had this long career and this opportunity to expand, to know more and to take more risks on the page and to look back at all those different writers I've been, you know, in my in my 30s, in my 40s, and that at each decade, I was giving the world something from that position that I held in the universe at that time.Speaking of your past books, so you did a ton of press for Demon Copperhead, right? And then it won the Pulitzer, and I saw you show up again after that at a bunch of different places. Did it seem that you were becoming the spokesperson for Appalachia? Did you ever feel self-conscious about taking that mantle as a spokesperson for Appalachia? Well, no, because, look, I'm standing on the shoulders of Harriette Arnow and Robert Penn Warren and Bobbie Ann Mason and Wendell Berry and so many others have done this before me, and so many others are doing it now. Silas House is a great, great Appalachian writer. He has a novel coming out the same week as mine, The Tulip Poplars, which is a fabulous novel. Because I live here, you know, I'm in this community of Appalachian writers, I don't feel like I'm doing this alone by any means. When some recognition falls to my books, as it did with Demon Copperhead, which won that big, big, fancy prize, what makes me happy is that people around here, people I didn't even know if my neighbors knew what I did. You know, I figured that they figured I don't have a job because they don't see me driving out in the morning. But you know what? They all said: We won that prize. It was fireworks all the way up and down the mountain. People were so proud that that novel was considered great. So that makes me happy.I was watching a talk that you did, and then there was a QA, and this guy comes up and you ask this question about, oh, why do all the people there keep voting against their own self-interests? And I don't know if you quite roll your eyes, but the camera cuts to you and you look clearly exasperated or annoyed or something like that. After all this time, what do you think it is that people still misunderstand about this place?Fundamentally, people think we're stupid. That's the long and short of it. People from the outside see poverty. They see underemployment. They see a kind of a monoculture, demographically and ethnically. Which is not who we are. They see that because they're not really looking at us. They're seeing artificial representations. They're not seeing nuance. When it comes to the poverty, and the underemployment, and the limited education, what they're looking at is what has been done to us by hundreds of years of exploitation, by extractive industries that came in here. A lot of the limited employment opportunities and the limited educational opportunities were deliberate because for more than a century, the coal companies literally owned these mountains. They didn't just own the mines. They owned the stores and the schools and the courthouses and the government. And they kept out fiber mills, other kinds of mills, other kinds of factories that could have employed people because they wanted a population that would be miners. They deliberately suppressed education because they didn't want an educated population. They wanted miners. So, you know, then the coal ran out and then they left. And here we are. It's a kind of institutional, inherited lack of resources and lack of privilege that we get blamed for still. And it's shocking to me that, in a time when most people, most educated people know not to make jokes, not to not to make contemptuous jokes about an entire category of people, we still get it.If you or someone you know may be considering suicide or is in crisis, call or text 9 8 8 to reach the Suicide Crisis Lifeline. Copyright 2026 NPR ...read more read less