Barbara Kingsolver grew up poor in Kentucky with a mother who didn’t support her ambitions. But she found her way to college, where she was an aspiring classical pianist. Livia Cable, the protagonist of Kingsolver’s moving new novel, “Partita,” shares that path. But their roads diverged there: Kingsolver got to college and realized she didn’t want to pursue music.
“This was not the life for me: Becoming a musician is a narrow world by necessity, and you have to eat, sleep and breathe music,” she said in a recent video interview.
“But I found that every elective I took blew my mind. I took an anthropology class, and I said, ‘I’m going to major in anthropology.’ I took a psychology class and wanted to major in that. Organic chemistry too,” says the eventual author of “The Poisonwood Bible” and “The Bean Trees.” (She got her degree in biology.)
Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and more
Kingsolver has also imbued her creation with more talent than she ever had. But Livia has also had a tougher life — her adored older brother committed suicide when she was 11, leaving Livia without a buffer from her unloving mother.
“The piano is the only place she feels safe. She threw herself at the keys day after day because music is one thing she could control,” Kingsolver says.
But the piano cannot save Livia, and she must face a life in which grief and pain return repeatedly. The book shifts between the present, in which Livia receives a phone call from someone in her past, and those long-gone days when the events that shaped her future occurred.
Livia’s first true love in her college days is a socialist labor organizer, which allows the author to engage in political conversations about family farmers, who lack health insurance and are being buried by debt.
“I’m writing in the shadow of ‘Demon Copperhead,’ which was a bigger deal than I expected it to be,” she says of her 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction-winning novel. “I thought it was my attempt to write the great Appalachian novel, but this is another kind of Appalachian community.”
But politics is secondary to music, which is central throughout the book. “There are passages and whole chapters that are about the pieces that she’s playing — that sounds incredibly boring but trust me, there’s sex,” she says. “Some of that passionate piano playing is extremely hot.”
Kingsolver even provides a listening list for readers annotated to the right page, and the audiobook will include music, too. When Kingsolver appears at the Pasadena Presbyterian Church on Oct. 21, she’ll be accompanied by a pianist.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why Nathaniel Philbrick says California’s Gold Rush led to the Civil War
Q. This book’s opening line is a stunner: “Here’s my question: How does a person step in front of a train and leave everything right there? Inhale, no exhale.”
How do you find the exact right first sentence and first paragraph?
Many decades ago, I got to sit in on a talk by Francine Prose, who said the first sentence of a novel should make a promise that the rest of the book will keep. That’s the best specific writing advice ever. I will die on that hill. A first sentence needs to grab you, and it needs to not overload you with information but to overload you with emotion.
But that’s a different thing from making a promise. If you start with a promise, you, the author, have a very good idea where you’re going. Not all novels give that impression. I have meaning in mind from the beginning — not just who the characters will be and what they’ll do, but what this story can carry to the reader and into their own lives.
Obviously, I have to work through a lot of questions of my own to make sure I know where a novel is going. The first paragraph or sentence of the novel is almost never the first one I write. Usually I’ve done quite a lot of writing about the book and into the book, exploring where it’s going before I know for sure what is the promise that I’m going to make. So, the first page or the first five pages of all of my novels have been rewritten between 27 and 100 times.
Q. In the present, little happens as Livia is reflecting on her life while the chapters set in the past are filled with incidents that are good, bad and catastrophic. Did that evolve as you were writing?
It was a decision I made early on to structure the novel like a partita, writing it like a musical composition in words. I’m a very architectural writer, and I like having a plan that I can stick to.
It was all charted out before I began writing the scenes and story in earnest. She’s given seven days in the present to make this decision that she feels like is going to end her current life either way. And each one of those days is a prelude, but will reveal to the narrator something new about herself. A lot is happening, but it’s internal. After each prelude is a movement that takes us back into this short period of a few months in her past.
Q. We gradually see how other people perceive her differently from how she sees herself. Did you want us to have to recalibrate?
She thinks of herself as this ugly old crone. And you kind of feel that way too. Little by little, you start getting glimpses of how other people have seen her and how she deflects that. All of us tell a version of our own story that’s filtered through so much stuff, including a lot of garbage.
I believe that all of us see ourselves as we were at, say, 13. There is some very vulnerable point in adolescence where all the chemicals are swirling, and something in our brain gets formed. And it’s really a shame because most people are a mess then and not really fully formed in terms of their confidence and their ability to judge themselves. And some of us suffer more than others — those who are bullied will carry that bullied child with them through life for better and for worse unless they get a lot of therapy.
This is a story about different kinds of love, but it’s also about the reconciliation of our earlier selves with our present-day selves.
I think that good novelists have to have a really good understanding of human nature and human trauma and how that’s carried. The nature of what motivates us and how we make decisions are so often rooted in emotion rather than intelligence, even though we think we’re using information to make our choices. Our hearts and guts were built by the lives we’ve lived, including trauma, including grief. And that’s really what I loved writing about — the way all of us are broken in some way, but it’s how we survive and pick up the pieces and reconstruct ourselves and go forward.
Q. Livia endures one trauma after another. Did you ever feel like it’s too much for her or the reader?
It’s funny you say that. My husband, Steven, is my everyday sounding board. He reads every page as soon as it comes off my printer. But he also hears about the story under construction at the end of every day. We make dinner, and I tell him this is what happened to Livia today. And he said, “Why do you do this to your characters?”
I had to think about that. I said, “So that they can come through it to the other side and give people hope.”
We’ve all been through the worst thing that we could think we could bear, yet still, here we are, fundamentally intact human beings. When readers see how other characters survive the worst parts of their lives, it’s both instructive and reassuring.
I have a commitment to never being dispiriting. I promise you, I will never leave a reader feeling hopeless at the end of a book. So I plant little messages along the way, promising the reader, this will come out OK.
If you go
- What: Vroman’s Bookstore presents Barbara Kingsolver discussing “Partita”
- When: 7 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 21
- Where: Pasadena Presbyterian Church, 585 East Colorado Blvd, Pasadena
- Tickets: $45.39 through Eventbrite.com, includes a copy of “Partita”
- Note: The event does not include a signing after the discussion
Map: 100 Southern California independent bookstores to visit in 2026