SOURCE: “Novel Beginning,” in Chicago Tribune, September 16, 1993, p. D13.

In the following interview, Kingsolver discusses her life, literary beginnings, and Pigs in Heaven.

Barbara Kingsolver arrived for lunch so promptly as to be early, a refreshing gesture from someone who was soon casually confessing that her writing career began with an enormous white lie.

The lie occurred some years ago, before Kingsolver had published her three novels and one book of short stories, and before her latest book, Pigs in Heaven, made its gently opinionated author a bona fide literary success. Back then, Kingsolver was a graduate student at the University of Arizona, studying the social life of termites.

“It's a very interesting question if you're in this special filed of population biology,” Kingsolver said. “But if you're not, and most people aren't, it's very difficult to understand what it has to do with the state of the...