SOURCE: An interview in Publisher's Weekly, Vol. 270, No. 30, July 26, 1993, pp. 46-47.

In the following interview, Ehrenreich discusses the writing of her first fiction book.

"I feel like a criminal," says Barbara Ehrenreich. "I didn't mean to do it!" She's not referring to an act of civil disobedience from her anti-war past (about which she'd be unlikely to repent); she's talking about the reckless act of writing a novel. Kipper's Game (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Fiction Forecasts, Apr. 26), an adventurous tale involving a computer game, Nazi scientists and a mysterious illness that causes uncontrollable bleeding, is indeed not the book you'd necessarily expect from a 51-year-old writer best known for her journalism and such works of social and cultural analysis as The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment and Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class, all written from a bracingly leftwing point...