Barbara Kingsolver Calls Her New Novel ‘My Love Letter To Millennials’

Nerdette Recaps With Peter Sagal

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4.6 • 924 Ratings

🗓️ 16 November 2018

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Barbara Kingsolver says her new novel, ‘Unsheltered,’ is “my love letter to millennials.”

“Today’s problems can’t be fixed by yesterday’s people,” she tells Greta. “They’re going to be fixed by tomorrow’s people.”

Kingsolver is the author of several award-winning books, including ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ and ‘The Bean Trees.’

‘Unsheltered’ is set both in the run up to the 2016 presidential election and in the aftermath of the American Civil War, and she says it’s about “how people behave when it seems like all the old rules have stopped working.”

Kingsolver tells us about the end of the world, why she's still optimistic, and what it's like to narrate the sex scenes when she records her own audiobooks. (“You just try to get through it all in one take”). She also answers one of Greta’s more poignant questions: “Are we just %#&!ed?”

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still
0:06.1	watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,
0:12.7	soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,
0:18.0	Stories Without End from WBEZ Chicago.
0:25.7	Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.
0:28.3	Listen wherever you get your podcast.
0:35.9	From WBEZ Chicago, this is NERDET, and I am Greta Johnson.
0:37.8	NERDET is a show where we talk to your favorite or soon-to-be favorite people and this week's guest probably should already be one of
0:43.3	your favorite authors. We are talking with Barbara Kingsolver. I got to hug Barbara Kingsolver.
0:49.8	She's the author of more than a dozen books, including Poisonwood Bible and the Bean Trees and Pradical Summer.
0:55.6	She won a James Beard Award.
0:57.6	And she was shortlisted for a Pulitzer.
1:00.1	No Big Deal.
1:01.2	Her newest book is called Unsheltered.
1:03.6	It's a novel and it is very much about the current political climate.
1:08.3	I always start a novel with a big question, and my question this time is
1:14.6	what in the heck? I mean, is this the end of the world as we know it? Because when I look around
1:20.9	every kind of shelter that most of us have come to depend on seems to be failing.
1:29.0	And for people who are, you know, sort of middle class people reaching middle age who have done what they feel like is everything right, followed the rules.
1:40.6	Many times the results are not what they expected.
1:44.5	There's no Easter egg at the end of the hunt.
1:46.9	So no great job at the end of the college degree.
	...

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