It’s the birthday of Barbara Kingsolver (b. 1955), who has written such acclaimed novels as The Bean Trees (1988), The Poisonwood Bible (1998), and The Lacuna (2009, winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction) and nonfiction such as the essay collection High Tide in Tucson (1995) and the book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007, winner of the James Beard award).

More importantly, Kingsolver is a founding member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, which also included Stephen King, Amy Tan, and like that.

Kingsolver was born in Annapolis, Maryland, and raised in rural Kentucky, where her father was a doctor—but the family also did a brief stint in a Congolese village, like you do. She went to DePauw University, first studying classical piano but switching to biology when she realized the job market for pianists sucks. Kingsolver graduated in 1977, moved to France for a year, moved to Tucson, Arizona, for two decades, got a master’s in ecology and evolutionary biology, got married, had a baby, got married again, had another baby, and moved to a farm in Appalachia. Kingsolver has said, “I’m a hillbilly. We look all kinds of different ways and this is one of them.” (See the article here.)

Kingsolver’s latest novel is Unsheltered (2018) and tells the story of Willa, who inherits a ramshackle, falling-down house into which her family moves when she and her husband lose their jobs. The family is beset with devastation, financial and otherwise, and their experience reflects the current American sense that life as we know it is coming apart at the seams. (Or haven’t you been paying attention?) The novel interweaves this story with one about the same neighborhood in the 1870s, when residents also felt they were undergoing a cataclysmic paradigm shift, thanks in part to the work of Charles Darwin, and now don’t you want to rush out and read this book this very day, putting aside that thing you have a deadline for and that other thing you’re supposed to start? Go for it. Seize the moment. Carpe the heck out of this diem.

Fun random fact: according to Kingsolver, Emily Dickinson hated Charles Darwin. Discuss.

Have a warmish, off-again on-again rainy sort of Monday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.