Barbara Kingsolver says that people often get her titles wrong. "Once a TV interviewer asked me how writing The Beans of Egypt, Maine has affected my life," she recalls. "I was able to say honestly, ‘Not at all!' " That's of course because the interviewer mistook Kingsolver's 1988 novel The Bean Trees for a novel by Carolyn Chute.
No matter, Kingsolver has heard worse-like when someone referred to 1993's Pigs in Heaven as Pigs in a Blanket. And though she's good-humored about the errors, she is serious about titles. "Titles are very important to me," she says. "I think of a title as a sort of skeleton key that unlocks a lot of different thematic doors inside the work. So it has to mean a lot of things. I always try to choose titles that have a lot of cognitive dissonance, words that knock against each other and rattle."
