Kingsbury extends reach of Christian fiction
Author may become household name at last with series, film
In the early years of her career, novelist Karen Kingsbury often prayed for success. “Lord,” she would say, “bless these books beyond anything I could ask or imagine. Let them be bigger than anything I could envision and let them change culture.”
Was it right to pray for something so worldly? Kingsbury, seated at a table in the kitchen of her home in an upscale suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, smiled. The question was perhaps naive. “I feel like it’s OK,” she explained. “God knows what you’re thinking anyway, you know?”
Kingsbury, 60, has long been hailed as the queen of Christian fiction. That is perhaps a slender crown. Until fairly recently, Christian fiction was siloed from the mainstream market, sold only at specialty bookstores. Crossover authors were rare and — as with the writers of “This Present Darkness,” “The Shack” and the “Left Behind” series — almost exclusively male. Will Kingsbury join them?
“Depending on what you think of as the mainstream market, I think she already has,” said Daniel Silliman, a news editor at Christianity Today.
The author or co-author of nearly 100 books, Kingsbury has sold more than 25 million copies, according to Simon and Schuster. (Its Atria imprint has published her latest novels.) Three of her books have become Hallmark movies. A fourth, “A Thousand Tomorrows,” was adapted as a series for faith-based streaming site Great American Pure Flix.
Still, she is not yet a household name. “I’m not John Grisham,” she said.
“I’m not Nicholas Sparks.”
That may change. Amazon Prime Video recently premiered “The Baxters,” a threeseason adaptation of Kingsbury’s most popular series, produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett’s Lightworkers Media. And Kingsbury’s new production company has also released the romantic drama “Someone Like You” into 1,500 theaters, which may markedly increase her visibility.
Kingsbury has a rigor that has allowed her to write as many as five books a year while raising six children — three biological, three adopted as boys from Haiti — with her husband, Donald Russell.
“I’m compassionate,” she said. “But I’m competitive, and I’m passionate and not passive.” Still, she tends to downplay that drive, crediting God’s grace.
Kingsbury grew up
mostly in California’s San Fernando Valley. She matriculated at Cal State Northridge, pursuing a journalism degree. The Los Angeles Times hired her onto its sports desk.
A few years later, she was poached by the Los Angeles Daily News. Around that time, at the gym, she met Russell, a clean-cut trainee teacher who insisted on bringing a Bible to their dates. Kingsbury, who had never read the Bible, found Russell infuriating. She also found him cute. Eventually, she bought her own Bible and a concordance, mostly so that she could prove to him that the Bible didn’t prohibit premarital sex.
Soon, she and Russell were baptized. Then they were married. She was pregnant six months later. An agent reached out, and a contract for a nonfiction book, based on one of her newspaper crime stories,
followed. Kingsbury wrote that book and three more. But the work, which relied on interviews with accused killers and grieving families, wore her down. So she tried fiction, taking 10 days off to write “Where Yesterday Lives,” inspired by her childhood.
Her publisher, Dell, didn’t want it. Other mainstream publishers passed, too. Kingsbury didn’t know much about Christian fiction. “I thought it sounded cheesy,” she said. But when a friend gave her a copy of Francine Rivers’ 1991 book “Redeeming Love,” a classic of Christian romance, Kingsbury intuited that her books might find welcome there.
She was correct. “Where Yesterday Lives” was published by Multnomah, a small Christian imprint, in 1998. Still, she resisted that label, exchanging “Christian fiction” for “inspirational fiction,” then trademarking her own term, “life-changing fiction.”
Most of Kingsbury’s books are romances, but they are romantic dramas, not romantic comedies. The characters experience terrible things — abuse, addiction, illness, accident. Yet each book ultimately affirms faith and family. Her father, Kingsbury said, coined a term for her genre: “hope operas.”
“It’s not necessarily a romantic happily ever after,” said Kaitlin Olson, Kingsbury’s editor at Atria. “But these stories end with people coming to terms with themselves and their faith and moving forward.”
Kingsbury’s use of reallife problems distinguishes her from her contemporaries. “She was really early to a broader trend we see now of tackling less-sweet topics,” Silliman said. “Not exactly gritty, but more realistic.”
The characters in her novels do reflect a particular reality: They are nearly always Christians, practicing or lapsed, and seemingly all straight. As the mother of three Black children, she does employ some racial diversity.
But she believes that introducing other diversity would feel too forced: “In terms of LGBTQ or trans, any of those communities, I’m so removed from that in my day-to-day, it wouldn’t feel authentic. It would just be agenda-ized.”
She is similarly cautious about sensitive issues. “Someone Like You,” for example, deals with in vitro fertilization and embryo adoption but neatly skirts any political debate.
“I want to be authentic to the issues today, but not so much that it takes you into controversy,” she said.
Still, Kingsbury does have an agenda, or perhaps several agendas. She wants to tell a good story. She wants each book to be better than the last. (“I’m competitive with myself,” she said.) And while she believes that secular readers can enjoy her books, each is an invitation to faith.
“I would hope, when people finish a book, that coming in through the door of the heart — not like a hammer, but like a whisper — is the fact that maybe there’s something more,” she said.
Kingsbury would like to make more movies. And she plans to publish more books, the next three via Forefront, a hybrid of traditional and independent publishing that she will believes will offer more flexibility.
At the moment, as far as her career is concerned, she has little left to pray for.
“There were times in my life when this was just a dream, and then there were times that in the last few years where I could see it coming. But now it’s here, and I’m ready.”