Jhumpa Lahiri will appear Saturday in Kingston and on Sunday in Newport.

The Providence Journal / CONNIE GROSCH

Before she won the Pulitzer Prize, before her first novel was turned into a film, Jhumpa Lahiri swam at Scarborough Beach, went to Girl Scout meetings at the Congregational Church, and shelved books at the Kingston Free Library.

But it was no idyllic Yankee childhood.

Born in London, the child of Indian immigrants, she never felt at home in the rented historic house on Kingstown Road. Instead, she found solace in the library a few houses away. There, among the musty stacks of books, amid the great and not-so-great authors, she found a calling.

“I was an unhappy adolescent, lacking confidence, boyfriends, a proper sense of myself,” says the author in a new anthology, State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America.

“When I was in the library it didn’t matter. I took my cue from the readers who came and went and understood that books were what mattered, that they were above high school, above an adolescent’s petty trials, above life itself.”

Books mattered. At 18, Lahiri left Rhode Island for New York’s Barnard College. Later, in Boston, she earned three master’s degrees and a doctorate in Renaissance studies.

Her first book of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000. Her 2003 novel, The Namesake, was made into a movie by director Mira Nair.

Next week marks a homecoming for the 41-year-old author.

Saturday night, she’ll read from her latest book, Unaccustomed Earth, at the Kingston Free Library. The doors open at 7:15 and seating is limited.

On Sunday, at the Jane Pickens Theater in Newport, she’ll talk about her Rhode Island essay from State by State. Published by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, the anthology pairs 50 writers with 50 states. The writers include Jonathan Franzen, Susan Orlean, Rick Moody and Dave Eggars.

The 4 p.m. event will feature a 40-minute documentary based on the book. Sean Wilsey, one of the book’s editors, will also talk about the project. Tickets are $5. State by State will be sold at the theater. To reserve a seat, call (401) 849-2665.

The project was inspired by the state guides issued in the 1930s, as part of the Work Projects Administration. Launched by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the New Deal project put more than 6,000 American writers to work.

Lahiri, of course, needed no job when Wilsey approached her.

Her most recent work, Unaccustomed Earth, debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, no small feat for a book of short stories about the lives of Bengali immigrants and their children.

Still, Lahiri jumped at the chance to write about the Ocean State.

Although many of her short stories are set in Boston, “I had never really written about Rhode Island in a straight-on way,” Lahiri said in a telephone interview last week. “I was excited. I was ready to think about Rhode Island.”

Lahiri had another reason for saying yes. Her new fiction will center on Kingston. She won’t say any more about it at this stage, except to say that it is a novel.

In her 10-page State by State essay, Lahiri mixes history, geography and keen observation. “Rhode Island is not an island,” she writes. But like many island communities, it includes summer visitors who come “for the swimming and the clam cakes” and full-time residents “who seem never to go anywhere else.”

Her family was a hybrid. After her father took a job as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island, they made Kingston their home. But like the summer people, they never really fit with the “hippies and Yankees and professors and students.”

Until Lahiri was 8, the family rented the first floor of a former law office owned by Asa Potter. Just six houses down, on the same side of the street, sat the Kingston Free Library, a former courthouse with a belfry and a mansard roof.

“From my earliest memories I was obsessed with the library, with its creaky, cramped atmosphere and all the things it contained,” she writes.

Story hour was conducted upstairs in Potter Hall, where light poured through enormous upstairs windows. It was “a sacred place that seemed both to represent the heart of Kingston and also the means of escaping it.”

When she was ,8 her parents built a new home in the Rolling Acres subdivision in Peace Dale, off Route 108.

The move suited her father, Amar, who worked in the garden, used coupons to buy groceries at Stop & Shop, and felt a community connection through his job.

But her mother, Tia, “a gregarious and hard-wired urbanite,” chafed at the isolation. Until she got a job as a teacher’s aide at South Road Elementary School, she stayed at home and cooked.

It was a different time, says Lahiri. People celebrated their differences less, and tried not to stand out.

But in early 1997, her mother stood out. For two terrible months, she became the target of a series of hate crimes.

At the South Road School, someone started leaving notes in her mailbox, workplace and coat pocket. “Go back to India,” said one. “Many people here do not like to see your face,” said another.

The police questioned students and school workers but never arrested anyone. The notes did, however, spark school and community meetings.

The Providence Journal wrote about the outcry. And talk-show host Montel Williams asked Tia to appear on his show. She declined.

Although many Kingston residents “reached out to my mother,” very few in Rhode Island’s Indian community did so, Lahiri writes.

“Some resented my mother for creating controversy, for drawing attention to their being foreign, a fact that they worked to neutralize. Others told her that she might not have been targeted if she had worn skirts and trousers instead of saris and bindis,” writes Lahiri.

Lahiri struggled with the decision to include the incident in State by State. Her mother “really didn’t want to revisit it,” Lahiri said. But in the end she decided it was important.

“I wanted to present a full portrait, both good and bad,” Lahiri said. “Not just the beautiful but the difficult and the painful.”

In her new house in Peace Dale, Lahiri felt queasy and uprooted. At South Kingstown High School she worked on the school paper, but she wasn’t good at sports.

“It was hard for me. I felt like I was waiting for something else, to get out and find a different atmosphere where I would feel more comfortable in my skin.”

She felt most at home near the sea. In a late passage in her essay she writes:

“The Atlantic I grew up with lacks the color and warmth of the Caribbean, the grandeur of the Pacific, the romance of the Mediterranean. It is generally cold, and full of rust-colored seaweed. Still, I prefer it.”

The sea never asked questions. “Thanks to its very lack of welcome, its unwavering indifference, the ocean always made me feel accepted, and to my dying day, the seaside is the only place where I can feel truly and recklessly happy.”

Lahiri lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two children, but she visits her parents often. Her mother, retired, recently survived a heart attack. Her father still works at the URI library.

But in her essay, Lahiri wonders if she will return after her parents are gone.

Because of their beliefs, “they will not be buried in Rhode Island soil,” she writes. The family house will be sold, severing a last connection.

“I can see myself, many years from now, driving up I-95, on my way to another vacation on the Cape.” She and her family will likely pass through Kingston, an area once called Little Rest, and drive across the Newport Bridge, “where the sapphire bay spreads out on either side, a breathtaking sight that will never grow old.

“Like many others, we will pass through without stopping.”

pdavis@projo.com