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Books interview Interview

Barbara Kingsolver
Barbara Kingsolver: ‘Rural people are
so angry they want to blow up the
system’
Lisa Allardice

Fri 16 Jun 2023 12.12 EDT

As 2023 unfolds, will you

support us?
We’re a reader-funded news organisation, with
‘I think I maybe more
have than
a better 1.5 million
understanding of women than Dickens’: Barbara Kingsolver at home in Virginia in 2018. Photograph: Jes
Tezak/The Guardian Single Monthly Annual
supporters in 180 countries. With this vital support, our reporting remains
The first
fiercely independent, and is never author toby
manipulated win the Women’s
commercial prize for fiction twice on how
or political Advertisement
Charles
ties. And it’s free, for everyone. Dickens
But if you – and rage
can support us,about the you.
we need opioid crisis - helped her $5 per month $7 per month
write
Give just once from $1, or better yet,‘the
powergreat
usAppalachian
every monthnovel’with a little

‘G
more. Thank you. uilty!” American novelist Barbara Kingsolver says when I ask Other
how she feels to become the first writer to win the Women’s
prize for fiction twice. “Guilty and delighted,” she says overthe Guardian
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coffee in a London hotel, the morning after winning the prize
for her tenth novel Demon Copperhead. “I don’t want to be greedy. I don’t
 want to take something that would be more helpful to someone else. It’s my
upbringing, I was raised in a culture of modesty.”

With a Susan-Sontag silver streak in her hair and steely good humour, 68-
year-old Kingsolver is a quiet titan of American literature. Best-known for
her mega-selling 1998 novel The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna, which
won the Women’s (then Orange) prize in 2010, she has taken on
uncomfortable subjects such as American colonialism and climate change.
She counts Hillary Clinton as a friend and was invited to lunch at the White
House with Barack Obama – “One of the most magnetically attractive human
beings” – who quizzed her for writing tips. And yet, she rarely leaves the
farm in the mountains of south-west Virginia, where she lives with her
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husband. When she is not writing, she turns her hand to delivering breach
Daniel Ellsberg, Pe
lambs. “I’ve done things that risk my wedding band, I’ll just put it like that,”
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she says, laughing. aged 92

“When I’m at home, I don’t talk like this,” she says of her east coast accent.
Trump supporters
“Do you want to hear how I talk? ‘How y’all doing? Ahm’a so sorry-ee,’” she the Fox News bann
sings with a Dolly Parton twang. Not bad for someone who says “they don’t
make people more introverted than me”.
Barbara Kingsolve
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Barbara Kingsolver with fellow Women’s prize for fiction shortlistees Jacqueline Crooks, Priscilla
Morris, Laline Paul, Louise Kennedy and Maggie O’Farrell. Photograph: David Levenson/Getty
Images

She is also surprisingly angry. “I understand why rural people are so mad
they want to blow up the system,” she says. “That contempt of urban culture
for half the country. I feel like I’m an ambassador between these worlds,
trying to explain that if you want to have a conversation you don’t start it
with the words, ‘You idiot.’”

As 2023 unfolds, will you

Raised in Kentucky, Kingsolver describes herself as “Appalachian, through
and through”. This DNA is stamped on every one of the 550 pages of her

support us? bravura retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, relocated to her native state
and updated to the 1990s. Largely written during the pandemic, its subject is
another epidemic:
We’re a reader-funded news organisation, the opioid
with more crisis,
than 1.5 of which Appalachia was “ground zero”.
million
With its deep-rooted evocation of place, Single
epic scope and powerful moral Monthly Annual
supporters in 180 countries. With this vital support, our reporting remains
purpose,
fiercely independent, and is never Demon Copperhead
manipulated is undoubtedly
by commercial or political the defining novel of an already
ties. And it’s free, for everyone. But if you can support
distinguished career. us, we need you. $5 per month $7 per month
Give just once from $1, or better yet, power us every month with a little
more. Thank you. “Now that it’s finished, I understand that my whole life I’ve been wanting to
Other
write the great Appalachian novel,” she says. For years she had been thinking
of this big story she wanted to write “but that nobody wanted to hear”, not
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just about the prescription drugs crisis, but the generations of exploitation
and institutional poverty, the plundering of the region for timber, coal and
 tobacco leading up to it. “Then Purdue Pharma targeting us saying, ‘OK, the
last thing that we can make money off is the pain and the disability of the
people who were injured in the previous industries’”, she says. But I had no
idea how I could make this a story that people wanted to read. It was like a
house that I was just walking around trying to find the doorway in.”

Ironically, for an author who describes herself as writing “very American

novels”, she found the key in a B&B in Broadstairs, Kent. At the end of the
UK book tour for her previous novel, Unsheltered, in 2018, and desperate for
a break, she saw an ad for Bleak House B&B and thought it might be fun to
check it out. “I had no idea how Dickensy it would be”, she laughs. “It was all
very much set up as if he were still living there.”

And so she found herself, late one November night, sitting alone in Dickens’s
study, at the very desk on which he wrote David Copperfield (his favourite
and most autobiographical novel), staring out at the ocean, just as he had
done nearly 175 years ago. “I just felt the presence of his outrage.” She’s not
given to hearing voices, but she says: “I felt him saying, ‘What do you mean,
nobody wants to hear this?’ He said: ‘Let the child tell the story.’ I thought,
‘well, I will. Thank you, Mr Dickens. I will let your child tell the story.’”

And so she sat up the rest of the night making notes and downloaded David
Copperfield to reread on the flight back. “It was a masterclass,” she says.
“Learning all the tricks that he used to get the gentle Victorians, who didn’t
want to think about poverty and orphans, to look at those kids and wait for
the next chapter.”

She finally had her way into writing about the “lost boys” of Appalachia,
where 40% of children are raised by someone else, either because their
parents are dead, in prison or too incapacitated by addiction. Her eldest
daughter, Camille (both her daughters have returned to live nearby after
university), works as a clinical mental health therapist with local
schoolchildren, and gave Kingsolver some shocking insights into the social
services. “We have this generation of traumatised kids who will be living
with that for ever.”

As soon as she got home she set up a spreadsheet, with columns for each of
the 64 chapters, and set herself the challenge of finding contemporary
equivalents. A shoe-blacking factory became a makeshift meth lab, and Mr
Crinkles’s boarding school for boys is Creaky’s slave-labour tobacco farm. She
“outsourced” her first draft to Dickens. Fans will enjoy all “the inside jokes”
and character spotting – David’s shifty schoolfriend Steerforth becomes
flashy Fast Forward, “Of course he would be the football hero quarterback. I
know that guy!” she says. And Uriah Heep is transformed into creepy Soccer
coach U-Haul. Anyone who remembers being disappointed in saintly Agnes
As 2023 unfolds, will you will be happy to see her made over into tomboy Angus, with her “bad girl

support us? Demon needed,” she says. “I think I maybe have a better understanding of
eyes”. “I wanted to make a tough cookie guardian angel, because that’s what

women than Dickens,” she hoots. “I’ll claim that.”

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 The difference between pessimism and optimism is
constructing a good ending

But she’s insistent that you do not need to have read David Copperfield first.
“In some ways it’s full of spoilers.” Taking on Dickens “was really fun and
really hard. And I love both those things. As a writer I need to feel that I’m
working at the very edge of my powers.”

Part of the block in writing her Appalachian novel, she realises, is that she
had “internalised the shame” of her rural upbringing. Now she feels she has
not “just the right but the duty” to represent her community. “The news, the
movies, TV, it’s all manufactured in cities about city people. We’re nothing.
We don’t see ourselves at all. And if we do show up, it’s as a joke, the
hillbillies. We are the last demographic that progressive people still mock
with impunity.”

In one memorable passage, Demon lists off all the insults thrown at them:
“Hillbilly, rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.” The
last alludes to a comment by Hillary Clinton, referring to Trump supporters
as “a basket of deplorables”. Now Kingsolver often spots bumper stickers
proudly declaring “I’m a deplorable” in her neighbourhood. But her agent
and editor, both based in New York, questioned whether she should include
it. “I decided, yes, I’m leaving it in because I want this to make the reader
uncomfortable.”

At the time of the last election, as non-Republicans in a red state, Kingsolver

and her husband did wonder if they should be fearful. “I love my neighbours,
and I know they love me. But there’s still this feeling like somebody’s going
to come down the road with the Trump flag and shoot you,” she says, in a
way that isn’t clear if she’s serious. “It’s scary how detached some people
have come from the possibility of compromise, the notion that ‘my people
matter and I hate yours’ – that’s terrifying.”

There were days when it was really hard for Kingsolver to go to her desk and
take Demon to the dark places his story had to go. “Writing means really
going into another world and living there fully with your whole heart,” she
says. Her husband would take her hand and make her go for a walk in the
woods and remind her that their children were OK.

For her, the role of fiction is to give hope. “The difference between
pessimism and optimism is constructing a good ending,” she says.

Demon Copperhead (Faber, £20) is the winner of the 2023 Women’s prize
for fiction. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at
guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

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