Literary ruralism (Part XXXVII): An interview with Barbara Kingsolver

The Guardian interviewed Barbara Kingsolver, winner of this year's Pulitzer Prize for her 2022 novel Demon Copperhead, on the occasion of the author also being awarded the Women's Prize for literature (previously the Orange Prize).  (I've featured excerpts from the Demon Copperhead in prior Legal Ruralism posts here and here).

Writer Lisa Allardice characterizes Kingsolver as "angry" and then provides this quote from the author as Exhibit A: 

I understand why rural people are so mad they want to blow up the system. 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."

Then there's this background on Kingsolver and the project:, which is set in Appalachia amidst the opioid epidemic: 

With its deep-rooted evocation of place, epic scope and powerful moral purpose, Demon Copperhead is undoubtedly the defining novel of an already distinguished career.

* * * 

“Now that it’s finished, I understand that my whole life I’ve been wanting to 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 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. 

 And this, which is about a part of the novel I excerpted in a prior post: 

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.”

One of my earliest blog posts, from 2008, is about Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (2007), and this one from earlier that year references the book.  This post from 2014 is about her novel Flight Behavior.