Barbara Kingsolver didn't realise the world thought she was a hillbilly until she left home to go to university.
The bestselling author of The Poisonwood Bible was raised in Nicholas County, Kentucky, in the Appalachian region of the United States, home to a largely white and disproportionately poor population often derided by outsiders as hillbillies — or, in the words of Demon Copperhead, the titular young protagonist of Kingsolver's latest novel: "Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables."
Growing up, Kingsolver was familiar with the depictions of this social class popularised by the 60s sitcom Beverly Hillbillies: "Ignorant idiots who hold our jeans up with a rope and have a pig in the house for a pet and shoot the neighbour's lights out if they're bothering us," as she explained on ABC RN's The Book Show.
But Kingsolver and her friends never took these "far-fetched" caricatures seriously; so when she moved to Indiana to accept a scholarship to study music at DePauw University, she was surprised to discover her classmates took the Beverly Hillbillies stereotypes at face value.
People made fun of her Appalachian accent, and strangers accosted her on campus demanding she speak in her mountain drawl.
"I lost my accent because I got tired of being ridiculed," Kingsolver says.
In her new novel, Demon Copperhead, the author returns to Appalachia to redress some of these stereotypes, and to tackle one of its most urgent issues, the opioid crisis — via a somewhat unlikely vehicle: a retelling of Charles Dickens's 19th-century classic, David Copperfield.
From scientist to novelist
Kingsolver persevered at university, switching her major from music to biology and graduating with a Bachelor of Science in 1977.
She spent a year in France before moving to Tucson, Arizona, where she lived for two decades, completing a master's degree in ecology and evolutionary biology.
She worked as a science writer and freelance journalist, penning fiction in her spare time, until the publication of her first novel, The Bean Trees, in 1988.
"I always loved writing; I just thought it was going to be the thing that I did in private … I didn't imagine that I would get to make a living this way," she says.
Two more novels and a short story collection followed before her breakthrough: The Poisonwood Bible, published in 1998.
A bestseller that also garnered critical acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize nomination, The Poisonwood Bible is the epic story of an American missionary family in the Congo in the 60s, told in the alternating voices of the matriarch and her four daughters.
It was partially based on Kingsolver's experience of living in central Africa in the 60s when she was seven years old, when her father, a physician, undertook an exchange there.
"It was a great adventure for me and my brother," the author told Claire Nichols, host of ABC RN's The Book Show, at Adelaide Writers' Week in 2018.
"We lived in a village that had no electricity, no plumbing, no cars. We were the only white kids that anybody had ever seen."
The Kingsolvers' time in the Congo coincided with a period of political upheaval triggered by the country's independence from Belgium in 1960.
Later, in her 20s, Kingsolver learned of the US government's involvement in a plot to replace the Republic of Congo's first democratically elected president, Patrice Lumumba, with Joseph Mobutu (later known as Mobutu Sese Seko), whose despotic rule lasted until 1997 when he was removed from power in a civil war.
"It broke my heart. I cried and cried … I had no idea this place I had loved … had been so damaged by my country," Kingsolver says.
The Poisonwood Bible was Kingsolver's effort to correct the historical record; an American Heart of Darkness that exposed America's colonial sins.
"In the United States, we think we're the colony that threw off the bad guy. We identify with revolutions, with young democracies all over the world. We think we're the good guys. We aren't," she says.
In 2010, Kingsolver won the Orange Prize for Fiction for The Lacuna, a sprawling historical novel set against the backdrop of anti-communist McCarthyism in the US and the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution.
Kingsolver's published works (17 to date, including nine novels, a short story collection, two collections apiece of poetry and essays, and three works of non-fiction) cover diverse territory, most recently the climate crisis, in Flight Behaviour (2012), set in rural Tennessee, and American materialism and the decline of civilisation, in Unsheltered (2018).
However, her writing engages with common themes, outlined in an essay by Dr Sylvia Bailey Shurbutt, an English professor and director of the Shepherd University Center for Appalachian Studies and Communities in West Virginia:
"[S]ocial justice and the environment, re-visioning the idea of family and defending non-traditional families and members of society, championing the outcast and unheard in a patriarchy that controls the destinies of both men and women, and ultimately looking with hope at a troubled geopolitical and economic world that appears at times to be careening toward self-immolation."
Returning to her Appalachian roots
Demon Copperhead, published in November, is a tale of institutional poverty and intergenerational trauma, like Dickens's original, that speaks to Kingsolver's abiding interest in social justice.
Kingsolver had long wanted to write a novel about the effects of institutional poverty and the opioid epidemic on children in the region she calls home.
In the late 90s, doctors in the US began prescribing new opioid drugs to patients suffering pain, under assurances from manufacturers that the drugs were not addictive — which proved untrue.
Misuse of these medications proliferated, and soon millions of people became addicted to both prescription and non-prescription opioids, creating a public health emergency that continues to claim thousands of lives each year.
(The crisis is vividly depicted in the 2021 miniseries Dopesick, based on Beth Macy's 2018 book of the same name.)
Kingsolver says pharmaceutical companies targeted Appalachian communities like Lee County, where Demon Copperhead is set, due to the high incidence of chronic injuries among the miners who lived there, and poor access to healthcare.
Opioid addiction has decimated Lee County and others like it, says Kingsolver.
"We have this whole generation of kids growing up orphaned, being raised by grandparents or the foster care system, wards of the state, because their parents are incarcerated or dead or non-functioning."
However, she feared few people wanted to read a novel about the victims of the opioid epidemic.
"Addiction has [a] terrible stigma. A lot of people have already made up their minds … [that] these are just weak, bad people, they should be in prison. There's just not a lot of sympathy for the story I wanted to tell."
Inspired by a Dickens classic
In the end, Kingsolver's entry into the story she wanted to tell about Appalachia's opioid crisis came from an unexpected source: the English writer Charles Dickens, who Kingsolver cites as a strong influence on her writing.
"I learned my craft from reading, and I have always relied heavily on the great plotters, and Dickens is the best. You just can't beat Dickens for a good plot," she says.
In the UK for a book tour, Kingsolver spent a weekend at Bleak House, an inn in Broadstairs, Kent, that had once served as Dickens's holiday home.
"[It was] this creaky old mansion on the top of a cliff overlooking the sea … and Little Dorritt was there limping around to take my bag upstairs. I could feel Dickens still in this house," she says.
The only guest, Kingsolver had the place — and, in a very A Christmas Carol-worthy twist, the writer's ghost – to herself.
"I spent a long evening sitting at his desk, communing with Dickens. And he said: 'You have to tell this story. But … let the child tell the story.'
"So right on that desk where Dickens wrote David Copperfield, I began writing my version of his story," she recalls.
Kingsolver's novel faithfully replicates the plot and characters of the original. David Copperfield becomes Damon Fields, known as Demon Copperhead, a boy born in a trailer to an 18-year-old single mother with a substance abuse problem.
Demon grows up to experience the worst of the US foster care system, eventually falling through the cracks to find himself homeless at 11.
Along the way, he encounters modern incarnations of Dickens's famous characters: the kindly Peggotty family becomes the Peggots, the charming yet unscrupulous gentleman James Steerforth appears as the football star Fast Forward, and the villainous Uriah Heep is U-Haul Pyles.
As she wrote her novel, Kingsolver began to see more and more parallels between David Copperfield's story — a tale of 19th-century poverty based on Dickens's experience of the poor house — and the lives of Appalachians, 140 years later and across an ocean.
"[Dickens] grew up knowing the inside of institutional poverty. I was luckier than Charles Dickens — my father did not go to debtors' prison — but I grew up among very poor people," she says.
"Appalachia is the poorest part of this country. For 200 years, it's been treated as a colony of the United States. It has been exploited economically, its schools have been kept deliberately substandard, and its people have been kept deliberately poor by the series of outside agencies that came in to pull out the coal, the timber, the tobacco — all the resources."
Ingrained prejudice
Many still consider Appalachia backward, says Kingsolver.
"That's a part of why I wrote this novel [Demon Copperhead]. I wanted to show, yes, that we have problems, but we are nuanced, interesting people with our honour codes and our resourcefulness and our pride."
Kingsolver agonised over whether to include the word "deplorable" — a direct reference to Hillary Clinton's much-pilloried description of Trump supporters in 2016 as "a basket of deplorables" — in her protagonist's description of his community.
"I took it out, and I put it in, and I took it out, and I put it in — and I decided to leave it," she says.
"I'm a great fan of Hillary, and I voted for her … but she made a mistake."
While Kingsolver, a self-described political progressive, again voted Democrat in the 2020 election, she says she understands why so many of her neighbours cast their votes for Trump and the Republican Party.
"We are really tired of the arrogance of urban progressives who see the world entirely through a progressive lens and don't see rural people at all. We never show up in the movies or on television or in the news unless it's as an object of pity or a joke," she says.
Including "deplorable" was her way of calling out what she perceives as liberal prejudice against rural Americans.
"I wanted to put a little frisson, a little bit of discomfort into Demon's anger, because that's how we've gotten here. That's why so many rural people are ready to vote for an absolute hand grenade of a politician — because they're just really tired of being ignored, and they're ready to blow up the system in hope of something better, of being seen."
Today, Appalachians have reclaimed the term hillbilly as a source of pride, says Kingsolver.
In 2016, J.D. Vance (now a US senator-elect from Ohio) gave voice to Appalachian disadvantage in Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, later adapted for the screen in a 2020 film by Ron Howard.
In Kingsolver's novel, Demon creates an Appalachian superhero who stars in a comic strip he titles 'Red Neck'.
"We use it [hillbilly] as a term of internal solidarity. But when I go on the road, I don't introduce people by saying, 'Hi, I'm a hillbilly.' If it comes up, I say, 'Hillbillies look a lot of different ways – and we all wear shoes,'" says Kingsolver.
Demon Copperhead is out through Faber (Allen & Unwin).
