‘Guilty!” American novelist Barbara Kingsolver says when I ask how she feels to become the first writer to win the Women’s prize for fiction twice. “Guilty and delighted,” she says over 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 husband. When she is not writing, she turns her hand to delivering breach lambs. “I’ve done things that risk my wedding band, I’ll just put it like that,” she says, laughing.
“When I’m at home, I don’t talk like this,” she says of her east coast accent. “Do you want to hear how I talk? ‘How y’all doing? Ahm’a so sorry-ee,’” she sings with a Dolly Parton twang. Not bad for someone who says “they don’t make people more introverted than me”.
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.’”
Raised in Kentucky, Kingsolver describes herself as “Appalachian, through and through”. This DNA is stamped on every one of the 550 pages of her 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: the opioid crisis, of which Appalachia was “ground zero”. 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. 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 will be happy to see her made over into tomboy Angus, with her “bad girl eyes”. “I wanted to make a tough cookie guardian angel, because that’s what Demon needed,” she says. “I think I maybe have a better understanding of women than Dickens,” she hoots. “I’ll claim that.”
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.
