Barbara Kingsolver Can't Stand How the Media Talks About Her Home

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2023

⏱️ 61 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Barbara Kingsolver set out to write her latest novel, “Demon Copperhead,” she was already considered one of the most accomplished writers of our time. She had won awards including the Women’s Prize for Fiction and a National Humanities Medal, and had a track record of best-selling books, including “The Poisonwood Bible” and “Unsheltered.” But she felt there was one giant stone left unturned: to write “the great Appalachian novel.” Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky and lives in southwestern Virginia. Appalachia is her home. So when national coverage of her region started increasing in the years since 2016, with a focus on the region’s problems — like deep rural poverty and the opioid epidemic — she felt something was missing. She wanted to write a novel about Appalachia from the inside, as someone who is a part of it and who grew up in it. “The story I wanted to tell was not about the big guys, but about the little people,” she told me. And if major awards are any indication, Kingsolver succeeded. “Demon Copperhead” won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and has been widely acclaimed for the nuanced portrait it paints of life in rural America. So I asked Kingsolver to talk about her background and the book, and to explore the often chasmic dissonance between how many of us city-dwellers think about Appalachia and the reality of living there. Mentioned: Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbie Ann Mason Book Recommendations: Landings by Arwen Donahue Raising Lazarus by Beth Macy Pod by Laline Paull Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Annie Galvin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Our senior editor is Rogé Karma. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Jeff Geld, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From New York Times' opinion, this is the Ezra Client Show.
0:22.5	So in 2023, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was won by two novels, trust by Hernan Diaz
0:29.2	and Demon Copperhead by Barbara King's, and King's Oliver, I think, is a literary legend
0:34.5	in her own time. I mean, she wrote the bean trees, she wrote the Poisonwood Bible, she
0:39.2	has won all kinds of prizes, but I think it's fair to say Demon Copperhead is a kind of masterpiece.
0:44.8	And it's a kind of masterpiece she was trying to create. She set out to write, as she tells me
0:50.9	in this conversation, she was setting out to write the great novel of Appalachia, and I think she did.
0:55.9	And this is a novel that is following loosely in the structure of David Copperfield by Dickens.
1:04.0	It's a novel set a little bit back in time, I think, that so much of our thinking now about
1:09.2	this is political and places to go for Trump and places to don't go for Trump, but the novel
1:13.3	set in the 90s and in the 2000s, so a little bit before some of the current economic and
1:19.2	political cleavages attain, at least the form we know them in. And it's a beautiful book,
1:24.9	it's a wrenching book, it's a book that I routinely had to stop reading, because I was so fused
1:30.9	with the character and so fused with the story that when I could see something bad coming,
1:37.7	I just couldn't handle it before bed, I just couldn't go through that with the main character.
1:41.6	So, I mean, that I think is about as much as you can say for fiction, when it almost feels
1:45.8	more real than the life you're living. So, I was grateful she was willing to come on the show
1:49.7	and talk a bit about her life, how she came to writing the novel, the sort of experiences she
1:53.8	brought to it and the kind of argument she's trying to have through it. As always, my email
1:59.8	as her client show at nytimes.com.
2:06.4	Barbara King-Salver, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me.
2:10.1	So, you've said that you're Appalachian through and through. What does that mean to you?
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