Hello and welcome to GabFest Reeds for August 2023.

I'm Emily Bazelon, one of the hosts of Slate's Political GabFest.

I'm here with David Plotz and John Dickerson.

Hey, David.

Hi, Emily.

Hey, Emily.

We are thrilled to be talking with Barbara King Solver about her recent book,

Demon Copperhead, which won the Pulitzer Prize

for Fiction this year. Barbara, welcome to Gap Fest Reeds. Thanks. I'm glad to be here. David and John

and I usually take turns interviewing writers, but today we're all here because we all want to talk

about this book. So, Demon Copperhead is a recasting of David Copperfield, the classic novel by Charles Dickens.

And Barbara, you're following the path that Dickens laid out to tell the story in his time of a boy growing up in 19th century England.

And you're telling the story of a boy growing up in our times in Appalachia.

I wanted to ask you for so long, why Dickens? And as your

source of inspiration, I especially want to know this now because I was reading a recent essay

in The New Yorker by Zadie Smith. And she was disparaging Dickens as being too sentimental,

too theatrical, too moralistic, and too controlling. And it just made me so curious because you have

sought him out as a source of material and inspiration. And why is that? He showed me the way

into a story that I had found impossible to write for several years. I spent close to three years

absolutely sure that I wanted to tell the story

of what's happening to my community, our communities here in Appalachia, as a result of the

opioid epidemic. And I wanted to tell the bigger story, sort of the whole context, the whole historical context

...