Barbara Kingsolver: ‘Every single family I know has been affected by the opioid crisis’

Barbara Kingsolver speaks politely but is unmistakably angry. “We have a generation of kids growing up here without parents, because so many of my people are incarcerated or addicted or dead,” she tells me.

She’s referring to the US opioid epidemic — addiction to prescription painkiller drugs — which is the subject of her new novel Demon Copperhead, the story of a boy growing up from the 1990s into the new millennium, with every card stacked against him.

But who, I ask, does she mean by “my people”? Kingsolver lives in Appalachia, a rural area covering parts of 13 US states from southern New York to Mississippi. “There is enormous condescension in my country of rural people against urban people,” she says. “If people from the mountains, ‘hillbillies’ as we’re called, show up on television at all, we’ll be the ignorant backwoods degenerate, the butt of every joke. It’s either that or a poverty documentary.”

In the book young orphan Damon — known to his friends and what remains of his family as Demon — says that rural people are “the dogs of America”, the only group it’s still OK to hate. “The fact is,” Kingsolver says, “that this poverty has been baked into our region by a long history of exploitation. We’ve been treated as an internal colony of the United States. Our timber and our coal fuelled the industrial revolution but it did nothing for the people here.”

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Indeed, it’s unusual for a world-class writer like Kingsolver — a perpetual best-seller and award-winner, best known for books like The Poisonwood Bible and The Lacuna — not to live on the urban east coast. “Young writers believe they have to go to New York to seek their fortune, which is a really bad idea because overheads are enormous. You have to pay so much to live in an apartment the size of a closet that it’s going to be really hard to make it as an artist.”

What about growing up there — was she encouraged to read? “I did read. I wasn’t discouraged. My father read everything, whenever I saw him, he was reading. And living where we did, it was fairly isolated, we didn’t have any neighbours close by. So reading was my way of opening windows in my brain and flying to other places. So I suppose you can see my love for books as a product of deprivation. But I’m really, really glad for it now!”

Deprivation is certainly a feature of Demon Copperhead’s life: his drug-addicted mother lives in abusive relationships and then dies from an overdose, whereupon Demon is fostered, exploited and given only the occasional glimmer of light before he becomes addicted to painkillers himself. Demon is not real, of course, but he represents many children in the US today.

To return to the subject of “my people”, Kingsolver explains the opioid epidemic. “People see it in terms of the big players, the good guys and the bad guys.” (The latter would include the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma, unwilling stars of Patrick Radden Keefe’s award-winning book about the opioid industry, Empire of Pain.)

“The lawsuits have gotten settled. The national eyes have moved on. [But] nothing has changed here, except for the supply of poison pills. We’re still left with this generation of kids that have been devastated. And I wanted to write about that.”

The inspiration, as astute readers may have spotted from the similarity of her novel’s title to David Copperfield, was the great writer-campaigner of the 19th century, Charles Dickens. In the book (“a little meta moment there!” she laughs), Demon reads Dickens and observes: “Jesus Christ, did he get the picture on kids and orphans getting screwed over, and nobody giving a rat’s ass.”

“I had the idea of channelling Dickens,” explains Kingsolver. “I spent several years wondering, how can I tell this story nobody really wants to hear? And I finally had this stroke of inspiration. Dickens wrote about orphans, institutional poverty, the abandoned, and he had people lining up at the docks waiting for the story. Even though his society was not much different from mine in terms of what people want to hear. But he gave them David Copperfield, he gave them Oliver Twist, he won them over.”

You can walk down the road where I live, and see the homes where grandparents are raising the children of their dead or incarcerated children... Every single thing that happens to Demon has happened to someone I know

—  Barbara Kingsolver

This brings us to a crucial point. From my description the book probably sounds like the grimmest sort of misery memoir, but it’s not. Demon’s voice is full of life, energy and cheek. Was it difficult to write in a lively way about deathly things? Or was it fun?

“Oh! It was so much fun, and also terribly hard. It was both those things. Once I hit on the ideas of letting the kid tell the story — that was the advice I got from Charles Dickens, who said that the voice is a writer’s most powerful tool — once I did that, he started talking to me and he would not shut up.

“In the beginning he was too angry. He has to make friends with the reader before he begins to explode on the page. I remember I got to about page 200 and thinking, I’ll just do a search here and see how many times Demon has dropped the F-bomb, and the answer turned up 175! So I thought that might be a little much. Let’s dial him back a bit.”

Writing Demon Copperhead was hard in other ways. “As I said, these are my people. Every single family I know has been affected by the opioid crisis. You can walk down the road where I live, and see the homes where grandparents are raising the children of their dead or incarcerated children. I had to sit down with a lot of people who are living that life, I did a lot of holding hands and crying with people about the agonies of that existence. Every single thing that happens to Demon has happened to someone I know.”

I have to be hopeful. I don’t have a choice. Because to give up hope is to abdicate responsibility, and that is giving up on the kids

—  Barbara Kingsolver

Furthermore, she says, “I can tell you that virtually every one of these people became addicted to opioids through a doctor’s prescription. A football injury, or a hand injury while a woman was working as a housecleaner. They take these round the clock, because that’s what [the doctor] has been told by the drug rep. Nobody wants to be an addict.”

I recall that Donald Trump declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency. Did that help? “He was not the first and not the last, but what we’re working against here is a couple of things. One is a really disorganised system, it’s very piecemeal because we don’t have a national health system. Everything we do is run by profits. Another huge problem is the so-called war on drugs, a war that is not winnable but has brainwashed several generations of people into blaming the victim.”

So is Kingsolver optimistic about the future for her people, for people like Demon Copperhead? Or pessimistic?

She pauses. “I don’t really ...” And pauses again, before affirming: “I see hope. I have to be hopeful. I don’t have a choice. Because to give up hope is to abdicate responsibility, and that is giving up on the kids. It’s an irresponsible and immoral thing to do, to give up hope. I see hope as a renewable option. You run out of it at the end of the day, you get up the next morning, and you put it on with your shoes. And what I can do as a writer is tell stories that might bring people closer to the kind of conversations that we could have,” she concludes. “That would make a better future.”