Kingsolver 'internalized shame' of her rural roots, delaying Appalachian novel; now an 'ambassador between worlds'

Barbara Kingsolver (Guardian photo by Jessica Tezak)

Now that she has won this year's Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the UK's Women's Prize for Fiction for Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver tells Lisa Allardice, chief books writer for The Guardian, “I understand that my whole life I’ve been wanting to write the great Appalachian novel.”

But Kingsolver says it took her some time to get around to it, partly because she had “internalized the shame” of her rural Kentucky upbringing that preceded graduating Phi Beta Kappa at DePauw University in Indiana and many years in Tucson before she amd her second husband moved to southwest Virginia, Allardice reports. "Now she feels she has not 'just the right but the duty' to represent her community. Kingsolver said, “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.”

Allardice cites "one memorable passage" in which Demon Copperhead lists the insults thrown at Appalachians: “Hillbilly, rednecks, moonshiners, ridge runners, hicks. Deplorables.” The last one refers to a 2016 comment by her friend Hillary Clinton, referring to half of Donald Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables” because they were “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic.” Clinton apologized the next day for what she said was an exaggeration; Kingsolver's "agent and editor, both based in New York, questioned whether she should include it," Allardice reports, giving her answer: “I decided, yes, I’m leaving it in because I want this to make the reader uncomfortable.” Kingsolver said she sees bumper stickers in Washington County, Virginia, saying "I'm a deplorable." 

“I understand why rural people are so mad they want to blow up the system,” she told Allardice. “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’.”