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Barbara Kingsolver
Perennial bestseller and author of Oprah’s Book Club pick The Poisonwood Bible, <anchor>Barbara Kingsolver</anchor> has long been a Dickens evangelist. But her 2023 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Demon Copperhead(also an Oprah's Book Club selection) is her most explicit homage, using the structure of David Copperfield as a North Star and featuring characters with 1:1 stand-ins for the Dickens cast. David Copperfield is the loosely autobiographical saga of a 19th-century British orphan’s education, loss of innocence, and rise to novelistic celebrity. (At the time, novelists were the equivalent of today’s A-list actors, and Dickens was a major public figure.) Meanwhile, Kingsolver’s main character, Demon Copperhead, named for his red hair and fiery personality, pinballs through a series of homes—first the neighbors, then a foster family, then his high school football coach—searching for both family and meaning after his mother dies of an overdose. Despite doomed relationships and his own addiction, Demon invents his own superhero in the popular “Red Neck” comics he publishes anonymously. Our advice? Read both epics about lost children who find themselves.
Oprah's Book Club Author Barbara Kingsolver Interview
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# Oprah’s Book Club Author Barbara Kingsolver Writes the “Great Appalachian Novel”

The “Poisonwood Bible” author spoke with Oprah Daily’s Leigh Haber about her latest magnum opus, “Demon Copperhead,” just selected for OBC.

By Leigh HaberPublished: Oct 19, 2022 12:42 PM EDT

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Alex Fine

In my job overseeing books for the Oprah platforms, I have the opportunity to meet and, in many cases, get to know some of the great writers of our time. This is a gift I’m grateful for every day. Authors are a rare breed—or as Oprah frequently says, “Authors are my rock stars.” For those of us who will never write the Great American Novel, what authors do is mysterious, and in my opinion, even divinely inspired. And yet most of the time when you discuss process with them, while they might refer to first having heard the voice of a protagonist in their heads as they unloaded the dishwasher or walked through the woods, most will also tell you that much of the work of creating a cast of characters and plot is about sitting down regularly to write, revise, research, write more, and revise again. But what I’ve witnessed is that it’s also about having a burning desire to communicate with the reader, to say something meaningful, to be heard.

In Barbara Kingsolver’s case, writing is also a form of activism, of righting wrongs. For her latest novel, Demon Copperhead, which is the new Oprah’s Book Club selection, she wanted to tell an epic and entertaining tale, but she also wanted to address an injustice. Kingsolver has long felt that Appalachia and its people have been misunderstood and taken advantage of. She knows that from a deeply personal place, as she grew up amid the mountains of Kentucky and now lives on a farm in the Appalachian region of Virginia. From the time she left the area to attend college in the Midwest, she was made to feel embarrassed by where she came from, and was made fun of for her “hillbilly” accent. As a fledgling writer, she initially avoided embracing the literary voice and style that came naturally to her, believing she needed to reach for something more sophisticated. She says it wasn’t until she read the work of Bobbie Ann Mason (specifically Shiloh and Other Stories), a fellow Kentuckian, that she decided to cast aside that insecurity and write from an authentic space. The rest is history.

Demon Copperhead is what I would call a social novel. I loved getting absorbed in the many ups and downs and zigzags of its hero and marveling at Kingsolver’s brilliance with language, but what stays with me is how the book is grounded by its creator’s pure heart and well-developed conscience. She wants us to witness and understand what her people have been through without looking down our noses, and in this, as in so much else throughout her career, she triumphs.

I had the chance to speak with Barbara Kingsolver about her creative process right after she received the news that Oprah had chosen Demon Copperhead for OBC. Here’s what we talked about.

Leigh Haber: Appalachia itself is a key figure in Demon Copperhead. Why did you set the book there?

Barbara Kingsolver: I’m Appalachian, through and through. I grew up in Kentucky and live in the mountains of Southwest Virginia. I’m committed to writing honestly and respectfully about this region that is widely ridiculed or just invisible in mainstream American culture. Appalachia is beautiful and culturally rich, but a long history of exploitation has left us with structural poverty, limited opportunities, and educational deficits that outsiders tend to laugh at. In the latest of these tragedies—the opioid epidemic—pharmaceutical companies deliberately targeted us for their poison pill. Seeing the devastating effects here where I live moved me to look for the bigger picture and write about it.

How does Demon Copperhead relate to David Copperfield?

Mine is a modern retelling of David Copperfield, which Dickens wrote to protest the ravages of poverty on the children of his time. I wrote mine for the same reason. I spent years wondering how I could get readers on board with such dark material before I hit on this device. It was challenging and also fun to transpose Victorian characters and situations to my own place and time: a boarding school for indigent boys becomes a beleaguered tobacco farm where foster boys are brought in to do unpaid labor. A shoe-black factory is a meth lab. The dangerous friend Steerforth is now “Fast Forward,” a high school football star with a narcissistic streak. Et cetera.

Who are the “lost boys” of this novel?

A scary percentage of the kids in my region—as high as 30 percent—have lost their parents to prescription drug abuse. They are wards of the state, or are living with grandparents or others who might prefer not to be raising them. That’s the case with my fictional hero, Demon, and his ragtag band of friends. They want so badly to be seen, in a world that wants them erased.

Do you have a special interest in foster care?

To write about a modern generation of kids orphaned by poverty and addiction, I had to dig in and understand the systems that support them—and those systems are inadequate. I was stunned to see how inadequate. DSS workers are absurdly underpaid. Turnover and caseloads are such that a child may not even know the name of his legal guardian, and vice versa. Cruelty and abuse are ongoing options. By telling some awful truths in the story and voice of Demon, maybe I can engage some hearts and minds to make a difference.

What research around addiction did you do?

My novel is about more than addiction; I started thinking of it as my Great Appalachian Novel. I wanted to put a modern problem in a long context of broken promises and dashed hopes. I have no personal experience with drug addiction, so I did a lot of practical research: How does one get a pill into one’s veins? Ditto for fentanyl patches. I had to learn the culture and language of use and acquisition. I made friends with Dr. Art Van Zee, who was instrumental in bringing the opioid crisis to public attention, and whose practice focuses on addiction recovery in Lee County, Virginia.

## Demon Copperhead: A Novel

What does this quote from Demon mean: “Anybody will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose”?

We’re largely judged by class and caste and the station of our birth. I’ve grit my teeth through enough hillbilly jokes to know that. But along with his defiant attitude and copper-red hair, Demon has a persistent belief in superhero rescues. He wonders whether superheroes still care about rural people, or “had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for bigger action?” Save or be saved, these are questions. You want to think it’s not over till the last page.

And here’s my promise to readers: It is not.

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Leigh Haber is Vice President, Books, Oprah Daily and O Quarterly. She is also Director of Oprah's Book Club.

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