Women’s Prize winner Barbara Kingsolver on creating ’empathy’ for the opioid crisis

The writer took home the top prize for her Charles Dickens-inspired novel Demon Copperhead. By Prudence Wade.

Barbara Kingsolver has become the first author to win the Women’s Prize twice (Ian West/PA)

American novelist Barbara Kingsolver says she could hear the cheering all the way from her home region of Appalachia when she won the Women’s Prize on Wednesday night.

She took home the top prize for her novel Demon Copperhead, making history as the first author to win twice (she also won in 2010 for her sixth novel, The Lacuna).

The book is a modern retelling of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, set in Virginia in the Nineties and putting the spotlight on the devastation of the opioid crisis.

As someone who lives in Virginia, Kingsolver saw the crisis take hold before it was covered by mainstream media.

“One of my daughters is a therapist, who works full time with teenagers,” says Kingsolver, explaining that through this she was able to begin to grasp “the stretch of it, the intensity of it, the life and death situations every day of it – this is a huge crisis.

“And the least told part of the story is the kids,” Kingsolver adds. “We have a generation of kids growing up in our region, who are being raised by a horribly flawed foster care system, or relatives who really would rather not be raising them – and that’s going to be with us forever.”

As stories of the crisis began to hit the news, Kingsolver says: “I thought, OK – people know the story of the big guys, but nobody knows the story of the little guys – that is not resolved, that will never be resolved. This is generational trauma, and it’s going to be with us forever.”

Appalachia has been particularly affected by the crisis, and the writer says the region now looks vastly different from her youth.

“When I was growing up, there was beer and whisky and weed. Now, there’s meth and oxy and fentanyl. The extent of the addiction crisis is not something any of us could have imagined when I was growing up.”

Demon Copperhead gives the crisis a human face, particularly with the struggles of the titular character.

Kingsolver aimed to “create empathy”, saying she wanted to “tell people a story that gently brings them inside of that world and helps them understand this, helps them develop some empathy and compassion for this disease”.

When researching the book – which took her three years to write – she spoke to recovering addicts, something she says was “essential” as “that was a part of this world I had only seen from the outside, fortunately”.

She seems moved when talking about the women who shared their stories with her, saying: “They were so generous. I can’t imagine it – sitting down with me for hours and talking to me about the most scary, degrading parts of their lives, and what they had to go through, and what they had to do in order to just stay alive.”

She says she’s become good friends with the women. They messaged her this morning to say, “Our book won a prize!”, Kingsolver shares with evident pride. “I could hear the cheering all the way from Virginia – just to be seen and heard, it’s amazing,” she adds.

Kingsolver, 68, left Kentucky when she went to university at 18, and says she was “shocked” by how she was treated.

“I got to go to a little college in Indiana, where I got a scholarship – it was just Indiana, but people there made so much fun of me, so much fun of my accent and my Kentucky hillbilly-ness. I’d never known that about myself until I left.”

She admits spending years trying to “cover” that part of herself up. “Just in order to try and succeed in the world and feel equal to people,” she says, “I really aspired to some cosmopolitan constructed persona that nobody would recognise as hillbilly.”

Even now, Kingsolver says she code switches: “When I’m at home, I don’t talk like this. I have another whole language that I use to talk with my neighbours.”

While she did try and write in the new, cosmopolitan persona she adopted, Kingsolver pulls no punches in saying it was “complete nonsense” and “fake”.

“It wasn’t until I started reading Kentucky writers – Bobbie Ann Mason was really important to me and Wendell Berry – it shocked me that there were people from back home, who were claiming that identity and writing from that place. When I began to do that – I won’t say I recovered who I am, I discovered who I am. I discovered I was Appalachian only after I left.”

She went on to find huge success with novels like The Poisonwood Bible in 1998 and previous Women’s Prize-winner The Lacuna.

With books like Demon Copperhead, Kingsolver strives to overturn common misconceptions and stereotypes around people from Appalachia.

“If Appalachia shows up at all in television or the movies, it’s as a joke – this monochromatic monoculture of backward white people. We’re so much more than that, and to represent my people with nuance is my first goal.”

After years living in Europe and Arizona, Kingsolver finally returned to Appalachia full time in 2004 – and she’s suitably poetic about why she loves the region so much.

“The moss, the ferns, the trees, the water that comes pouring out of the mountains, the natural beauty of the place, the people, the language, the storytelling, the resourcefulness – it’s a culture where people make things for themselves, by themselves. They grow food, they make quilts, they make music. We’re people made of community – I’ve never found that anywhere else.”

With all of Kingsolver’s novels, she starts with a question.

“I start with the thing that’s keeping me awake at night,” she muses. “I start with the thing that I have to write about, the thing that I know that I can’t unknow, that I feel like everybody probably should know.

“Then I work out a plot and characters and how I can ask this question. I don’t really answer it in a novel, because literature doesn’t do that, but I can invite readers to walk with me through this world, where we will maybe find our own answers.”

And Kingsolver knows she’s finished a book when she’s found her own answers. “It’s never black and white, but it’s a sense of closure when I feel like I have really explored this question, and a lot of times it’s getting at what really is the question so we then know how to take the next steps.”

The central question of Demon Copperhead – around the opioid crisis – is an unremittingly bleak one, but Kingsolver says she stays hopeful.

“I have to. I don’t have a choice,” she says simply. “Giving up hope is an abdication of responsibility for the future, and that would be irresponsible. I couldn’t do that to my kids or anybody’s kids.”