Oprah sat down for a conversation with Barbara Kingsolver, whose epic novel Demon Copperhead is the latest OBC selection—the 98th in the 26-year history of Oprah’s Book Club.
This is Kingsolver’s second appearance as an OBC author. Her first was 22 years ago, when Oprah named The Poisonwood Bible (1998) as a pick. In this new interview with Kingsolver and select Oprah Daily Insiders, Oprah observes that “Demon Copperhead is one of the great novels of our time” and Kingsolver is one of America’s “best-known and revered” writers. When the book hit shelves in October, her heart-rending coming-of-age tale debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list.
Oprah opened the conversation by asking Kingsolver why she’d chosen to set the book in Appalachia, where people have been “misunderstood and taken advantage of,” just as fictional protagonist Demon is. Kingsolver is a native Appalachian who lives on a farm in Virginia, and says that in writing the book, she hoped to counter the stereotypes about the region as being made up exclusively of “hillbillies” who are often portrayed as “the butt of jokes,” or as characters in a “poverty documentary, if they show up at all.” Instead, Kingsolver says, “we are churchgoers, funeral-goers, storytellers, porch sitters, music makers…community.”
In the interview, the pair also discussed how Kingsolver feels the rest of the country looks down on where she lives, thinking of it as “nowhere.” Oprah replied, “People always say it’s the middle of nowhere, but it’s somewhere for all the people who are living there.”
It turns out that Kingsolver made her way into the writing of Demon Copperhead while seated at the desk of Charles Dickens, who wrote David Copperfield, on which the book was modeled. Kingsolver says that at the end of a book tour, she’d checked herself into an English inn called the Bleak House, which was where Charles Dickens had lived and written David Copperfield. She says: “I just put my head down on the wood of the desk where Dickens worked, and I felt this vibe. I felt his anger. Demon’s life was Dickens’s life. He, too, was an orphan. His father went to the poorhouse. He was bounced around among relatives. David Copperfield is also Demon’s story.”
Kingsolver revealed that Dickens was also instrumental in helping her frame the story of how Appalachia became “ground zero” in the opioid epidemic without the novel becoming so dark that readers would turn away. “Let the child tell the story” is what Kingsolver heard Dickens advise her. She says she then “realized that this outrage that I was feeling was 150 years old. I was just channeling dismay that some things never change, that the same way the Victorians didn’t want to really look at the poverty and the kids in their midst, it’s still with us. And I just really felt the man saying, ‘You can’t give up on this. You really have to do this. You have to tell this story.’”
Oprah wondered what Kingsolver’s aim was in writing the book, which the author confesses she was nervous about releasing to the world. In part, Kingsolver says, her goal was to “generate empathy in readers for people they don’t know well and maybe have misunderstood.”
Mission accomplished.
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Leigh Haber is Vice President, Books, Oprah Daily and O Quarterly. She is also Director of Oprah's Book Club.
