Barbara Kingsolver, writer: “You buy a book to take a break, not to be taught a lesson”

He was going to be a pianist, but he changed course, studied biology and ecology, and was already in his thirties when he published his first novel. Since then, Barbara Kingsolver (Maryland, 69 years old) has published 17 books of fiction, non-fiction and poetry, in which she has dealt with topics such as the story of a family of American missionaries in the Congo (The poisoned bible2020), a country in which she spent several seasons as a child (her doctor father traveled there to help) or the project that she undertook with her husband and daughters to feed themselves for a year only with food they obtained from your farm or the surrounding area (Animal, vegetable, miracle2008).

Adored by millions of readers and honored with numerous awards, this author’s piano skills did not fall entirely on deaf ears: she performed as a keyboardist in the music band Rock Bottom Remainders alongside novelists Stephen King and Amy Tan, among others. “It was the idea of ​​Kathi Kamen who accompanied the authors who were in tour when they stopped in San Francisco and since she was a musician, she ended up discovering that many of the writers played instruments. I didn’t last very long, but I had a great time,” she recalls connected by videoconference from her farm in West Virginia.

Kingsolver has just concluded the long European promotional tour of Demon Copperhead (Navona), his latest novel with which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 2023 —ex aequo with Hernán Díaz for Fortune—. This time her European trip did not take her to Tenerife, the island where she spent a year in 1991—according to what they say, she decided to go there when the United States entered the first Gulf War—but Kingsolver speaks enthusiastically about her visit to Cádiz, a city that She was intrigued by the books she had read about trade with the American continent. “That place was alive in my head,” she says with a broad smile. In her latest novel, however, the writer has not traveled to any distant place, but rather she has put the magnifying glass on the impoverished region where she was born and where she lives today, the Appalachian Mountains.

Once a mining center, Appalachia is one of the areas with the highest poverty rate and where the opioid crisis has had the greatest impact, and that is a central nerve in the story of Demon, the red-haired protagonist of the book, whose life it narrates. Kingsolver taking as a guide David Copperfield, the monumental work of Charles Dickens. “It is a region of mountains, a place more united culturally than politically, because it is distributed in many states (Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi). It has a long history of exploitation; Its inhabitants have seen their opportunities to prosper completely curtailed. When the mines were active, everything was set up so that there was no other business, no possibility of employment in another sector, nor opportunities in education. They look at us badly, we are what they call hillbillies, the rednecks who are always laughed at.” Trump voter territory? “Rural people tend to be more conservative. Here many feel ignored, left out, without trains or buses, with closed hospitals and more than two hours by car to get to the doctor. Many of my neighbors vote for Trump, yes, and I understand it because they are very frustrated,” explains the author. They are the forgotten and punished, whose misery does not address racial injustices. “In the United States we talk about structural racism, but never about the structural classism suffered by the working class, because here the myth persists that this is a classless society. But people who start with nothing don’t get ahead and feel ashamed. The victims are blamed for their poverty,” she emphasizes.

Kingsolver recalls that his encounter with Dickens dates back to childhood with Christmas story. He has read all the classic British novels, but David Copperfield It did not stand out particularly in his imagination until he decided to write “a great saga of my people and my place, that had a context.” He wanted to talk about the brutal opioid epidemic and remembered Dickens who talked about misery, punished lives and children who had to work. “I decided to relocate his book here, to make it that same hard story of love, humor, and growing up. David Copperfield It would be my template. I was passionate about the challenge, it was like fitting a puzzle with many pieces,” she notes.

Kingsolver is often called a “political writer,” perhaps because she places her pen on the side of those who suffer injustice. What does she think of this label? “I never understand what they mean and I don’t think it makes any sense. I do not write fantasy books, but my stories are located in this world full of inequalities, machismo and racism. Before there was an anxiety in artistic circles about social realism, but it has now been overcome,” she reflects. “My writing is not domestic, I leave the house with the stories in my books and address issues such as, for example, child abuse. “Perhaps women are judged worse for having ambition and not remaining limited to an intimate universe.”

Before turning to the river novels that carry the enormous stories of his books, Kingsolver worked as a journalist freelance and you trained in science, has that helped you in your literary career? “I am introverted and shy and journalism forced me to call and ask people, it gave me tools that I later used in fiction. With Demon Copperhead I researched the child care system and drug addiction. “A lot of people who are hooked started taking these pills when their doctor prescribed them,” he says.

Science, he says, allowed him to approach writing starting from a hypothesis to try to reach a conclusion. But, Kingsolver emphasizes, it is essential to never tell the reader what he should think: “You buy a book to take a break, not to be taught a lesson. I think of novels as windows and mirrors. When you are little they allow you to see what is happening outside, and when you grow up you see in them a reflection of what you feel. I aspire for people who read my books to see another world and feel compassion.”

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