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‘I’ve dealt with anti-hillbilly bigotry all my life’: Barbara Kingsolver on JD Vance, the real Appalachia and why Demon Copperhead was such a hit
As the Pulitzer-winning author’s little-known debut – about the 1983 Arizona miners’ strike – is published in the UK, she discusses the roots of division in the US, her wild childhood, and putting the story straight about where she’s from
Rachel Cooke
Sunday 6 October 2024
When ecstatic fans tell Barbara Kingsolver they’ve read every last one of her books, she always smiles inwardly. “I bet you haven’t,” she thinks, knowing it was a nonfiction account of an Arizona miners’ strike in 1983 that set her on the road to the bestseller list.
Admittedly, this recherché volume has never been out of print in the US. But its long-term home is on the specialist list of an academic publisher, where it nestles beside other, even chewier books about labour relations. “It was hard to place,” she says. “Every editor who read it said: wow, this is interesting. But we couldn’t sell it.” Only after her first novel, The Bean Trees, was published in 1988 did her agent send it out again, at which point an offshoot of Cornell University Press stepped in. “It’s the book nobody knows about,” she concludes, a statement only a writer who has since won just about every literary prize going could make without sounding utterly depressed (she is smiling broadly).
So, yes, she’s surprised – “I’m amazed!” – that Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike is about to be published in the UK for the first time, though the credit belongs to her editor at Faber, Louisa Joyner, who having unaccountably dug it up, approached her about a British edition. “I hadn’t looked at it in decades, and I was a little nervous to reread it,” she says. “But I’m very proud of it, and I hope it’s OK for me to say that. I feel like this is maybe the place where I found my narrative voice.” Isn’t her twentysomething self a bit of a stranger to her at this distance? “No, I think I was [already] so much the person I am today. I look back at the writer I was 40 years ago, and fundamentally, nothing has changed.
“I grew up in working-class, rural Kentucky, and in those days – hard to imagine now – almost no one was a registered Republican. Southern Appalachia was formed by the collision between labour and big capital. It wasn’t mining country, but it was tobacco country, and everyone had a sense of “it’s us or the big companies”. Of course you don’t think about these things when you’re young; you just absorb your milieu. But as I got older, I always felt the story I wanted to hear was the workers’ story. In a cafeteria, I want to go into the kitchen, and talk to those people – and they’re often the women.” Her point is that she knew all about unions and how vital they can be long before she arrived in Clifton, Arizona, in her Nissan pickup with only a tape recorder and a few high-minded journalistic ideals for company.
If Holding the Line belongs, in a variety of ways, to another era, it speaks to today nonetheless; the politics of the US in 2024 are, she believes, inextricably linked to the story it tells, a turning point in terms of American industrial relations. (And it will resonate with some British readers, too, in the year of the 40th anniversary of the miners’ strike.) But Kingsolver had little idea of this at the time – at least, in the beginning. She was working in Tucson as a scientific writer, and cutting her teeth as a freelance journalist in her spare time. Her mission on this occasion was simply to report for several news outlets on the strike that was taking place in a constellation of remote copper mining towns in the south of the state. She wasn’t, in other words, supposed to stay out there for very long.
She soon found, however, that she couldn’t look away; the drive to Clifton, the town where she was mostly based, was three-and-a-half hours from Tucson, and in the end she did it so often, she wore the tread from her tyres. The strike had begun as a straightforward dispute between a mining company, Phelps Dodge, and its unionised workforce; copper prices had fallen, Phelps Dodge was losing money, people were being laid off. When, during contract negotiations, the company insisted it required wages to be frozen, thousands of miners elected to strike.
Most commentators believed the dispute would be conventional and relatively brief, but within a month, things had shifted dramatically: squads of armoured men with teargas and automatic weapons were storming tiny, bucolic main streets; people were being jailed for nothing more than calling a neighbour a scab. It lasted from June 1983 until December 1984. By the time it was over, the trade union that represented the workers had been decertified, and half a century of organised labour in Arizona was at an end.
Kingsolver is speaking to me from her home in Virginia: a farm in a hollow surrounded by deciduous forests, to which she moved with her husband and two daughters in 2004. On Instagram, she often posts photos of her abundant homegrown crops, sometimes before mammoth pickling and bottling sessions in her kitchen: tomatoes, cardoons, padrón peppers, sweet potatoes. I can’t see any of these things on my screen now; only a bookcase is on offer. But rightly or wrongly, I feel I know all about her particular contentment: happy, productive hours at her desk followed by equally happy, productive hours outdoors. We’re very far indeed from dusty Arizona, where her 28-year-old self once spent her days carefully interviewing the women who kept the show on the road during the strike (they staffed the picket lines when the men travelled to other states in search of a wage), sitting with them on the “squeaky porch-swings of [their] slant-frame houses”. These days, after all, her characters belong only to her imagination, no Dictaphone required.
In 1983, she struggled to maintain the dispassion she believed was required of a good journalist. It was impossible not to take sides, and having won their trust, the people of Clifton began to refer to her fondly as the “gal” who was writing a book about them. Back in Tucson, her interview tapes began to pile up in what she describes as an “impugning” way; in the end, she wrote Holding the Line because she saw “no other decent option”. Only later did it occur to her that the story had historic implications: “This was the moment when the forces of capital teamed with governments to crush labour. A lot of it turned [in the US] on the air traffic controller strike [of 1981]. Reagan broke that strike overnight. He fired 11,000 unionised controllers in a single morning and then – this is the really shocking part – he banned them from working in the federal service ever again. It felt, in a weird way, like a military coup. We didn’t understand that the president had the power to destroy so many lives at once, and it terrified [workers]. Your working life – your professional life – could end by edict.”
Has she been back to Clifton recently? “I did for years, but [not recently], no. The women in my book mostly moved to other places. Ajo, Clifton and Morenci were classic mining towns, and once those closed, there was nothing else in them. They’re something like ghost towns now, I’d say.” But she hardly needs to take a long drive to grasp how these things play out. In Virginia, where coal mining was once king, she has seen with her own eyes what happens when stable jobs disappear.
“The mines kept out other factories and mills that might have come in. They owned everything: the land, the courthouse, the politics. When coal left this region, it left an enormous void, which created a kind of hopelessness. I love Appalachian culture. It’s community-based. It’s very self-sufficient. But you have this hopelessness that [makes people] vulnerable to politicians who say: I’m on your side. When someone comes along who says: I see you, I hear you, and what I especially hear is that the government has abandoned you, because look at your schools, your hospitals, your unemployment rates… Populist politicians have tapped into this sense that we’re on our own, that government can’t help us.”
This brings us inevitably to JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate who rose to prominence on the back of his hit 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, in which he describes the values of his family, who came originally from rural Kentucky, and the socioeconomic travails of Middletown, Ohio, to which his mother’s parents moved after the second world war. When the book was first published, it enthralled many urban liberals, who took it at face value, glad to be instructed about a world they didn’t know and possibly feared. But what did Kingsolver think? Did she hate it? And if so, how did she feel about the attention – even the acclaim – it received?
Drawing breath, she seems to grow a little taller in her seat. “I can tell you that Appalachian people felt betrayed by that book a long time before he became a Republican politician. I’ll begin by saying: anyone is entitled to write a memoir. That’s his story, fine. But for him to say that his story explains all of us – I say, no, I resent that, because it’s very condescending. There’s this subtext all the way through it that suggests we’re in a boat that’s sinking because we’re lazy, unambitious and uncreative, which I resent.”
The positive responses to the book, she believes, were born of the fact that it simply confirmed well-worn stereotypes. “I’ve dealt with this condescension, this anti-hillbilly bigotry for a lot of my life. I didn’t realise it was a problem until I left Kentucky and went to college [she went to university in Indiana] and people made fun of my accent, and said things like: ‘Look at you, you’re wearing shoes, ha ha!’” She pauses. “You know, it’s more insidious than that. Even as a writer, I feel like my whole life until Demon Copperhead [her Pulitzer prize-winning 2022 novel, which is set in modern Appalachia] I was snubbed because I’m rural, I’m from this place that’s considered backward. I’m quite used to it. But it [Vance’s book] really made a lot of us angry that this became the explanation for us.”
Her neighbours, she says, saw through him immediately: “The hollowness, the fact that he isn’t really one of us.” And perhaps this only increased her determination to write a book like Demon Copperhead, which tackles head on the agonising effects of the opioid crisis in Appalachia: “We have to talk about history. This was done tous. This region has been treated as a kind of internal colony exploited by the outside. It was just so personal for him [Vance]. There was no analysis, and no compassion. It was just: if I can survive, anyone can survive.”
How does she think Vance is working out for Donald Trump, who picked him as his running mate? She is scornful. “The bottom line is: Trump doesn’t want a vice-president. I don’t think it was a thoroughly considered decision. He’s entirely about himself. He’s not even interested in the presidency. He’s only interested in winning.” Is she anxious about the election? “Of course I’m nervous. But I’ll tell you this: I’m a lot less nervous than I was. I have immense respect for Joe Biden, he has done so much. But the image of an old man at the helm… I have enormous respect for his decision to turn over the keys to a younger generation. Almost all my friends are younger than me. I have millennial daughters. They’re so enthusiastic about a [potential] new administration, and how it will represent them.”
It goes without saying that Kingsolver’s career was stellar long before Demon Copperhead was published. Novels such as The Poisonwood Bible, about a family of Baptist missionaries in Congo, and The Lacuna, which pieces together the story of a man whose friends include Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, were acclaimed, prizewinning bestsellers. But even she seems to feel that Demon Copperhead, her most recent book, a retelling of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield that won her a second Women’s prize for fiction as well a Pulitzer, is special – not least because it has changed perceptions of Appalachia.
“I know that it has,” she says, “because I hear that from people every day. It broke the – I don’t know what to call it – grassroots ceiling.” Starting out, she tells me, there were male writers at the top of the pile, women’s literature in a special category, and then, far below both of these, rural writers – where they remain to this day. “They’re just not respected, I’ve always known that. I’ve felt it, in interviews, time and time again. But I long ago gave up the expectation of that kind of approval, I guess I’m just a rebel – and this book [Demon Copperhead] broke through that. It won the big prizes, and it got all the attention, and it stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for over a year. And this seems important to me because it looks straight at the bigotry rural people face.”
Identity politics has helped people like her, she says: it has chipped away at the parameters of what subjects are deemed acceptable. For readers, Demon Copperhead is a bridge over the urban-rural divide; a “window on a world” in which doctors are in such short supply that women commonly have to drive to another state to have their babies, as happened to Kingsolver’s own daughter.
She had wanted to write such a book – her great Appalachian novel – for a long time, but the project seemed daunting, maybe impossible. On a book tour in England in 2018, however, she stayed at Bleak House in Broadstairs, where Dickens wrote David Copperfield (it’s now a B&B), and everything became clear. Alone, late at night, in the writer’s former study, she felt “the presence of his outrage”, and his voice urging her to “let the child tell the story”.
On the flight home, she reread his great tale of an orphan, the book of his own that he loved best of all, and saw how she could rework it to write about the “lost boys” of Appalachia, where 40% of children have parents who have either died as a result of opioid addiction, are incapacitated by one, or are in prison. Mr Creakle’s boarding school would become a tobacco farm, and the blacking factory, a meth lab; Uriah Heep would be transformed into a soccer coach called U-Haul, and David’s friend Steerforth into Demon’s pal, Fast Forward.
It’s almost outrageous, I tell her: a woman from Kentucky taking on Dickens. She laughs. Her career as a writer, she says, still amazes her – “I get up surprised every day that I do this for a living” – perhaps because her path towards it wasn’t entirely straightforward. The daughter of a doctor, she spent part of her childhood in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, an experience she later drew on for The Poisonwood Bible; at university, she began by studying classical piano on a music scholarship before – on the realisation that she didn’t want to spend her life “playing Blue Moon in a hotel lobby” – switching to biology. “I had a wild childhood. I was always catching bugs and lizards and learning the names of things, so science was natural for me. But it also seemed practical. I was lucky to get to college; a lot of my friends had babies by the time they were 17. I had this sense, almost like having been shot into space, of needing to make good use of my time.”
She professes herself – somewhat unconvincingly, I would say – to be “a hermit” nowadays, her longstanding introversion intact, even if she has mastered her shyness. “I live in a beautiful place, and I want to stay here for ever. My family jokes about it, they keep a record of how long it is since I have left the hollow…” Sometimes, though, there’s nothing for it. “I have to move in the world to know what I want to write about. The currency of my fiction is human interaction, but that does not exist without a sense of place – my characters are not just people doing people things among, you know, objects made by people. There are trees overhead. A river comes roaring through the town. In Holding the Line, you smell the honeysuckle. So much of the world is not made by people, and paying attention to that is important to me.”
Her books are so replete, somehow: so bright and so big. Does she ever worry that they will go out of fashion? That the internet is making novels smaller: more colourless and inward-looking? “Are we discussing Sally Rooney?” she asks, with sudden and unexpected waspishness. But no, she isn’t worried at all. “I’ve seen minimalism come and go,” she tells me, in the moments before she disappears (I picture a scrubbed kitchen table, laden with immaculate veg). “I mean, take The Overstory [a Booker prize shortlisted novel] by Richard Powers. There’s a book about trees, and people loved it!” She nods her head, a silver curl flashing. “Give them something bigger than a conversation in a room and they’re going to eat it up.”
Holding the Line: Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike is published by Faber (£16.99).
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