In conversation with Barbara Kingsolver, author of Demon Copperhead

Barbara Kingsolver discusses her acclaimed novel, the role of compassion, and her upcoming book, Partita.

We meet American writer Barbara Kingsolver under a sheltering tree at Alipore Museum (formerly a jail built by the British where many of India’s political prisoners, including Jawaharlal Nehru, were incarcerated) in Kolkata. As birds chirp and leaves sway in the gentle breeze, she approves of the setting. 

In the city for the Kolkata Literary Meet, Kingsolver takes in some of the sights — the Botanical Gardens and the largest flower market in Asia near Howrah Bridge and the ghats — to get a sense of the place. A biologist by training and writer by profession, she has always had her ear to the ground and her books reflect that.

She sensitively recast Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield into Demon Copperhead (2022), in which an Appalachian boy narrates his life amid a raging opioid crisis. Like in all her novels, the story’s large problems — poverty, addiction, failure of institutions — are universal themes, and struck a chord with readers. As did Demon’s intrinsic values, “gentle optimism, resilience and determination”, with which he faces his challenges.

Accolades followed swiftly — the Pulitzer Prize, Women’s Prize for Fiction, months on The New York Times bestseller list, and book tours taking her far away from southern Appalachia where she lives on a farm.

Kingsolver had been thinking about how to tell the story of the opioid crisis — “people don’t want to read about orphans and poverty” — when the Eureka moment came during a stay at Bleak House in Kent, where Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield. “In Dickens’ office, with his manuscripts and pens lying around, I felt his spirit come to me and say, ‘Look around, David Copperfield was a huge hit, so was Oliver Twist. You have to let the child tell the story’,” recalls Kingsolver.

She immediately began writing in her notebook on Dickens’ desk, taking David Copperfield as a first draft, with its “great plot and fabulous characters”. Transplanting it to her place (Appalachia) and time (the present), she gave her David “a new name, red hair, fierce attitude” and made him “less apologetic, resilient, and such a survivor”. “Everybody loves a survivor story and Dickens was my way in, he opened the door,” she says.