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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. We're only halfway through the week and it's already been a big one in the world of arts and journalism awards. Yesterday, the Peabody Award winners were announced and they included a few works we've discussed on All Of It, including the documentary projects Fire of Love about to married volcanologists, as well as W. Kamau Bells, We Need to Talk About Cosby, and Yoruba Richen's film The Rebellious Life Of Mrs. Rosa Parks. Also, kudos to our WNYC friends down the hall at On the Media for winning a Peabody for The Divided Dial, their series exploring the history of right-wing radio.

Those awards came out on Tuesday. On Monday, the Pulitzer Prize board announced its 2023 winners. For the first time in history, two authors were awarded the prize for fiction, and both of them have been on All Of It. Barbara Kingsolver, who won for her novel Demon Copperhead, and former Get Lit book club author, Hernan Diaz, who won for his novel Trust. Congratulations to both, as well as to Beverly Gage who won in the biography category for G-Man, about FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, which was our December full biopic. You can listen to all those interviews on our website, as well as interviews with fellow 2023 Pulitzer winners Hua Hsu, author of The memoir Stay True, and playwright Sanaz Toossi who won for the drama, English.

Right now, we're going to revisit our interview with one of the two fiction winners, Barbara Kingsolver. The Pulitzer board described her latest novel Demon Copperhead, this way, a masterful recasting of David Copperfield, narrated by an Appalachian boy whose wise unwavering voice relates his encounters with poverty, addiction, institutional failures, and moral collapse, and his efforts to conquer them.

The novel follows Damon Field whose nickname is Demon Copperhead, because of his wiry red hair. Despite the name, he's a good kid born into a bad circumstance. His young mother battled addiction but does not fight back when it comes to her nasty new husband named Stoner. Early in the book, Demon finds himself orphaned. He has a fast mind and superior survival skills, which he uses to survive a series of troubling foster homes, but the one thing that could take him down is the same thing that ruined his mom's life, opioids. Barbara Kingsolver, joined me in January to talk about the book. Here's our conversation.

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Alison Stewart: In the digging, in the researching about this book, I read you had a spiritual encounter with Charles Dickens while on holiday. What happened?

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Barbara Kingsolver: Yes. I'm not one to talk with dead people, but it happened. It really was how this book was born. I live in Southern Appalachia. I wanted to write a story. I wanted to write a novel set in this region, looking head-on at some of the biggest problems we have here, including the opioid crisis. It's a really hard thing to write about, especially what this does to kids. What institutional poverty does to kids, orphans. So many kids here have been orphaned by poverty and addiction. I was just struggling for a couple of years to find the doorway in. Is it even possible to write a story like this, that people will want to read?

I was really just at the end of my rope on this question, and also at the end of a book tour in the UK, and I had a weekend to kill before I went home. I booked myself just on a whim, a place called Bleak House, which was like a bed and breakfast. That happens to be really Bleak House where Charles Dickens lived. It's out on the coast on Broadstairs, and it's where he wrote David Copperfield. I just thought, "Oh, I got to see this place, how Dickensy could it be?" It was really Dickensy. It was like the guy behind the desk was from Central casting. [chuckles] I mean, there were real people, but he was Bob Cratchit.

My husband had flown over to join me and we were the only people in the place. It was a dark and windy and stormy and sleety weekend, and really dramatic. There was really nothing to do but prowl around this house. They said, "Make yourself at home," so I did. There was Dickens's study, a little room at the end of the hall, with his desk, pushed up to the windows looking out over the stormy ocean and I sat there and I just thought, "Holy cow, this is where he wrote David Copperfield." It was his own favorite novel because it's his story. He grew up in poverty. His father went to the debtor's prison. He had to do child labor, the Victorian equivalent of foster care, and all the stuff that we're dealing with here now, he lived through and that was his book, and that was his outrage.

As I sat there, I heard him saying to me, "You think people won't read this? The orphans, poverty, look, you got to do this." I just felt his anger coming up through the wood of that desk. This is the advice he gave me, "Make it a crackerjack plot, and you let the kid tell his own story." I just heard him say that. I ran and I got my-- [chuckles] My husband had already gone to bed. I said, "I just had this conversation with Charles Dickens," and he said, "I can't wait to hear about it in the morning." I grabbed my notebook and I went back to that desk and I started Demon Copperhead that night on that desk.

Of course, Charles Dickens came home with me because you can download anything now. I reread David Copperfield on the flight home, and I just thought, "This will totally work." Crackerjack plot, yes, sir. I just started. It was like a translation. I just took it chapter by chapter, scene for scene. I also want to say that readers should not be put off if they don't like Dickens, heaven forbid, or if they haven't read David Copperfield, it really doesn't matter. It was my exercise, but this novel is its own story. There's no required reading, this isn't [unintelligible 00:07:10] English. You just open it and start. It's really fine.

Alison Stewart: There are a lot of allusions to the original text. You said you went line by line, the abusive father in your book is Stoner, it's Mr. Murdstone in David Copperfield. How did you decide what you were going to mirror from David Copperfield, and then when you wanted to bring something new to the story? When did you know you had to bring something new into the story?

Barbara Kingsolver: Well, the plot just worked. I actually laid it out on a spreadsheet, all 66 chapters, they're short, David Copperfield moves quickly because it's short action-packed chapters. I laid them all out and I looked at it, and I just said, "Yes, I can move every element, every plot element of this story, every character element, I can move into the modern day." It works beautifully as its own story set right here in my backyard.

What I knew I had to change was David Copperfield's wide-eyed innocence. He tells the story in this sort of very hopeful way. Well, David Copperfield's father dies before he's born, as does Demon Copperhead. When his mother remarried, David Copperfield was all, "Oh, well, I hope Mr. Murdstone is a nice fellow." Well, no. With Demon, no. He's not innocent. He's born. He's literally born in trouble. From his very first awareness of the world in his consciousness, he knows that he can't really trust the universe to deliver good stuff. There's no adult in his life he really can count on. Almost none, it seems. That voice had to be completely reinvented.

Demon, he's a good kid, as you said, he's a good kid born into bad circumstances, which I would say is universally true. I don't think any human is born without grace, but he's tough. He has to be tough. He's cynical. He's funny. He's self-deprecating. He's wicked in his assessment of people. I knew he needed that edge of survival, and also his humor to survive and also for you, the reader, to survive everything he goes through. You had to love him, and you had to love being with him. He's like the funny best friend that you wanted to have when you were a teenager.

Alison Stewart: You put Demon through a lot in this book. There are moments I had to stop because it was so heartbreaking. How do you know when to go up? How far do you know to go?

Barbara Kingsolver: Well, it's true. I will also say that that's why I had to write this book. Every single thing that happens to Demon in this book has happened to somebody I know personally. There's one degree of separation at most. Some of it has happened to me. Most of it not thankfully, but there's one degree of separation between me, myself in my good and wonderful happy life, and every single thing that this kid goes through. I live here. I live among demons. They're in the school. They're in the community. They're on my road. If you walked with me down the road, I live on, out in the country, I could point out the houses where grandparents are raising kids, they're raising grandparents.

Alison Stewart: Grandkids.

Barbara Kingsolver: I'm sorry, they're raising grandkids or great-grandkids because the parents are incarcerated or non-functionally addicted or dead. This is where I live. This is real. That takes us back to the beginning of my story here. I had to tell this story. I just had to find a way to tell it that would invite readers in so that you can experience this. I also want to say it's not all bad. Addiction and poverty is not who we are.

The other really important reason I had to write this book is that I'm Appalachian. I'm proudly Appalachian. I'm really, really tired of the way we are portrayed in the mainstream media. I wouldn't blame any New Yorker or anybody in this country for thinking that we are nothing but a bunch of dumb hillbillies here, because that's the only version of us you're ever going to see on television or the movies.

It's also important to me to create a portrait of us that's realistic about our problems, but also realistic about how we got here, why it's not our fault, what institutional poverty really is, and how it exists in this region that has been treated as an internal colony of the United States for a couple of centuries and also how we've survived that, what we have and what we are. Our culture here is so rich and so resilient. We are such resourceful people. We're storytellers. We're makers. We're survivors. We're not just the orphan kid, we're also the amazing grandmother that takes care of everybody in the neighborhood, which is Mrs. Peggot in my story. Mr. Peg, who is a philosopher, who knows the name of every animal and every plant and every bird in the woods. If you listen closely, he will tell you the meaning of life. These kids, the way they take up for each other and look out for each other. These whole, these networks, these communities of people. That's what I wanted to put on the page. That's what I wanted to give the world as an antidote to the stereotypes that you've heard about us.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the now Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead with author Barbara Kingsolver. We'll have more of this conversation after a quick break.

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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart. You are listening to my conversation with author Barbara Kingsolver about her latest novel Demon Copperhead. The novel was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction on Monday. When we came back from the interview, Barbara was kind enough to read from the book's first chapter. Here is Barbara Kingsolver.

Barbara Kingsolver: First I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and they've always given me that much. The worst of the job was up to me, my mother being, let's just say out of it. On any other day, they'd have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering trouble as neighbors will. All through the dog breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there she'd be, little bleach blonde, smoking her palm malls hanging on that railing like she's captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour it's going down.

This is an 18-year-old girl we're discussing all on her own, and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage, picking up grit from the vinyl tile worming and shoving around because I'm still inside the sack that babies float in pre-real life. Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life he'd spent waiting on women. His wife would've told him the jesusing could hold on a minute. First, she needed to go see if the little pregnant girl had got herself liquored up again.

Mrs. Peggot, being a lady that doesn't beat around the bushes, and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag like a little blue prize fighter. Those are the words she'd used later on being not at all shy to discuss the worst day of my mom's life. If that's how I came across to the first people that laid eyes on me, I'll take it. To me, that says I had a fighting chance. Long odds, yes or no. If a mother is lying in her own [bleep] and pill bottles while they're slapping the kid she's shunted out telling him to look alive, likely the kid is doomed.

Kid born to the junkie is a junkie. He'll grow up to be everything you don't want to know. The rotten teeth and dead zone eyes, the nuisance of locking up your tools in the garage, though they don't walk off, the rent by the weak motel, squatting well back from the scenic highway. This kid, if he wanted a shot at the finer things should have got himself delivered to some rich or smart or Christian non-using type of mother. Anybody will tell you, the born of this world are marked from the get out, win or lose.

Me though, I was a born sucker for the superhero rescue. Did that line of work even exist in our trailer home universe? Had they all quit Smallville and gone looking for the bigger action, save or be saved? These are questions. You want to think it's not over till the last page.

Alison Stewart: That was Barbara Kingsolver reading from her new novel, Demon Copperhead. You can learn a-- It's interesting because obviously a lot of this is fiction, but there's some great history in the book. I wanted to ask about, and I'm not sure I know how to say it properly, that Demon's background is Melungeon.

Barbara Kingsolver: Melungeon. Yes.

Alison Stewart: Melungeon. I'm going to let you explain what Melungeon is.

Barbara Kingsolver: Melungeon is a, historically people who are a mixture of mixed race people. It's not clear from DNA evidence, but traditionally what we say is we are a blend of European, Black, and Native American people. There's a concentration of Melungeon people who are generally dark-skinned, light-colored eyes. Sometimes red hair that's unusual but Demon has red hair. His father was Melungeon. In this region, there is no stigma attacks attached to it. It actually goes back. The word comes from melange, I think the French word for mixture which was a pejorative.

Other interesting pejoratives, it has been adopted with pride. Melungeon people are perfectly well respected. The mayor of one of the towns in Lee County is Melungeon. Appalachia is not generally known to be ethnically and racially mixed. The stereotype is that everybody here is white, but it's not true at all. There's a lot of interesting history.

The way Demon puts it is that, when he looks into it for a school project, he's interested in his background. He says, "Well, way back in the day, everybody was as poor as each other, the white people, the Black people, the Native people," so they just hung out together, and had a good time and had their mixed up babies, and nobody much cared. It's a category of Appalachian people that we know pretty well around here but isn't widely known elsewhere.

Alison Stewart: Why did it fit to have it be part of Demon's history?

Barbara Kingsolver: I'm sorry, why did what?

Alison Stewart: Why did making him Melungeon, what was the purpose of that?

Barbara Kingsolver: Well, among other things, what I just said. I'm trying to represent my region and my people accurately and to counter a lot of the stereotypes that people have externally to here. That's one of them. When I first conceived of this kid, the first thing that came to me after my conversation with Dickens and my thoughts of Copperfield was that he should be called Copperhead. I saw him with wiry red hair. I just had this vision of him with red hair and dark sort of coffee with milk kind of skin, and green eyes as its very arresting-looking kid. Then I realized, "Well, of course. He's Melungeon."

Alison Stewart: Opioid addiction, it plays a huge role in this novel. Demon's mother dies of an overdose of Oxy, and then Demon himself becomes addicted after having a really terrible football injury. He has a moment when he is a football star. I know you spoke to Dr. Art Van Zee from Pennington, Virginia, who was one of the very first people to sound the alarm about the dangers of opioids in Virginia. What was something you got from those conversations that really stuck with you over the course of writing the novel and you wanted to make sure you were able to express?

Barbara Kingsolver: I'll tell you, I became friends with Dr. Van Zee. He was really helpful to me because he-- well, most of his practice now is treating patients in recovery. He put me in touch with any of his patients who wanted to speak with me. I'm lucky to say I don't know addiction from personal experience, and so I really needed to understand it from the inside, the whole story from falling into addiction, how that happens, how it feels, how does it feel to be dope sick, where is recovery, how does recovery come about, how is it possible, what are the steps? Literally.

Even like the practical things of, "Here's this pill. How do I get it into my veins?" I mean, not literally, I didn't do that, but I needed to know for Demon because Demon does that.

Through my conversations, which turned into friendships, with these wonderful people, these very resilient people, all women, interestingly, were the people who came forward to want to speak to me, and all young, every one of these patients told me the story from beginning to end. Their addiction began, in every case, with a bottle of pills prescribed to them from an injury. A work injury, in most cases.

The instructions from their doctors, from the drug company, to say, "Set an alarm clock. Take these pills absolutely according to your timing in your clock. You have to take them every so many hours. Don't miss one. Stay ahead of the pain." This is what the pharmaceutical company said was required. At the end of the first bottle of pills, they were addicted. They were physically violently ill if they couldn't get more. That's how it starts.

We've been so brainwashed in this country by the 50-year-- like half a century of the so-called "War on Drugs," which was first a war on hippies, and then became a war on Black people, to see the addict, the so-called "addict" as a criminal, and to treat this disease by imprisoning the addicted people. It's ridiculous. Addiction is a disease. I had to understand it from the inside and try to tell it with as much compassion as possible from the inside, so that readers who don't know would understand, this is a disease, and it can only be cured when it's treated as a disease.

If our daughter had cancer, we don't say to her, "Oh, you need to hit bottom before you can start chemo," or, "I'm kicking you out of the house until you're over this cancer." That's how we treat addiction, and it doesn't help. It doesn't cure anything. My hope, on many levels, for the readers of this novel is that you will find within this story, some compassion for some category of person that you've never known yourself, or maybe you have known in your family because compassion and empathy is the magical cure for pretty much everything that's wrong with this right now.

Alison Stewart: I think you explain really, really beautifully, and that's the right word, how targeted people are in this area. There's a character who works for a pharmaceutical company, who is very clear about this is fertile soil for the company. You have somebody who's a truth-teller about opioids in this story. What is something you hope that people come to understand about that side of the issue?

Barbara Kingsolver: This was absolutely done to us. This was not accidental. We don't have these high rates of addiction here because people here are whatever, are morally weak or something, this was a decision made by Purdue Pharma. They looked at metrics. They looked at data from all over the country, and they identified three places in the country where they felt confident that they could pump in massive amounts of their new painkiller, OxyContin. One of them was Lee County, Virginia, which is here where I live, it's just to the west of me, and that's where this novel is set. Another one was pretty close to us in West Virginia, and the third one was in Maine.

It has to do with a number of things, a number of people who have work injuries or living with disability, but also with the fact that the healthcare delivery systems in these regions are desperately stretched, stretched really thin. Physicians don't get to see their patients very often. They have to write a lot of prescriptions. They don't have the option that people have in wealthier areas of being transferred to pain clinics or other modes of pain relief. Oxy was done to us.

The company lied, just outright manufactured studies that said, "This is not addicting. It's impossible to get addicted to us." As a consequence, we have immense-- It's impossible to overstate the effects of addiction in these communities. A lot of that story has been told. My friend Beth Macy, a journalist, has done a great job in the Hulu series, Dopesick, tells that story. People now, I think mostly, know the story about the big guys, the lawyers, and the evildoers, and the lawsuits.

The story I wanted to tell, and I want to remind readers is that, okay, the settlements might be over, but we are living with the aftermath. The kids, the orphaned kids, the addicted high school football players, this is a lifetime. That once again, we've been left with the damage, just like strip mining and all the other exploits that have been done to us here, this one has left us with human wreckage. My hope is that some compassion for the disease of addiction will help sway public opinion towards directing some of these resources back to the region where we need help, we need resources to get people into care, into treatment, and recovery.

Alison Stewart: That was my interview with author, Barbara Kingsolver, one of a number of former All Of It guests who landed on the list of Pulitzer Prize winners on Monday. Her latest novel is titled Demon Copperhead. That is All Of It for today. I'm Allison Stewart. I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate you. I will meet you back here next time.

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