Best Of: Barbara Kingsolver on ‘Urban-Rural Antipathy’

Today, I wanna share one of my favorite conversations from our archives. This is from 2023. It's with Barbara Kingsolver about her amazing book, Demon Copperhead, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her work to write the great novel of Appalachia. I hope you enjoy. From New York Times opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show. So in 2023, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction was won by two novels, Trust by Hernan Diaz and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. And Kingsolver, I think, is a literary legend in her own time. I mean, she wrote the Bean Trees. She wrote the Poisonwood Bible. She has won all kinds of prizes, but I think it's fair to say Demon Top Red is a kind of masterpiece. And it's a kind of masterpiece she was trying to create. She set out to write, as she tells me in this conversation, she was setting out to write the great novel of Appalachia, and I think she did. And this is a novel that is following loosely in the structure of David Copperfield by Dickens. It's a novel set a little bit back in time. I think that so so much of our thinking now about this is political and places that go for Trump and places that don't go for Trump, but the novel is set in the nineties and in the February, so a little bit before some of the current economic and political cleavages attain, at least the form we know them in. And it's a beautiful book. It's a wrenching book. It's a book that I routinely had to stop reading because I was so fused with a character and so fused with a story that when I could see something bad coming, I just couldn't handle it before bed. I just couldn't go through that with the main character. So, I mean, that I think is about as much as you can say for fiction when it almost feels more real than the life you're living. So I was grateful she was willing to come on the show and talk a bit about her life, how she came to writing the novel, the sort of experiences she brought to it, and and the kind of argument she's trying to have through it. As always, my email is reclineshow@nytimes.com. Barbara Kingsolver, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So you've said that you're Appalachian through and through. What does that mean to you? I'm Appalachian. And it's a funny thing. It's a marker. Appalachian means you say, I live in Appalachia. It's a region that's a little hard to pin down on a map because it includes parts of a lot of states starting from North Georgia, Eastern Tennessee, Western North Carolina, and Virginia up into the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, and then up into sort of the ridge Country Of Pennsylvania. So that sounds complicated, but to us, it is a whole …