<
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-27/barbara-kingsolver-demon-copperhead-appalachia-opioid-crisis/101792232>
'Barbara Kingsolver didn't realise the world thought she was a hillbilly until
she left home to go to university.
The bestselling author of
The Poisonwood Bible was raised in Nicholas County,
Kentucky, in the Appalachian region of the United States, home to a largely
white and disproportionately poor population often derided by outsiders as
hillbillies — or, in the words of Demon Copperhead, the titular young
protagonist of Kingsolver's latest novel: "Rednecks, moonshiners, ridge
runners, hicks. Deplorables."
Growing up, Kingsolver was familiar with the depictions of this social class
popularised by the 60s sitcom
Beverly Hillbillies: "Ignorant idiots who hold
our jeans up with a rope and have a pig in the house for a pet and shoot the
neighbour's lights out if they're bothering us," as she explained on ABC RN's
The Book Show.
But Kingsolver and her friends never took these "far-fetched" caricatures
seriously; so when she moved to Indiana to accept a scholarship to study music
at DePauw University, she was surprised to discover her classmates took the
Beverly Hillbillies stereotypes at face value.
People made fun of her Appalachian accent, and strangers accosted her on campus
demanding she speak in her mountain drawl.
"I lost my accent because I got tired of being ridiculed," Kingsolver says.
In her new novel,
Demon Copperhead, the author returns to Appalachia to
redress some of these stereotypes, and to tackle one of its most urgent issues,
the opioid crisis — via a somewhat unlikely vehicle: a retelling of Charles
Dickens's 19th-century classic,
David Copperfield.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
