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The Guardian
4 days ago
- General
- The Guardian
‘The damage is terrifying': Barbara Kingsolver on Trump, rural America and the recovery home funded by her hit novel
In the spotless kitchen of a white clapboard house in the Appalachian mountains, a retired deacon, a regional jail counsellor and I form an impromptu book club. The novel under discussion is Barbara Kingsolver's bestselling, Pulitzer prize-winning Demon Copperhead, which is set in this area, Lee County, Virginia, during the 1990s, at the beginning of the opioid epidemic. I say that I loved the novel, that it was vivid and brilliant, heart-warming and tragic. Their reaction is more complex – there's a real sadness behind it. Julie Montgomery-Barber, the jail counsellor, tells me she found the book 'hard to read'. The Rev Nancy Hobbs agrees that reading it was painful, 'because I felt like: I knew these people. At every level, from foster care to the football coaches to Demon. I knew Demon.' Hobbs and Montgomery-Barber sit on the board of Higher Ground, the recovery residence recently established by Kingsolver using royalties from the novel. We are viewing the house together as part of its official launch party, on a sunny Saturday in June. The house is a bright and welcoming space. It provides a safe place to live for women whose lives have been torn apart by addiction, who are seeking long-term recovery. Some of its residents have come directly from prison; one was living in a tent before she moved in; current ages range from 33 to 65 years old. Higher Ground gives residents a roof over their heads and supports them in myriad ways, from transport to AA appointments (most have lost their driving licences), to access to education and help with finding employment. The women can stay for between six months and two years. It opened in January and will be at full capacity later this month, when its eighth resident arrives, though there are plans for expansion. It is the first such residence for women in the county, explains Joie Cantrell, a public health nurse and the board's co-director. She is, she says, 'ecstatic' to be part of the project. So often, when people recover from addiction, they are sent 'right back into the same situation. We were setting them up for failure.' Not here, says resident Syara Parsell, 35, who came to Lee County from prison in 2019. Born and raised in Connecticut, her mother drove her over here, she says, in the hope that the change of location would help her overcome a heroin addiction. Instead, she 'started getting high in this town', and was incarcerated again. She found Higher Ground when she was discharged in February and will be six months sober this month. Thanks to the house, she says, 'my life has changed. My mentality has changed. I am truly sober.' She believes Higher Ground will give hope to others in active addiction nearby. They can see that 'it gets better – and I would have never said that. I've been at some low points. I never thought I could do this.' The launch event includes an afternoon of free Appalachian food and music in the nearby Pennington Gap Community Center, where Kingsolver stands beaming, with her husband Steven at her side, hugging guests and posing for pictures. Later, that evening, she takes to the stage of Lee theatre, an attractive mid-century playhouse next door, and ushers the centre's staff and board members on stage to rapturous applause. Then, with spotlights illuminating the distinctive streak of white in her hair, she tells a largely local audience why she set her story here, in Lee County, the former coal mining region ravaged by addiction after Purdue Pharma flooded the area with its supposedly non-addictive new wonder drug, OxyContin, in the 1990s. Kingsolver, who grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, tells the audience that the area's struggles 'are things we are supposed to be ashamed of – but they are not our fault'. Rather, she says, they are the legacy of 'big companies who came here to take something away'. First that was timber, then coal, 'then they came to harvest our pain'. It's a rousing speech which turns emotional when she interviews some residents on stage. Nikki is now studying for her GED (the equivalent of a high school diploma) and says she feels, for the first time, as though she has kin. 'I really got to know the girls in the house, and when you don't have a family, and you really get close to them, that's your new family.' I meet Kingsolver the next day at her hotel, a 40-minute drive along open roads in the green mountains, past clapboard houses with US flags on their porches, churches with white steeples, corrugated iron side-of-road shops and cows chewing the cud on hillside farms. She wears a patterned red top and bootcut jeans, and is still in high spirits from the previous evening, telling me proudly, 'There wasn't a dry eye in the house!' That it has all come together is 'amazing', she says. She could not have imagined any of this happening when she was writing the novel, a retelling of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield. 'I didn't have any idea Demon would bring home so much bacon,' she says. 'I never presume success. I write about things that can make people uncomfortable, that ask them to examine their prejudices and think about the world in a new way. I never assume that's going to be marketable.' Kingsolver has been a towering figure in American culture for decades, author of acclaimed novels including The Poisonwood Bible, her 1998 epic about a family of American missionaries in the Belgian Congo, and The Lacuna, for which she won the 2010 Women's prize for fiction. She has frequently written about the Appalachian region which, she says, is the only place that feels like home. She grew up in rural Kentucky, and, after a stint as a journalist in Arizona, has spent most of her adult life on a farm in Washington County, southwest Virginia. Her longstanding literary preoccupations – nature and the web of relationships between people and systems – derive from growing up 'around wildness and woodlands', and from living in a rural community, through which she became aware of 'the interconnectedness of our every ambition and accomplishment'. Rural life and the opioid crisis have not been sufficiently represented in fiction, she says. 'Appalachian life in general has not been sufficiently represented. People don't know the complexity and the nuance.' Appalachians represent 'ecosystems of people, the people in need and the people who give; the Memaws (grandmothers) who take care of all the kids.' She dismisses one infamous account – vice president JD Vance's 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy – as a book that was 'really all about himself, how he got out and made good, and the people that stay behind, well, are just lazy'. Appalachian culture, she says, is about modesty and self-reliance. 'If he were a real Appalachian, he wouldn't tell that story.' Fittingly, then, she says it was Demon's voice that made the novel so compelling to many, and 'I thank Mr Dickens for that. My hesitation with this book, and the trouble I had getting started with it for years, was the stereotypes I was working against. People have ideas about Appalachians, and they have ideas about what so-called addicts are like. By telling the story from the point of view of an orphaned child, readers are immediately sympathetic.' It helps that Demon is so loveable: 'He has moxie, he's so funny. So mad and profane, but he has such a good heart. People want to adopt him.' Even by Kingsolver's standards, Demon Copperhead's success was 'of a different magnitude'. As well as the Pulitzer, she became the only woman to win the Women's prize twice. Her sales were in a 'new stratosphere'. She tells me she has given much of her income away for years. 'Material success came gradually. So I had time to learn how to draw a cap on what we need as a family and what we can do with the rest.' So, when 'that first royalty cheque came in and our eyes all popped wide open, I thought: 'I could do something significant with this.'' After learning from local residents about the desperate need for recovery residences, she bought a building and set about assembling a local team. Many Lee County locals have become deeply involved, from the community college offering one resident free electrical and carpentry training to the centre's 83-year-old neighbour Larry, who 'just kind of adopted these ladies', as Kingsolver puts it, and frequently gives them lifts to appointments. Community involvement is crucial, she says. 'Charity is a very loaded concept. It involves a power imbalance. It is a person standing in a position of privilege saying: I will give this gift to you, and implicit is: 'to help you become more like me'. Everything about that is odious to me.' For all the successes, of both the centre and the book, there has been some local pushback. 'Initially, and maybe still, specifically in Lee County, some people felt like: 'Why did you have to name us?' Nobody told me to my face, but I heard other people sort of sniping about it. I think it's pride. Very privileged people who would really rather not think about their neighbours who are struggling and suffering.' One such naysayer made his opinion clear when Kingsolver tried to donate a set of books to Lee County High School, Demon's alma mater, at the request of an English teacher. 'Between opening the trunk of the car and getting the books to the classroom, they mysteriously vanished,' she says. After some investigation Kingsolver appealed to the school board, telling them how 'life-changing' she would have found it, as a girl in Kentucky, to have read a novel written nearby. The books miraculously reappeared in the principal's office. She is convinced that the perpetrator had not read the book but 'had a sense that it was set in Lee County and it talked about bad things. We can't have people knowing that bad stuff happens here. You know, that wonderful denial that keeps people afloat.' Pride, denial and shame are longstanding Kingsolver fascinations. She says that the archetypal American story of the lone hero pulling themselves up by their bootstraps 'is just bullshit. We have classes in this country. We have class barriers. There are places you can be born that you're never going to get out of.' Still, she says, that myth is powerful: it 'brainwashes' people; it can lead to self-blame. Shame, she believes, is intrinsic to Trump's success, something she explores in one memorable Demon Copperhead passage addressing the word 'deplorable', a reference to Hillary Clinton's infamous description of Trump voters as a 'basket of deplorables'. 'I spent more worry on that word than perhaps any other single word in the book,' she says. 'I took it out, put it back in because, I mean, I love Hillary. I voted for her. I think it was so unfair that one sentence was taken out of context. But, also, there are people in my neighbourhood driving around with trucks that say: 'I'm a deplorable.' It has become so easy for urban people to dismiss all of rural America, to paint us all with the brush of backward, dumb – that was toxic. I'm sure she read this book, and I'm sure she didn't like that I used that word, but I didn't mean it personally. It's just awfully important to get it across that, as Demon says, we have cable. We know what you're saying about us – and we're mad about it.' Trump understands this, she says. He's the guy who says: 'I'm not like them. I'm not a fancy educated guy. I'm one of you. That's what appealed to people. Shame is such a part of this. He got under people's sense of shame and found other places to put it.' She lives in Trump country, and says she understands how he 'hooked' so many people, but she never demonises Trump voters herself, describing her neighbours as 'some of the most generous, kindhearted people you will ever meet'. She has no kind words for the man himself. His presidency is, she says, 'a circus. That's too kind a word for it. Circuses make you laugh. This one makes you cry. It's stunning how much damage one ignorant man can do.' She points out that Trump's 'so-called Big Beautiful Bill' could be devastating for the region, with its cuts to the National Park Service, the Weather Service and disaster preparedness – just last year the area was hit by the devastating Hurricane Helene – and cuts to Medicaid, which could cause havoc in an already under-served area. 'The damage will be unimaginable. Lots of people will die, lots of wild lands will be destroyed. The damage is terrifying.' Does she think her Trump-voting neighbours will change their allegiance if such terrors come to pass? 'Will they connect the dots when our hospital closes? I don't even know the answer to that,' she says, shaking her head, fearing that the TV and radio stations that told them to vote for Trump in the first place will 'come up with some other reason why your hospital closed. For those of us who are in the information business, that's a depressing subject.' She writes to her Republican congressman every other day to say: 'You studied history. You know better than this. Come on!' She is seethingly angry with the administration 'because the Congress people do know the law. Pretty much all of them come from wealthy backgrounds. They know what all this means, and they're not standing up to him. I just want them to grow a spine.' She is not thrilled with the Democrats, either. 'I'm very critical of both political parties in this country in terms of how beholden they are to corporate interests. Corporations run this country. It's really just a question of how much or how little they are willing to spare for the public good. A lot of us have been reading about late capitalism for a long time, and now we're seeing it.' In the long term, she says she believes in the Martin Luther King Jr quote that 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice'. Until we start to see that bend, good news comes locally, at least: Higher Ground is already growing, she tells me, with the acquisition of a neighbouring building, which the women will run as a thrift shop. She hopes that the project will expand further, will help more people. She plans to be involved for the long run and hopes to do whatever she can to help in 'destigmatising this disease and bringing the community into the project of supporting our lost citizens'. She is also currently adapting one of her books – she can't say which – for film and is in the middle of writing a new novel. Meanwhile, Demon lives on. His spirit is in the recovery house, whose residents Kingsolver describes as 'the mothers of real-life Demon Copperheads'. Unlike their fictional counterpart, these women have hope of getting back on their feet, thanks to a house paid for, in large part, by book lovers – many of whom have continued contributing. When Kingsolver announced the initiative on her Instagram page, her 150,000 followers donated more than $50,000 in cash in a week, and purchased reams of items from an Amazon wish list. The house's patio seating was gifted by a book club in Switzerland. Demon also lives on in readers' brains. 'Readers still ask me: 'Did he get his happy ending?' I tell them: 'He's yours. Now, you get to imagine whatever happy ending you like for him.'' Faber has reissued Barbara Kingsolver's titles The Lacuna, Flight Behaviour and The Poisonwood Bible this summer; for more information on Higher Ground see In the UK, Action on Addiction is available on 0300 330 0659. In the US, call or text SAMHSA's National Helpline at 988. In Australia, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline is at 1800 250 015; families and friends can seek help at Family Drug Support Australia at 1300 368 186
Fast Company
13-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
10 summer reading picks from business and financial leaders
Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I'm Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. A few weeks ago, I published part of my summer reading list. I asked readers and CEOs to respond with their own picks, and they delivered. Here are a few that stand out, in their own words: Jay Chandan, chairman and CEO, Gorilla Technology Group Peak Performance Trading and Investing by Bruce Bower This is a powerful read that strips away the noise and gets to the essence of how elite thinking drives consistent outperformance. Bower distills decades of experience into pragmatic frameworks that are just as relevant in the boardroom as on the trading floor. His insights go well beyond markets; they offer clarity under pressure and sharpen decision-making across any high-stakes environment. Kathy Crosby, president and CEO, Truth Initiative Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver As someone who's spent years advocating for children in foster care and adoption, this book is both heartbreaking and affirming. Barbara Kingsolver gives voice to the kids too often left out of the national conversation—resilient, overlooked, and deserving of so much more. This story haunts you because it's not just fiction—it's the truth for too many. Mary Ellen Iskenderian, president and CEO, Women's World Banking Fintech Feminists: Increasing Inclusion, Redefining Innovation, and Changing the Future for Women Around the World by Nicole Casperson Through compelling storytelling and rigorous insight, Nicole Casperson shines a powerful light on the women transforming fintech and, in doing so, reshaping the global economy. This is essential reading for anyone committed to building a more equitable and resilient financial system for women everywhere. Richard Kopelman, CEO, Aprio Advisory Group The Curiosity Muscle by Diana Kander and Andy Fromm This book is a powerful reminder of how curiosity fuels progress. Kander and Fromm offer a clear, practical framework that helps teams adapt in fast-changing environments and unlocks their full potential. Their insights have inspired me to think bigger about how curiosity drives growth, avoids stagnation, and keeps us evolving. It's a timely and energizing read for anyone committed to building a culture of forward momentum and continuous learning. Philip Krim, cofounder and CEO, Montauk Climate by Javier Blas and Jack Farchy This book exposes the history behind the behemoths that dominate today's markets around commodities, power, precious metals, and others. Studying how we got here helps inform me on where we are heading. Andrew McMahon, chair and CEO, Guardian Life Insurance Company of America Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI by Ethan Mollick I found Co-Intelligence invaluable for its practical insights on how we can all collaborate with AI. The book reinforces Guardian's vision of using AI to enhance how we serve customers and policyholders, make decisions, and scale our impact. Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner, SkyBridge Capital Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays by Gay Talese Gay Talese released a fantastic new book, A Town Without Time, in late 2024, that is absolutely worth reading, but I recommend you start with some of his older material, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold and Other Essays. Talese is credited by Tom Wolfe with the creation of a new form of rich nonfiction writing called 'New Journalism.' As long-form journalism recedes in the face of soundbite-driven social media, I encourage readers to dig into work from the greatest storyteller of a generation. Mike Tiedemann, CEO, AlTi Tiedemann Global Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed This Pulitzer Prize winner offers a rare perspective on the history of the 1920s and the four central bankers that drove the decisions that, while well intended, ultimately led to the Great Depression. There are lessons in this book that rhyme with the world we are living in today, (e.g., currencies, inflation, trade tensions, and crypto). I found it an incredible perspective to gain about a critical time in history. Hepsen Uzcan, Americas CEO, DWS Group Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well by Amy Edmondson In my view, this book captures the challenges between managing innovation, regulatory, and market complexities while navigating through the organizational cultural implications, highlighting the importance of psychological safety we need to foster where failures will be embraced. Fail fast to recover faster. Austin C. Willis, CEO, Willis Lease Finance Mind Hacking Happiness, Volumes 1 and 2, by Sean Webb The first volume was a validation of something that I've known for a while . . . if you don't let too many things attach to your 'self' map, you are less apt to get upset or frustrated when those things are attacked or criticized (i.e., Don't let your identity become intertwined with a sports team. That way, when one loses or is criticized, you don't find yourself getting angry.) The second volume took the concepts to a new level and discussed how mindfulness, science, and religion all interact: Specifically, how the pursuit of enlightenment is foundational to nearly all religions, although enlightenment goes by many names, and how different types of science interact with religion.
Time Magazine
08-05-2025
- General
- Time Magazine
Barbara Kingsolver
In the years leading up to the publication of her Pulitzer-Prize winning 2022 novel Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver spent time in Lee County, Va., the drug-ravaged southern Appalachian region where it's set (about an hour and a half from her home). She sat down with people in active addiction, as well as those in recovery, and listened to their stories. 'I gained so much compassion, and I wanted to do something,' she says. 'I thought, 'Lee County gave me a story—I'm going to give something back that really makes a difference.' I mean, how could I not?' After the book was published, Kingsolver traveled back to Lee County and convened a group of friends who live in the area for a breakfast meeting. If she had $100,000 to help people in addiction recovery, she asked them, where should it go? Everyone agreed that in this county with so few resources, the greatest need was for a sober home where people in recovery could live in safety and support: with counseling, transportation, and job training. 'When people leave their addiction behind, they almost always leave behind their whole word,' Kingsolver says. 'People come out of addiction with no social capital at all, no friends, no skills, no education, no transportation or even a driver's license. Addiction strips you of all those things.' Kingsolver found the 'perfect house,' doubled her investment, and used her royalties from Demon Copperhead to turn it into a recovery home for people battling addiction. The Higher Ground Women's Recovery Residence opened in 2025, and Kingsolver and her team are already working on expansion plans. Readers around the world have embraced the project along with the Lee County community. Fans in Switzerland raised money to order porch furniture for the house. The local community college offered free tuition for women residents to take classes, and nearby attorneys have donated their services. 'I think the happiest part of this is that it went from a wild dream or a wish in my head to an actual house—a beautiful house with a red door and a red roof and women inside who are getting their lives back,' she says. 'It's unstoppable at this point. I think it's going to grow and grow.'
New York Times
07-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Demon Copperhead' Explored Addiction. Its Profits Built a Rehab Center.
When Barbara Kingsolver was writing 'Demon Copperhead,' a novel that explores the devastating effects of the opioid crisis in southern Appalachia, she was doubtful that people would want to read about such a grim subject. To draw readers in, she knew she would have to ground the narrative in real stories and push against stereotypes about the region. So she traveled to Lee County, Va., a corner of Appalachia that's been battered by drug abuse, and spoke to residents whose lives had been wrecked by opioids. 'I sat down and spent many hours with people talking about their addiction journey,' Kingsolver said. 'There are stories that went straight into the book.' Published in 2022, the novel was an instant success, in time selling three million copies and winning a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2023. But even before the novel came out, Kingsolver felt indebted to the people who shared their stories. 'I felt like, I am getting a novel from this place, and I'm going to give something back,' she said. Kingsolver decided to use her royalties from 'Demon Copperhead' to fund a recovery program for people battling addiction. In a social media post this week, Kingsolver announced that she has founded a recovery house for women in Lee County, where the novel is set. The center, 'Higher Ground Women's Recovery Residence,' will house between eight and 12 women recovering from drug addiction, offering them a place to stay, for a small fee, for up to two years, as well as counseling and other forms of support, like free community college classes. Kingsolver grew up in rural Kentucky and lives on a farm in Virginia. As someone raised in the region, she said, she felt she couldn't ignore the opioid epidemic in her fiction. But she struggled for years with how to write about the issue in a way that would make readers pay attention. While on a book tour in England, Kingsolver stayed in a bed-and-breakfast where Charles Dickens had worked on his novel 'David Copperfield,' and found inspiration in the story and its resilient young narrator. In 'Demon Copperhead,' which is loosely based on Dickens' novel, Kingsolver tells the story of Damon Fields, a boy who is born to a single teenage mother who struggles with drug addiction. He ends up in foster care and later succumbs to opioid abuse. As soon as the novel was released, she resolved to find a tangible way to help people whose lives have been upended by addiction. 'The first week that this book hit the stores and was so successful, I said OK, I'm going to bring this home, I'm going to be able to do something concrete with this book that will help the people who told me their stories,' she said. 'I had these royalties that 'Demon' brought me. I took that money and went back to Lee County and said, what can we do with this?' The biggest need, she learned, was for support for recovering addicts, who often had no housing or job prospects. She and her husband, Steven Hopp, started a nonprofit, 'Higher Ground,' to create a residential home for women, and provided the funds for the nonprofit to purchase the property last summer. A grand opening is planned for this spring, Kingsolver said, but some residents have already moved in. Kingsolver said she's been heartened by support the project has received from local organizations, including church groups that have helped get the living space in shape, a local store that donated furniture and a grant from the Lee County Community Foundation. 'You might, in earlier times, have expected stigma, for people not to be open to this, but instead it's been, 'Yes in my backyard,'' Kingsolver said. 'This is the reality of where we live,' she continued. 'Everybody knows someone touched by the opioid epidemic.'
