Barbara Kingsolver (author of Demon Copperhead)

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts. on Experts, I'm Dan Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Lily Padman.

Hi.

Hi. Hi.

How are you?

Good, I made a bolognese last night.

You did? How did it turn out? As good as the last batch you gave me?

I think so, because I started earlier, so I didn't feel so rushed.

Oh, okay.

I really could chop those onions fine.

Uh-huh, and the garlic?

Yeah, the garlic you're supposed to slice because you don't want it to burn, and so you wouldn't, it's not good for you because you would break out.

Yeah, that's okay. It might be worth it. I ate a shitload of it last time.

It was so good. I mean, you. let me know, I have extra.

Yes, and I found a gluten-free noodle that's in the fridge section over at Lazy Acres. That's delicious, actually. Oh, great.

I'm glad you finally found a gluten-free pasta.

It, in fact, made me want to make my own. It's been a long time.

I want that.

Yours is better. now. You've outgrown me.

Different and not better.

This is a rare occurrence. It's the first time ever that you and I independently read books that we both loved on the same level, and then we both were starving to talk to the author, which is such, we talk about it in the episode. It's incredible, the privilege to be able to fall in love with a book and get to talk to the fucking author. It's like what I dreamed about as a kid.

I would never trade that in, the way I also happened, I also read it, which, as we have declared, is fairly rare in these circumstances. Normally, I don't, and I act more as the audience. I will say, even though I'm so glad, I recognize that me knowing more, there are parts when we're talking about the book, it's good, I don't read them.

Right, because we can't have everyone on the inside.

Exactly, because people who haven't read it are like, I don't know what you're talking about right now.

What people don't hear on this show, which is cut out, is I often get too esoteric with the guests, because they know their subject matter really well, and I just brushed up on it. So we can depart from what the general audience might know, and you constantly go, hold on a second, I don't think anyone is following this at this point.

Yeah, but it's harder if I'm also one.

Inside the bubble, yes. So maybe these episodes suck.

So it's really bad, so don't listen. No, do listen, it's my favorite of the year.

Okay, oh yes, so you said this in the fact check. This isn't a response to what we just said. Yeah, Barbara Kingsolver, she of course wrote our favorite book of the year, Demon Copperhead, which I'm so prone to get wrong. I say Copperfield sometimes.

You want to, but which makes sense.

Yeah, it makes sense. But, Barbara, she won the Pulitzer Prize for the book this year, but she's written a ton of other beautiful books. The Poisonwood Bible, Unsheltered, The Bean Trees, Flight Behavior, and I encourage everyone to go get Demon Copperhead, and hopefully this will whet your appetite to read it, because it is phenomenal.

She's so amazing.

And she's even cooler than the book. She's so cool. She's better than the book. Please enjoy, Barbara Kingsolver.

He's an armchair experimenter.

He's an armchair experimenter.

He's an armchair experimenter.

You're already here.

I'm here. Oh, my goodness. She made it. Hi. Hi.

I'm so happy to have you here.

Welcome.

Thank you. Yeah.

It's great to be here. I'm very excited. You smell great. Oh, that's our candle. That's our candle.

No, no, it's all me. It's all me.

It could be a mixture. Good pheromones mixed with the candle.

Good morning, nice browns.

Thank you, I'm in yeah browns.

Yeah browns.

That sounded a little bit like a euphemism.

For?

My breasts.

Oh.

Alas, it was not, but.

But I thought I'd clear that up.

Barbara, welcome.

Thank you.

Okay, this is a little self-indulgent, but I'm just gonna tell you, it occurred to me. what is so exciting about having you here, is if you would have told me, I don't know, in my teens and 20s, that I could have put down fear of flying and then gone and spoken with Erica Young, or I could have put down Catcher in the Rye and then talked to J.D. Salinger. I'm having a very big moment where I can't believe I get to read a book, fall in love with it, and then talk to you. It's like very exciting for me.

Well, good, that's so much better than if you said, well, I kinda hated your book, but here's your chance to redeem yourself, Barbara.

Win me over, Barbara. I know the Pulitzer's convinced that you did a good job, but I think you need to convince me.

My standards are much higher.

When you were young, who would you have most wanted to have talked to after reading their book?

Oh, man, well, it depends on how young. Like when I was 12, Charles Dickens or Louisa May Alcott. That's a toss-up. Then later, Doris Lessing. I actually did get to meet Doris Lessing.

What was she saying? that you were like, oh, right, that's kinda how I think. Thanks for saying it.

The first books of hers that I read were the Martha Quest novels, The Children of Violence. I don't know that they're all that well-known. The last of those five novels is The Golden Notebooks, which people do know about. But the series begins in what was then Rhodesia. So she was writing about what was called then The Color Bar.

In what year? You can ballpark it. Give me a decade.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

A decade, yeah. In the 50s, 60s. Okay. Those were the first novels that helped me understand what literature can really do, what it can talk about, what it can embrace, what it can change, what it can challenge, how it can make you feel uncomfortable. Or, in my case, it was more like articulating these pressures on me that I didn't know how to name.

They were not encouraged to go educate themselves or pursue anything.

It wasn't even about encouragement. It was about options. I mean, I just grew up looking around, seeing that men ran the world. Hmm. Seems like they still do, but.

You can use present tense for that.

Yeah. There were authors along the way from Louisa May Alcott. Little Women is the first novel I remember reading. that just took me completely away from where I was, which was the back of a station wagon going on some long, long family vacation.

Post-Congo.

Yeah.

Yeah, you weren't reading that book at six.

No, I was probably nine or 10..

Well, she could have been. Some people are early.

She could be a Doogie Howser or a prodigy.

I was an early Doogie Howser. Then I went to medical school. No, I was an early reader. Actually, I remember the first word that I read. No.

Sure, yeah, yeah, of course.

Well, I was three. I know that because of where we lived. And my dad was a reader. When he was home, he had his face in a newspaper or even the cereal box on the table, whatever there was that had print, he was reading it. And I just remember watching him and thinking, I want that.

From these little symbols.

From those, yeah. That first experience of the symbol becoming the experience. Yes. Like going straight into the brain. I mean, how could you forget that?

Okay, great. Because I was gonna say two seconds ago, but this is yet another example of writing, and reading is magic. There's a bunch of magic that happens. There's a crazy symbol. There's no way that should make you think of the smell or taste or visual of an orange.

I completely agree with you. I say this all the time. It is a kind of truth. It makes me really sad to hear people say, well, they don't have time to read fiction or it's like secondary somehow to journalism. It's another kind of truth, but it's magical, as you say, because journalism informs you.

It's an empathy machine, for sure.

You actually put your life down on the bedside table or whatever, and you put on the life of another person. so their kids are your kids and their worries are your worries and you feel their fear. It's even deeper than empathy. It's losing yourself inside another life, and there's nothing to replace that. And I think it's awfully important to learn.

Yeah, what are they asking me to do? Right, right. What opinion are they asking me to support or deny?

Right, and what is the symbolism here? or whatever? Just to learn to read fiction and do that magical thing of putting fiction on when you're young enough that your brain, I think, still has the plasticity to enjoy it. Because I'm afraid that if you don't, like a second language, it's harder to learn that process later on.

And there's so much going on. We could look at biochemically, right? The part of your brain that's activated while reading a bit of news is generally to fall into the amygdala. If you're looking at this empathetic human experience, which predates all of our political opinions, predates all of our civilized governments, everything. It's the truest thing that we can tap into.

Yeah, I like what you just said, that it's the truest thing we can tap into. Well, I was trained as a biologist.

This excites me greatly. I'm an anthropology major, so the fact that we're both sitting here is hilarious.

Anthropology was my minor in graduate school. And so I'm really interested in the human condition, as we were for millennia. 300,000 years. Before this little blip of history, where we began getting all our information, not from people, but from an intermediate source. We evolved as social animals.

In group, out group.

Yeah, exactly. All of those things are just in us. And so I think it's interesting that fiction is the one medium of gaining information that kind of replicates the human experience.

Yeah, the early storytelling.

Getting the experience from another person, and the advantage is that we can get that information from someone who's not in our family or our group. A stranger. From a stranger who lives in another side of the world. It's a way that we can experience the other without that defensive otherness.

You can teleport in reading. You can time travel in reading. Everything we would hope that would be invented exists in this 3,000 year old tradition. Yep. Oh, my God.

It is so cool. When you think about the aliens, let's imagine they can't read.

Somehow they made it all the way here, but they can't read yet.

And they're looking at us and they're like, what's going on with those people? They're just staring at a paper and they're crying or laughing. How?

They probably think it's a slightly bigger phone. They can't read. Oh, they have these really big phones they occasionally look at. It seems to be at bed at night, on trains.

That was me looking at my dad when I was three. Like, what is it? What is the magic there? Because clearly it is. Yeah.

Also, I guess this is what the internet has become over time. But certainly when I was young, to be in holding Caulfield's brain and go, oh, there's another person that feels like me. That feels like this place is really abstract. That feels like this is all arbitrary. That these rules and all this stuff is very confusing.

Right, that feeling that someone has just touched you on the shoulder and said, yeah, me too. Well, as they say, it's windows and it's mirrors. Both are really important to see yourself and to see somebody, that you'll never be. Someone who's a different gender or so different that the only way you can really experience their reality is through a novel.

Yeah. Okay, so you already hinted at it, which is, you majored in biology and got masters in ecology and evolutionary biology. Let's go back even further. Okay. Dad was a physician.

Actually, I was born in Maryland. He was in the Navy, but I don't remember that part. We moved to Kentucky.

Yeah, Annapolis, you were born.

Who cares? My earliest memories are from Eastern Kentucky.

Okay, then I just wanna tell you more self-indulgence. So all my family's from Hazard, Kentucky. My mom was born in 1951.. So similar, feminist, all these things. So much of your story I feel very connected to.

Yeah, I always say that's what I did instead of second grade. Okay.

Skipped second grade in lieu of Congo.

Right, in lieu of Congo.

Which then was Zaire?

It was the Republic of Congo. then. We were there right after independence. So it was just a minute after Lumumba was killed, it was still up in the air and it hadn't become the dictatorship that it was under Mobutu. yet.

You didn't need to study anthro, you lived it. You did field work. You were doing an ethnography at seven years old.

Well, I'll tell you what, it really changed my life. It was a deep dive into the notion that what's true and right and good in one place can be very different in another. And, for example, I had never thought about being white before. And then I went to a place where nobody in the village had seen white kids before. they had maybe seen white adults.

Were they fairly fascinated by you?

That's one word for it.

Grabby? Handsy?

Yeah, like why don't you have any skin? Right.

Why are you, yeah.

And I had really long hair, which kids just kept trying to pull up.

And was it blonde? Like, that's so confusing.

It wasn't, but it was long, you know, and straight. It was just like, what is this weird stuff you have on your head? So I was very self-conscious and my brother and I just tried to learn ketubah and keep up with these kids who were so competent. By the age of probably nine or 10, all the kids in Kikongo were doing basically adult work. The girls were taking care of younger siblings.

Really quick, so dad was there doing health care work, mommy and dad? Yeah. Was it religious?

Zero religious component. I will say that a lot of the social services that existed in the Congo after independence, because the Belgians didn't allow Congolese people any education at all. So when the Belgians left, there was sort of a dearth of doctors, any kind of professions. And so there were religiously based groups that organized things like what you would say, doctors without borders now, to get people into places and kind of help with education, social welfare stuff. So there was probably a group of missionaries who helped set up this arrangement.

Where can I get the most bang for my buck?

Right, like where would I be the only physician within, you know, like 500 miles?

We're gonna see 300 patients a day.

This is it. Yeah, I wanna see leprosy. I wanna see, I mean, seriously. And we did. I mean, my sister was two.

Did you know? it was temporary?

Yeah. Were you scratching in the wall five?

I mean, that's, at least knowing like, this isn't, for, I would feel better.

It wasn't permanent.

It was a huge adventure. I really did do this instead of second grade. There was no schooling. My brother and I were just feral children. We were just left to our own devices.

Oh man.

Yeah, there were hard things about not having enough to eat.

So, on one hand we would go, dad's incredibly altruistic. But also, if I'm the child of dad, I could also say, little egomaniacal to drag all of us. You know, you have a hair up your ass. Now we all have to join you.

And not eat food for a year. Yeah, yeah.

And here's a wife who says, whither, thou goest? You know, I'm like, okay, honey. Yeah, I wouldn't do that. We'll just leave it at that. Congo's just an example.

How did you get into DePaul?

Was it challenging?

That's the question. Yeah.

So it was like this in Congo. It was like this throughout my childhood. If I wanted to know something, I had to figure it out. We had books in the house. My dad, as I mentioned, was a reader.

A louse? Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good for him.

You're going, you're crawling. fairly, however, that goes. Just this fascination with words was always there. And we had books and we had the bookmobile in the library. And so I just-.

Supplemented?

It wasn't even supplementation. It was like, that was the primary. I was an autodidact. For example, my brother and I decided we were going to read the Encyclopedia Britannica. I started at Z.

Oh, like you're tunneling.

By the time we meet, we're going to know everything.

Yes, well, if you're together.

That was our thinking. That was like, we're a team and we will know everything.

Can I ask how far you got?

We got pretty far. That's the sad part.

My brother and I had a lot of plans, but they would run out of stuff. We were going to build a raft and go across Lake Michigan.

Yeah, we had those plans too, but we learned Morse code. My brother and I taught ourselves Morse code, and we ran this wire through the register from my room to his. And so we would like tap out. It's really tedious. And we were saying things like, are you asleep yet?

That's an enormous gift.

It is.

You have to learn all this stuff, which no one wants to have to do anything. But if you're just on your own quest for knowledge, that's an entirely different endeavor.

I think that it's why I'm a novelist is I just feel like I can do anything.

No, I like that.

I hope that doesn't sound terrible. No, you feel competent.

The opposite is you felt in Congo, you became to feel competent.

Yeah, or anything. I need to know, anything. I need to become an expert on, I can.

It kind of sounds like you're on Gilligan's Island, a little bit. Kind of, yeah.

Without comedy, without the skipper. You know, when I see people worrying a whole lot about getting their kids into even the best preschool and worrying so much that kids will be at a disadvantage somehow in this horse race of education if they don't get the best and the best and the best. And I had to figure out how, just to get to go to college because people in my high school didn't. Nobody told us, oh, you need to take the SAT or anything like that. My brother and I figured that out from reading.

From the encyclopedia.

Thank God you had your brother.

You figured that out. Yeah, yeah. Because that was in the S's. Yeah, that's right.

SAT's.

SAT's.

I read this part. I couldn't do that. But definitely my brother and I were a team. It would have been different to be solo, but I didn't even know of the existence of the Ivy Leagues. This was a kind of long story.

Oh, this is hot.

Yeah, yeah.

Classical piano.

Dueling. What if they're a couple at a piano bar? Dueling pianos.

Dueling pianos, exactly. So yeah, I just figured out, cause we needed scholarships. And so I got myself to DePaul. They had a good music program and auditioned and got in on a piano scholarship. And I just thought, well, this'll work.

Was dad at all urging you to pursue medicine, or were you not inclined to pursue medicine? You obviously hold him in high regard.

When I was young, I wanted to do everything. I remember wanting to be a doctor and a farmer and I don't know, fly airplanes. Not that that was really an option. Concert pianist. Yeah, I kind of wanted to do everything.

Yeah, exactly.

Being a nautilus, you get to be everything.

What a great point.

I remember, I didn't really know that women could be doctors. That wasn't clear to me.

That's back in the day where the riddle, this may come from you.

Oh, the riddle.

Do you remember when we were kids, there was a riddle.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The doctor is not.

The doctor and his son are driving in a car. There's an accident. The father dies. The son's rushed to the OR and then the operating surgeon says, I can't operate on him. He's my son.

No, because the majority of students in med school now are women.

It's actually one of the encouraging things I've witnessed that we told them that riddle and they're like, this isn't a riddle.

Yeah, right. Yeah, what is wrong with you? But no, I do remember thinking about being a doctor and I remember kind of this turning moment in my life when I realized I couldn't do that because of empathy. I would hurt too much.

You had too much or you lacked it?

No, no, the opposite. I think I was maybe a little opposite of my dad. I knew I would be too invested. I thought that if I have to see people die, I will die. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You weren't so interested in seeing the leprosy.

he was super interested in seeing. No, no, it felt too painful to me to put my whole life into people's pain. I just couldn't go there. You know, I didn't know what I would do. I just knew I needed to get to college, because all of the women that I knew growing up were completely dependent on men, financially and, frankly, not very happy.

Yeah, most indentured servants aren't super happy.

Yeah, exactly, that's how it felt to me. I wanted to get out of indentured servitude and college was gonna be a ticket. And when I got there, it took me 10 minutes to figure out I'm not gonna be a classical pianist. Maybe there are like 10 job openings and I wasn't in the top 10.. So I realized that was not gonna pan out as far as the financial security end of things.

Well, great, because I look at your trajectory and I'm curious when that starts to seep in. I obviously know when you start writing, but at that point, when you joined biology, again, you have a lot of fantasies, which I appreciate, but what is the primary fantasy that will happen after you get this biology degree? Do you think you'll teach? I wasn't that clear.

I just thought I really like learning this stuff. It really clicked. I really love science.

Meiosis is sexy.

Yeah, yeah, well, biology is sexy, for a fact. It is. No, I just loved learning it and I figured this is practical. I'll get a job. I didn't really nail it down.

You go to France immediately after graduating for a year.

I just wanted to see the world. I got one of those $200 Icelandic air tickets.

I gotta interrupt you. This usually takes me the entire episode to do.

I know who it is.

You say it first.

Meryl Streep.

Yep, Meryl fucking Streep.

You have such a quality.

It's crazy. Do you get that a lot?

I do. Yeah, of course, of course. People ask me if we're related.

The voice is really similar too, yeah. I'm so glad we're on the same page.

I thought it like four minutes into this. I was like, oh my God.

Half the time. this annoys Monica, because we'll have like a really profound professor on or something, and I'm so distracted by what movie star they look like, and then eventually I'll take some time to say that.

We're like in the middle of an important conversation, which we are now as well.

Okay, here's the difference between her and me. I don't have a star down there on that sidewalk. Yet.

Yeah, you should have one, come on.

She's wonderful.

Okay, sorry, back to France.

I just got that $200 one-way ticket that you could get on Icelandic Air and hitchhiked all over Europe. I did whatever jobs that you could do. I worked on archeological digs.

No kidding.

One in Northern France.

Finding Neanderthal bones.

That's what we were after.

Northern Gaul.

Asterix.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, awesome.

You know, I just sort of fell into this French commune.

We don't know each other well enough yet, but did you take on a French lover? Of course. Yes. What about you? Obviously.

You know, just one thing led to another. I lived in Paris for a little while. Again, living with a whole bunch of people in a small apartment. Just the things you do. Then I worked in York, England for a while.

How did you know when it was time to come home?

Because my work visa ran out. Okay, that'll help.

That's how I knew. Was there a version in your mind that you would stay forever? Yeah. Why not? You were probably having the best time of your whole life.

I was, and I really liked looking back at my country and not being in it. There were things I missed, mostly having to do with, I don't know, it's so hard to explain. There's something about the way Americans reveal ourselves to each other, kind of an immediate closeness that you can establish. Like this conversation we're having.

Could not happen in Sweden.

And it wouldn't happen in France either. You don't think so.

No, and it wouldn't happen in the UK. I think that aspect of American culture is probably moving European cultures in the direction of-.

Well, I also think we have a historical explanation for that, which is like, we were the most multicultural place on the planet. If any group of people with their high dopamine levels could trust strangers, it's us. Right. And these homogeneous populations have a much different everything. Yeah.

That's the part I didn't miss. Yes, of course, yeah. But I'm a very verbal person. And while I became comfortable in French, I never was fluent enough to completely relax into words. I missed that.

Right. Build a McDonald's franchise? Yeah, for example.

Little did they know. you could do something that no one else could do, but they didn't know yet.

That wasn't proven yet. Okay, you have to come home. How do you then get to? Tucson, Arizona. Tucson, Arizona, yeah.

I was footloose. I'll say. I just wanted to see the West. I figured I'd stay a couple of weeks, honestly. I mean, I had probably $150 in my pocket and I just thought I'll go see the West, see what happens.

Right. Do you feel trapped by that? Someone with such wanderlust and an appetite for all experiences?

I mean, I would've just rolled on if I felt trapped. I wouldn't have thought of it this way until this very moment, but I spent most of my 20s running away from the notion of being trapped. Just because I grew up feeling so afraid of that, so determined not to be that woman who's tied down, that becomes its own trap. I was very reluctant to commit to relationships, to jobs, to place, to anything. I didn't have a home.

Oh, yeah, we all had it. You did?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, that keyhole that could be opened with a bobby pin.

Yeah. Or you could just pull it apart.

Or you could just pull it apart. And what you would've found in my seven-year-old diary was then I read a book and then I went to bed. It was really, really boring.

Sounds like my current journal.

But along with reading, writing was just that private thing I did to process my experience. And my diaries did become more interesting in my teens and more confessional and thoughtful.

I, too, started writing at a young age. There was also the element that I can't actually go have this adventurous life. I want right this second, but I can have it on paper.

It's funny, I not too long ago cleaned out the childhood home and found this cache of my short stories that I wrote when I was between ages of eight and 13.. Every single one of them was about a little boy with some kind of terrible disability. Uh-huh, you were really drawn to that. They were all in the first person. I am a boy with one leg.

Here I lie, a boy with one leg.

Well, but you were in an environment where you were exposed to a lot of horror.

Boys with one leg.

Yes, I am a boy with elephantiasis. I don't know what that was about, but I just didn't want to be a girl, was what it was.

It's very limiting.

Exactly, so. I think that my fantasies of being boys were based in that, but then the obstacle.

Well, because you couldn't escape how you really felt, which was disabled.

Was disabled, that's right. It leaks in. But yeah, I was writing these fanciful stories and I wrote poems, and I also feel like writing about what I lived through, I was always really conscious of time getting away, which is a weird thing. I mean, kids aren't supposed to worry about time flying by, but I did. Maybe because I love seeing people die.

Also, if you have a million fantasies in a romantic inner life, you have a finite amount of time. You're aware of that.

That's really a good point.

I was constantly like, oh, you gotta get the show on the road. Like, if we're gonna do all these things I wanna do, can I really wait till 12th grade before I head out to California?

Yeah, I would say I'm a very impatient person. I have always had to cultivate patience. That's something to have to work hard on.

Kids really help with that, don't they?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, like, the more in a hurry you are, the slower they go.

They're the antidote. If you're struggling with patience currently.

Yes, have a baby.

I feel like you could, not to be this capitalist girl, but you could sell those short stories now for so much money. You could give them to charity, the money, but wow, I'd love to read a Robert Pink's author.

You should make a cash offer, but what would you do?

14,000..

I don't know, I could get canceled.

No, you would, you couldn't. It could be bad.

But back to time, I just felt like time is this river and I can't pin it down. And writing about what I did today, what happened today, what I saw or thought, or what hurt today, or what I accomplished today, it just kind of nailed that river to its banks. That's how I felt. And so that was the reason I wrote. Not really for anything else, but me.

Right.

It felt frivolous.

Yeah. Growing up in a working class culture and a working class place, you don't say you want to be an artist when you grow up. Well, at least in Kentucky, you don't say that because it seems-.

Feels hoity-toity.

It feels hoity-toity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what it feels.

It feels upper class. It feels rich. We hate rich people.

Exactly. It's self-indulgent. What a luxury. And it's putting yourself above it. Like, I'm not one of you.

Yes, which happened on accident.

Yes, I just kept this to myself.

Can I say as a boy, as a young boy growing up in very blue-colored Detroit area, it was gay. That was my fear. I was writing, I was being creative. And so my little paradigm I was stuck in was that was gay.

Because it was feminine, which also is probably part of your feeling too. You want to be a powerful woman, which means more masculine.

Right. I need to do what the boys are doing. The STEM stuff.

And they're not writing poems.

Right, that's for sure.

It's all wild. That either of us would have had any thought like, this. thing needs to be private. It's so crazy.

Yeah, and God forbid if you'd wanted to be a dancer.

Oh, no, it wasn't on the table. People ask me that in interviews, like, when did you know you were going to be an actor? Did you act all through high school? I'm like, you didn't go to my high school. I would have acted in high school.

Not an option. That's how I felt. For a long time after I left Carlisle, Kentucky, being a writer was not an option. Saying I am a writer, I couldn't imagine it. I needed to be something real and practical.

Mm, interesting.

I didn't have any authority. I was writing short stories set in Tucson and they just felt fake, just as fake as those French stories that I wrote. There was no authenticity. And also, honestly, I had internalized the shame of being a hillbilly. I mean, we haven't even started on that.

Oh, no, we're getting there.

But just as I didn't understand I was white until I went to the Congo, I didn't understand I was a hillbilly till I went to college in a state where people stopped me in the cafeteria and made me say words so that they could laugh at me.

W-A-S-H.

Warsh. Yeah. Yeah, and syrp. What's this, syrp?

Smells like a polecat, what?

Yeah, just mocking my accent and saying, oh, you're wearing shoes, how cute. So I just kind of erased that, the accent you're hearing now. I code shift. When I'm in Kentucky or when I'm at home, when I'm talking to my neighbors, I talk the way I spoke growing up. But little by little and not really intentionally, I just neutralized my affect.

For sure.

So that people will listen to what you're saying instead of stopping at the words.

Really quick, you're arriving at a place that artists have to arrive at, which is you first start by trying to emulate things that you yourself find captivating or romantic, and you can't succeed at it. And then, hopefully, the road leads you to believing, actually my version is worthy of telling and my voice is worthy of listening to. And that's such a crazy road.

I agree with you completely. And I'd take it a step further. You have to get to, I do have something to say. My voice is worthy. Furthermore, it's the only thing I've got.

Yeah, exactly.

It's your only true asset. And if all you have out there are antennae for what you think people want from you, you got nothing, absolutely nothing. And I think that's where I was for a long time. And when I was maybe starting to take my writing a little more seriously, even though I still hid it through grad school, but I was writing poems and starting to share them and starting to share stories.

You're also writing for the school paper, you're doing science related.

Yeah, my first job after graduate school was as a scientific writer, just talking to scientists and translating what they said into English that other people could read. But the, what do you call it? When I fell down on the road to Damascus was, does that play? Yeah, it does.

It's really good, yeah, yeah, beautiful. Very poetic.

I was becoming aware that I had no authentic voice. somehow. It was like the cogs weren't catching. And somebody gave me a collection of short stories called Shiloh and Other Stories by Bobbi Ann Mason. Do you know Bobbi Ann Mason?

Never read, never heard of.

All right, she's Kentuckian. This collection, which would have been released early 80s, it was quite renowned. People really paid attention. It was kind of the minimalist era. It was sort of a little like-.

Raymond Carver, were you about to say?

Yeah, ask a little after that, but she's from Western Kentucky. And all of her short stories were about people who worked in Kmart and they did shift work, and they were my people. These stories were beautiful and they were respected.

How inspirational.

It was, like the scales fell from my eyes. It just really happened. all at once. I understood what I had been-.

Repressing.

Yeah, the enormity of the ordinary life.

And it can make the reader feel special. I remember those types of things made me feel special. Hemingway, I was like, oh, I'm not in World War, I. I'm not gonna sail a boat here. I don't catch marlins.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I know that feeling so intimately.

And it slows you down. It stops you in your own tracks and asks you to look at the lives that are being lived in your circle, in your own neighborhood, among your own people, and how brave they are, what they're dealing with, and that that's worthy. That's literature, too. And in my case, reading Bobbie Ann Mason, that I didn't need to be ashamed of my people.

They could be heroes of stories.

Well, and they weren't ridiculous. All along, I knew better, but especially when you're young, you just internalize the shame.

The world tells you something else.

The world tells you that you're worthless. So I did a deep dive. I read Wendell Berry. I had been exposed before, but I hadn't really paid attention. And so I read a lot of Kentucky authors.

And you were spelling out phonetically the accent?

No, but that was the bean trees. That was my first. No, I was being poetic. She needed a Kentucky accent. She needed a Kentucky identity.

Talk about making lemonade out of lemons.

Yeah, yeah.

I don't sleep very much and I call it my superpower.

God, maybe I should embrace that for me too, because I'm kind of just miserable half the night.

No, no, I'm serious about this. Embrace it. I mean, so long as you can still function, because some people just don't need as much sleep as others. You know, my doctor was saying, oh, do something really tedious that you, hey, like, scrub. Literally, my doctor said, get a toothbrush and scrub the grout.

On the same day. The two most pivotal moments of your life. Exactly. On the same day. Were one moment.

Twins, you birthed two, two careers.

You know, the two most important things that I am. Yes. Happened at once.

The cornerstones of your identity, all on the same day.

And, as you can imagine, I only noticed one of them at a time. You know, I was like hormonal. I'm the queen of the universe. I just produced a human being. And then, wait, what?

I also sold my book.

Yeah.

I want to read your journal from that day.

I gave it to my daughter actually. Oh, you did? Yeah. But that's when I finally was able to say I am a writer because I sold a novel. Yeah, you're in now.

A billion dollars. Yes.

Right, right, right. It was enough for me to live on while I wrote another book, and that changed everything.

Yeah, so you're off to the races. That's 1988..

That's right. The week it was released was the week my daughter learned to walk. Oh no.

Oh, my gosh. A little serendipitous. It is. So. then you go on a tear.

And you know what? You're leaving out. Also, there was a collection of short stories. Right. So I had four books in four years.

You guys like what I'm writing.

Here's some more. Yeah, I was able to get a bunch of books out pretty efficiently in those early years, because I could just live from advance to advance. I did some other work, some other freelance work, which was good for me, I think, to be a journalist, but I didn't have to go back to a day job.

You did the thing. You were supporting yourself. You weren't an indentured servant.

Exactly. I had my own money. Yes. I could be an artist and be independent. Independent, wow.

I'm only gonna fast forward because I wanna spend a lot of time on Demon Copperhead.

I think my publicist would agree with you on that.

Would like that.

Yes, I don't know if your publicist has told you, but Monica and I have already talked about Demon Copperhead. I bet you, 40 times in the last seven months.

I get these DMs from time to time. Aren't you an expert? Really liked your book.

I'm glad it made its way to you. That's good.

Life-wise, I just wanna throw in there that in 94, you get married to an ornithologist. We just had this incredible owl expert on.

Oh, yeah.

And we got really deep into birdwatchers, ornithologists.

Wait, who was on?

Jennifer Ackerman. Do you know, Jennifer Ackerman?

I don't know her personally, but I know her work.

In that conversation, she was very much drawn to birdwatching. And I said, do you think, if we had to generalize our stereotype, that ornithologists and birdwatchers are people who very little stimuli gets them excited? In fact, probably pretty sensitive to too much stimuli. Is this the case with Steven? Was that true of him?

He's also a rock and roll musician. Oh, wow. It goes right out the window. When I met him, he was the front man of a band. And a professor of psychology.

Very sexy. A rock and roll star and a professor?

Oh my God. Right, yeah, exactly. They're gonna implode. Right, no, he's the perfect guy.

Oh, that's awesome.

So, I forgot what was the question.

I just wanted to update on this story before we land at Demon. I just want to mention that you marry an ornithologist. You have a second daughter. 98, you write, or is released, the Poisonwood Bible. And that one gets a ton of attention.

Okay, how can it be deeper than you know nothing?

Oh, watch this. And I'm gonna name drop here. But Kevin Bacon, having dinner with him, and he goes, you know, I don't read books. I wish I liked them. I just don't like them.

Who cares? Doesn't matter who wrote it.

At that moment, it didn't. Of course.

I feel like it happened here, didn't it?

It did. I'm gonna walk her through that. Other prerequisite knowledge you must know is that I fucking hated the hillbilly elegy. Thank you. I fucking hated it.

And the one good thing about him running and winning the position he has now is it's proof.

Exactly.

That he's not one of us.

Well, that's the only thing that ultimately Monica had to.

I had to really eat my shorts, or whatever that phrase is. Because we had a lot of arguments around that, because he was like, I don't buy it. I know that world. And I'm also from the South. I'm from Georgia.

We had a lot of debates about it, right?

And then I had to be like, God, you were right. This fraud.

It's his worldview. Okay, here's my complaint about that book. We don't even have to say the name of it. He's entitled to write his memoir. The fact that that got pitched and bought wholesale as my memoir too, and your memoir too.

It was a self aggrandizement of his enormous accomplishment.

Well, it was like bootstraps. Yes, I went to the Ivy League. If you only work hard enough, you can be. And the thing is, what's heartbreaking about it is that it really validated the stereotype. It was so widely, sorry.

There's also a pull. Humans love a quote, underdog. People love an underdog story. That's what it felt like, a little bit, which is very problematic because it's again, this model minority issue where-.

Also he's pretending he's Basquiat and he's not.

Exactly.

Right.

An Ivy League school. It makes people believe, oh, well, if he can do it, what's wrong with everybody else? Yeah. And that's wholly wrong.

A lot of us recognize structural racism, institutional racism, but structural classism is just not talked about.

We just had Kerry Washington on and she had two different, jumping into different world experiences. One was her school was moved because they didn't want the white kids to have to bust into the Bronx. So they sent everyone to this Italian neighborhood. So that was her first kind of cultural clash. Then she ended up going to this very, very, very expensive on a scholarship Manhattan school.

That's right. Because America is the classless society. We've really, really bought that.

Yeah, the fallacy of meritocracy.

Yeah, I didn't write Demon Copperhead as an answer to anything. I don't want to give that guy credit for it. But when I read that, I was so angry about the lack of context that it gave me this hunger to write the great Appalachian novel. I wanted to somehow tell the whole story of what made us this way. It's the poorest hunk of America.

Yeah, talk about a company town.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's a company region. They deliberately kept out all other kinds of employment. So people had to work in the mines.

Yeah, you're like a rich kid.

Nobody knows any rich people, so there's no frame of reference for that.

It's like, who do you think you are? You're not better than me. Yeah, yeah.

And that's cultural, and that comes from a history of these companies that didn't want people to be smart, and a family culture where they don't want you to go to college because then you'll leave home and they'll never see you again. So it's all of a piece. It's not about laziness. So yeah, I wanted to write that novel, and my point of entry into it, I knew, would be the opioid epidemic, because that's just this freight train of exploitation, starting with timber, pulling out the timber, then pulling out the coal, then tobacco. The fact that Purdue Pharma looked at data and they targeted us, our exact region.

Well, it's very parallel to the crack epidemic of the 80s and the victims of that.

Yeah, the most vulnerable. Wait, so finish.

Okay, great, yeah, because I think you'll get a kick out of this, because it involves my hubris. So I get this book. I come on here, I start talking about it all the time, and here's what I am saying repeatedly on here. This is so epic, because I'm wrong on like nine accounts. So I'm like, boy, this book's the opposite of Hillbilly Algae.

We're like real time, and I'm like, who? Okay, I look it up, and I was like, oh, it's Barbara Kingsolver.

I'm like, wait, it's a woman?

Yeah, and I was like, yeah, and not just a woman. Like, one of the biggest authors of our time.

I'm like, it's a woman? So wait, she's not a boy? That is how insanely good your book is. Well, thank you. I honestly was on this mission to explain to everyone that this is what happens when an author actually has lived the thing, and blah, blah, blah, and it turns out I'm completely wrong.

Here's the thing about being an author. It's so much better than being an athlete or a model, or maybe even an actor, because you get better with age. There's no cap. The older you get, the more things you've been, the more lives you've had. You have wisdom.

Yes, of course.

And I mean, I just think you still do. And so I've seen on social media, how does this grandma person know what it's like to be a teenager? Well, you know what? I was. What am I allowed to say on here?

Everything you want.

Yes.

God damn it. I was a fucking teenager. There we go. I remember being 13 much better than I remember being 35.. The same, the same.

It's so foundational.

You feel things so intensely. There's so many firsts. I still have a teenager in me. I have all of those people I've ever been still in me. Many of them very unhappy.