Hannah Marriott, The Guardian ; ‘The damage is terrifying’: Barbara Kingsolver on Trump, rural America and the recovery home funded by her hit novel
"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.”...
“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.”...
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...
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.”...
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”."
