...
“I can tell you that Appalachian people felt betrayed by that book a long time before he became a Republican politician. I’ll begin by saying: anyone is entitled to write a memoir. That’s his story, fine. But for him to say that his story explains all of us – I say, no, I resent that, because it’s very condescending. There’s this subtext all the way through it that suggests we’re in a boat that’s sinking because we’re lazy, unambitious and uncreative, which I resent.”
The positive responses to the book, she believes, were born of the fact that it simply confirmed well-worn stereotypes. “I’ve dealt with this condescension, this anti-hillbilly bigotry for a lot of my life. I didn’t realise it was a problem until I left Kentucky and went to college [she went to university in Indiana] and people made fun of my accent, and said things like: ‘Look at you, you’re wearing shoes, ha ha!’” She pauses. “You know, it’s more insidious than that. Even as a writer, I feel like my whole life until Demon Copperhead [her Pulitzer prize-winning 2022 novel, which is set in modern Appalachia] I was snubbed because I’m rural, I’m from this place that’s considered backward. I’m quite used to it. But it [Vance’s book] really made a lot of us angry that this became the explanation for us.”
Her neighbours, she says, saw through him immediately: “The hollowness, the fact that he isn’t really one of us.” And perhaps this only increased her determination to write a book like Demon Copperhead, which tackles head on the agonising effects of the opioid crisis in Appalachia: “We have to talk about history. This was done to us. This region has been treated as a kind of internal colony exploited by the outside. It was just so personal for him [Vance]. There was no analysis, and no compassion. It was just: if I can survive, anyone can survive.”
