An Open Letter To Barbara Kingsolver

Hillbilly Fabulist

I’ve always thought open letters were stupid.

But what’s a Substack with 150 readers for?

I’ll try to write something about October 7 tomorrow.

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Dear Barbara Kingsolver,

I guess a letter should start with “I hope this letter finds you well” but the picture of you in The Guardian shows a handsome woman in the pink, so I can dispense with that. You look great.

I came across the above-linked article by accident. One of the X accounts I consult referred to something else on the Guardian and as I scanned it boredly, I saw the link and clicked. I’ve never read any of your books, but your name has stuck with me — Kingsolver, what an interesting name — and it’s been on my mental bucket list of writers to check out for decades.

You don’t like J.D. Vance, his book, his politics, and the way he portrays rural Appalachian people. Fair enough. Not only is everyone entitled to his or her opinion¹ you’ve paid your dues. You are from Appalachia. I don’t like people basing judgements of New York City on scandalous personal memoirs. If everyone judged New York City on Prozac Nation, I’d be huffy too.

But there was something about your case against Vance that didn’t sit well with me. There was an echo in my mind. I’m just old enough to remember rabbis inveighing against Philip Roth in synagogues for the way he portrayed Jews in Portnoy’s Complaint. They thought that it (and Goodbye Columbus) would stir up anti-Semitism. When the books turned into best-sellers and Roth was anointed an American master, the hubbub died down.

In any case, I wanted to know about you, this Kingsolver of the bucket list, so I looked you up — not doxxed! — just looked you up on standard internet sources, thinking along these lines: “She’s amazing. She rose from a humble background in Appalachia to respected author.” To hail from Appalachia and become a prize-winning author is a tremendous accomplishment.

What I learned is that you may be from Appalachia but you are hardly of it.

You were born in Annapolis, Maryland while your physician-father was doing a stint in the US Navy. (As a physician, he would have been an officer.) He later moved the family back to his native Kentucky to start a practice. It seems from this obituary that Dr. Kingsolver was from a middle-class background. Born in 1928, when few people even graduated from high school, your father graduated from college and had the interests a child of reasonable prosperity would have:

At Lafayette High School and the University of Kentucky in Lexington², he loved studying science, exploring the natural world, playing chess and learning photography. He met Virginia (“Ginny”) Henry, his sweetheart of 70 years, in tenth grade Latin class. They were married from 1950 until her death in 2013, and were partners in setting up his family practice in Nicholas County, where his parents and grandparents had lived, after his internship and residency in Cincinnati and at St. Joseph Hospital in Lexington. He was drafted into the Navy and served as a physician in Annapolis, Maryland before returning to Carlisle to resume his practice.

Latin class, college and med school… doesn’t sound like grinding poverty to me. At some point Dr. Kingsolver did charity medical work in the Congo — admirable, but hardly the sort of thing that a struggling doctor who came from a disadvantaged background would do.

In short, you come from a prosperous, educated, solidly professional background.

In the Guardian article, there is zero hint of this. On the contrary, you’re presented as a literary Dolly Parton who made it out of a shack with no running water:

“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.

Hey. We all do a bit of self-promotion, mythologizing, story-telling. If someone were to write about me in the Guardian, I would tell them my dad went no further than the 9th grade. He was a waiter in a theater restaurant during the Golden Age of Broadway. He waited on every famous actor and actress, and every great boxer (because the restaurant was a few blocks away from Stillman’s Gym), was in the joint when the Mafia beat up Jimmy Breslin as he was sitting at the bar, and so on. Colorful, no?

I also grew up in a house full of books and had total access to an excellent (if stultifying) educational system. I would tell them that lack of access to conventional opportunities isn’t one of my regrets. It was lack of access to things that I would have been good at but which weren’t valued when and where I was growing up. ³

Nor was it with you. Due to your class background, you were able to study classical piano (switching to biology) at DePauw University. What kind of hillbilly goes to a private college with years of solid training in classical piano? They don’t.

I would never lie about my upbringing and say that I grew up in a working class background where literacy was downgraded. I grew up around a lot of palookas — but I was never one of them. Same as you.

To pass off yourself as an aggrieved representative of a disfavored people is the height of careerism, which is probably the most galling thing about it.

Her neighbours, she says, saw through him immediately: “The hollowness, the fact that he isn’t really one of us.”

Puhleeze. Again: Ms. Kingsolver, you are a doctor’s daughter who happened to grow up in Appalachia. You aren’t “one of them.”

Enough of your bullshit.

About Vance — he has been scrupulously honest about who he is and where he came from. No lies, no misrepresentations, no humble-bragging. If anyone claims he’s exaggerated or made up tales, please tell me.⁴

Do I think that you have a right to criticize Vance from an honest perspective? Sure! It would have been perfectly OK of you to say something like this:

“I’m not a hillbilly. I grew up a middle-class doctor’s daughter around them but I am not one of them. I feel empathy for them and their plight, which is difficult to characterize because their exclusion isn’t based on race, which is something Americans can actually see and which was one codified by law. Hillbilly exclusion was one of the spirit and not the letter of the law.

J.D. Vance is the real deal. His people came up from grinding poverty and by luck and pluck he escaped. I don’t agree with his conclusions at all. I think that bootstraps don’t apply to people whose legs have been cut off. But I can’t gainsay his authenticity.”

You didn’t do that. You deliberately mislead people about your background and trashed the truthfulness of another writer who was self-laceratingly honest about his, for strictly political reasons.

Ironically, the only writer whose work I now have interest in reading is J.D. Vance. I’ve moved you from the bucket list to the bin.

Sincerely,

Diana Murray

P.S. Your father sounds like a wonderful man. You should honor his legacy more faithfully.

1. I recently got into a back-and-forth about this right here on Substack. My interlocutor irritably contended that “no one is entitled to anything.” To which I responded, “that is your opinion, to which you are entitled.”

2. I don’t think that Lexington, KY itself is Appalachia, although I welcome correction. I think it’s from bluegrass country and is wealthy.

3. Specifically: languages, art, handcrafts, tennis, and singing lessons.

4. Angela’s Ashes has been questioned on factual grounds. I have enough on my plate and I take no sides. I’m simply pointing out that that Angela’s Ashes is still a literary darling despite its veracity being questioned.