Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Kingsolver used royalties from her latest novel to open a recovery center for women struggling with addiction. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
Barbara Kingsolver Used ‘Demon Copperhead’ Profits to Open a Recovery Center
The recovery center in Appalachia offers a wide variety of services and supports for women who are navigating re-entering society.
Author Barbara Kingsolver is too close to her material — in a good way.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist recently celebrated the opening of a women’s recovery center she started with the royalties from her most recent bestseller, Demon Copperhead, whose plot revolves around people in Appalachia who have struggled with opioid addiction.
The Higher Ground Women’s Recovery Residence, in rural Pennington Gap, Va., offers a supportive residential facility for women as they navigate re-entering society and learn to live without drugs. Many women who are there came either from jail or a treatment center.
Higher Ground offers a variety of support services, including crafting classes and personal finance education, and features one- and two-person bedrooms, a communal kitchen and a den. Kingsolver, who grew up in Appalachia and has seen the devastating effects of the opioid crisis there, said she wanted to “cast my net back over all of the extractive industries that have come to this place, taken out what was good, and left behind a mess.”
The epidemic “has changed so much of the texture of this place,” upending families and communities, she added.
Demon Copperhead, which reimagines Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, revolves around a boy who grows up in southwest Virginia in the late 1980s to a teen mom who is addicted to painkillers. After she overdoses, he becomes a ward of the state and has to navigate poverty in a broken health care system, as pharmaceutical companies with shady motives loom large.
The book has sold over 3 million copies and allowed Kingsolver to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to opening the women’s facility.
Syara Parsell, one of Higher Ground’s first residents, was able to receive help finding a job and enrolling in community college courses after staying at the facility. The 35-year-old told CBS News that she used drugs as an escape from social anxiety, but she has since been embraced by her fellow housemates.
“Together,” she said, “we figure it out.”
Donations have poured in for Higher Ground, which receives no federal or state funding. Kingsolver also recently bought the building next door with plans to open a thrift store for the women to learn retail skills and for an additional source of funding.
