Homesickness as Loneliness

An essay on the upside of homogeneity. And what to do when a novel sets up camp in your brain.

Aug 22, 2023

Last month, I spent a couple of weeks completely lost in the new Barbara Kingsolver novel, Demon Copperhead. And, honestly, I still don’t think I’ve come all the way back to myself. The book is based on Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (which I’ve never read, though I have now spent a considerable amount of time on the book’s Wikipedia page). Instead of painting a bleak picture of life in Victorian England, as Dickens does, Kingsolver paints a bleak picture of life in the Appalachian mountains at the start of the opioid epidemic. Which is to say: a picture of the place I grew up and the people who live there.

The book is set in Lee County, Virginia, where my mom was born, and her parents before her, and her grandparents too. My grandmother, Mamaw, lived most of her eighty-nine years within about an eight mile radius in the county’s coal camps and mining communities. Lee County is the pencil point of Virginia, isolated from the rest of the state by deep hollars* and winding mountain roads. It is not a tourist destination or even a place you might pass through on your way to somewhere else. All of which, you might imagine, makes an unlikely setting for the latest Great American Novel.

At first, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to read the book. I worried it would feel too familiar or be too dark or make me too angry. (I happen to have an unlimited supply of anger toward the Sackler family and Purdue Pharma for their role in the opioid crisis.) But my internet friend (and lovely real-life human) Liana Finck talked me into it.** And it didn’t take long to feel like the book was somehow rooting its way into the deepest parts of my psyche.

I started dreaming about the mountains. Not in any way that had a plot; I could just feel them. The way the dew settles on the grass in the night and burns off by mid-morning. The way a late summer thunderstorm rolls through out of nowhere, rattling gutters and stranding cars on the side of the highway. The smell of manure and the exact shade of green of a field full of tobacco.

I listened to the book on audio (the narrator does a nice job but you should know his accent is not quite right). And, some days, as I was biking to my office here in Vancouver, on the other side of a continent, it felt like what I was actually doing was sinking into the past. There was something surreal about moving through two geographies, two dialects, two homes at once—as if my past was somehow overlaid on the present.

Demon and I have little in common, but still the book felt as though it was written for me. Not like Kingsolver was sitting at her desk with me in mind, but like the book inhabited specific parts of my psychic terrain. I have stood on the sidelines of the football stadium where Demon plays, my pompoms held aloft in the cold November air. One of the major characters in the book is a football coach and, though my dad didn’t coach at Lee High School, he was a coach at a school that was amalgamated into Lee High School; that’s where he met my mom. And it’s not just that. At one point, the kids are cruising around Pennington Gap and they drive right down Joslyn Avenue, right in front of Mamaw’s house. (It is someone else’s house now, but Mamaw would’ve lived there back in the late 90s when the kids drove by. In my mind, she lives there still.)

The book has me thinking about what it means to have a history somewhere, not just to be known by the people around you, but to know that they know your parents and grandparents too. To have a relationship with a place that goes back not years or decades but generations. When I take my kids to the playground, we are surrounded by people who, like me, have followed various currents of migration, people who are far away from the places or cultures that birthed them. One dad is Turkish, his wife is Ukrainian. They moved here to escape the war and now they worry constantly about her family. Their son, who is two, cycles through three or four languages in a single sentence. Another dad is from Nigeria; he has twins the same age as mine and he told me, laughing, that their last flight home was so miserable they’ve decided not to go again for at least a few years. (I so get this laugh, and also the heartache behind it.) A set of grandparents is from China and, though they don’t speak much English and I speak no Chinese, they chat happily with us while their granddaughter shows my kids how to be more fearless on the slide.

Part of me loves that my kids will grow up taking this kind of community for granted. I had little access to cultures or languages other than my own (white, Protestant, rural) until my early twenties. It’s not just that I didn’t eat unfamiliar cuisine or watch movies in a language other than English or know people—anyone really—from elsewhere; it’s that I was genuinely afraid of these things. Their very foreignness made me nervous. I couldn’t imagine tasting sushi or curry, much less ever liking it, or craving it, or trying to make it at home. (I think often of the two Chinese students—brothers, maybe twins, who went by Benny and Hank—who, for a time, went to my high school. And I feel so much regret about how I could never see them as fully human; it seemed impossible that anyone who didn’t say y’all and eat biscuits could be like us—like me—in any meaningful way. If my classmates were curious about them, no one showed it. How lonely they must have felt.)

Eventually, gradually, I got over my fear of the unfamiliar, and I began to think of cultural homogeneousness as, well, bad. Maybe this is the predictable, knee jerk response that everyone has when they first leave a small town. The more nuanced way of thinking about it is this: in leaving home, I had made a trade-off. And what I had lost was a sense of depth, of belonging, of having a history rooted (in the sense of a tree’s roots, growing deeper with time, holding it more firmly in place) in dialect and food and tradition.

My children have never seen the mountains I grew up in, never tasted a tomato pulled ripe from the vine in my dad’s back yard. And yes, I know, they’re barely two. But still, I want them to know something about who they are. Of course I can read them books and show them pictures and play them music and bake them biscuits (which I do—they definitely know biscuits). But I don’t want to teach them my history; I want them to experience it, in their bodies. I want them to feel that it is their history, that these places belong to them, the same way I once felt that Lee County belonged to me, even though I didn’t grow up there.

The K-Mart is no longer there. But, if you’re interested, I found a YouTube channel full of short, boring videos of the abandoned K-Marts of the region.

The truth is that, as much as the unfamiliar scared me, I never planned to stay in Appalachia. When I was seventeen, I worked as a cashier at the local K-Mart and customers would come through my line with their gallon of milk and their bag of potting soil and their box of ammunition and their Martha Stewart brand bed sheets and I’d ask how their day was going and they’d look at me and say, “Now, where are you from?”

I was so pleased by this question. “Here,” I would answer, and smile at their surprise. I learned early to tone down my accent. Because even in our very homogenous part of the world, I knew that how I spoke conveyed something about who I was—or who I wanted to be. And I wanted a life that was bigger than Appalachia.

When I fantasized about the future, I imagined being the kind of person who could walk to the market to buy what I needed for dinner. Somehow this single image—of a neighborhood store where apples were displayed on fruit stands outside the front door, where you could buy milk in glass bottles, where they did not stock cans of Easy Cheese or giant styrofoam coolers with college football logos on the side—represented everything I wanted but did not have from life.

Of course now I understand that these fantasies weren’t about groceries. They were about social class.*** For so long this life I have now—the one without all the NASCAR bumper stickers—felt like a better life. Not just more suited to me but better as in morally superior. It took me years to unlearn this way of thinking. Eventually I could see that the problem wasn’t Appalachia, it was that I’d internalized nearly every stereotype there was about the place: Appalachia was backward, undereducated, culturally inadequate.

What I like about Kingsolver’s book is that it rejects this simple story. It insists that, despite the wreckage of the opioid crisis and the economic devastation from the boom and bust of coal, Appalachian culture is rich and distinctive and even enviable. Somehow she manages to squeeze the economic and political history of the region into casual conversations between the book’s characters. And even though I could see what she was doing—which is to say explaining the impact of endless resource extraction on land-based economies—it never felt didactic. It never felt anything less than urgent.

What I’ve been feeling lately is not quite homesickness but it is a kind of loneliness, a kind of longing. Or maybe it is a very specific version of homesickness. The version where, even though you really like your life, you sometimes long for a part of yourself that is no longer accessible, that is, in fact, invisible to everyone around you. Maybe that was what was so weird about biking around Vancouver while listening to a book set in the mountains of Virginia. I could see a familiar world in that book, but no one here, not even the people I’m closest to, can see that world in me.****

Yours,

Mandy

The Loneliness Project

Discussion about this post