Orange Prize for Fiction: > show > feature > Orange Lionel Shriver interview

Lionel Shriver

interview

What sparked 'We Need To Talk About Kevin'?

An intersection of the public and the private. I was in my early forties, and contending with the fact that my tentative decision to forgo children was soon to be writ in stone. What was I so afraid of? Meanwhile, stories kept pouring in from the U.S. about kids shooting up their high schools. I thought: that (among a host of other things) is what I’m afraid of.

How does that compare with the genesis of your other work?

Par for the course. I’ve always liked making connections between what I read in newspapers and whatever is personally biting my bum. I’m a news junkie. I calculated recently - with some alarm - that between an addiction to the on-line New York Times, a regular dander through the Daily Telegraph, appointment-TV with Jon Snow at 7PM, and a longstanding crush on Jeremy Paxman, I spend four hours-plus per day hoovering current events. Is this avoidance behavior? Do I really care about the fall of Rover, or is Chapter 10 going poorly?

Eva is an extraordinary character: breathtakingly honest and superbly unreliable as a narrator. How did you go about writing her?

Any number of readers and reviewers have conflated me the author and Eva the narrator. But we are not the same person. We have completely different family histories, and Eva, to me, is a discrete creation.

Nevetheless, I did stick the poor woman with some of my own least attractive qualities, which I carved out and put on the table for dissection. For example: It has taken me many years to come to terms with being American and to stop apologizing for my nationality (hey, everyone has to come from somewhere, there’s something wrong with every country, and we don’t get to choose where we’re born).

So I gave Eva an arm’s length, superior attitude toward her countrymen, a disdain that her son learns fatally to ape. I am fully aware that being ashamed of your origins, and imagining that you can opt out of your own culture by acting haughty about it, is unattractive. Yet I find that especially among leftwing Americans this self-hatred-disguised-as-elitism is endemic, and therefore worthy of inspection. The fact that I have erred in this direction myself on occasion gives me a sense of access. But you make a big mistake if you think that the author and the narrator are one and the same.

I recently heard a couple of TV reviewers declare fiercely to camera that not only did they not like Eva; they personally disliked the author. I laughed aloud. (It’s impossible to take it personally when someone claims to have taken a scunner to you and you’ve never met.) Eva = Shriver is a naïve reading of the novel. Like most of my fictional characters, Eva is a casserole, made of a variety of leftovers in my psychic fridge - a drizzle of acidic dressing, a few ambrosial florets of broccoli with orange sauce, and (since she is a fearful woman at core) a chunk of cold chicken.

As for Eva’s unreliability: she is not deliberately dissembling. She is telling the truth as she understands it. But she is, as are we all, compulsively self-justifying. It suits her purposes for Kevin to seem out of kilter from birth. Her story is rigged.

How – having not had children yourself – did you go about writing motherhood?

With trepidation, at first. And relying on hearsay; clearly, I haven’t gone through labour. But what eventually gave me courage was the recognition that the relationship between a parent and a child is still just a relationship between two particular people, in which case every permutation, every emotion under the sun, is possible. So the mental leap to motherhood wasn’t so different from imagining being 59 years old (the age of the protagonist in my first novel), or being a man (as many of my main characters have been).
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We Need to Talk About Kevin is incredibly challenging to read: both because of the subject matter and because of the way it forces readers to question their own morality, blind spots and hypocrisies (petty and otherwise!). How did it feel to write?

If I say “depressing,” I might seem to imply that the book is depressing to read, and I hope that it isn’t. In fact, I’m especially thrilled whenever someone points out that the novel is surprisingly funny (if not in a roll-on-the-floor sort of way). I’ve always hoped that the story has enough drive, and the text enough vitality, that it doesn’t send you to the medicine cabinet for an overdose of Paracetamol.

I was, however, pretty downcast during its composition. I had published six previous novels, none of which did very well commercially, and the seventh, which has still never been published, had been consigned to the computer equivalent of the desk drawer. If KEVIN, too, failed to see print, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to keep going as a fiction writer - which is all I have ever wanted to be from early childhood. When I recall my humor during that time, I honestly cannot tell you whether what got me down was the plot of the book, or the plot of my life.

What are you working on now?

Believe it or not, a romance. I needed a break.

Please could you tell us about what’s on your bookshelf? The old stuff, the unread stuff, the favourite books, the passing enthusiasm....

How much time do you have? There ain’t only one shelf.
Immediately to my left? I’ll Go to Bed at Noon by Gerard Woodward - Booker shortlist this year; wonderful novel, wish it had won.

Dennis Johnson’s Fiscadoro - qualifies as 'old stuff', but terrific; I’m a big fan of his work. The Devil’s Oasis by Bartle Bull - only got through it because I had to review it. Bloody awful. Empire Falls by Richard Russo - not nearly as good as his earlier novels, but the first thirty pages are a tour de force; read those and skip the rest. John Barth’s Coming Soon - another review book, and one that made me want to shoot myself in only two or three pages. For Barth, I guess that constitutes a kind of achievement, since when people want to shoot themselves reading my books I’m certain the number of pages required is at least five or six. Nick Hornby’s How to be Good - which, while you could call it middlebrow, I had a wonderful time reading, a quality that I prize above all others, and I love the idea of virtue being annoying. Also to my left, I keep a few copies of my own novels, which I suppose qualify as 'passing enthusiasms'. As for an example of the unread? The Northern Ireland Peace Process by Thomas Hennessy. I may be a news junkie, but I am not a masochist.

Is there one book by a woman (that isn’t eligible for this year’s prize) that you’d like to recommend to website visitors?

Maria McCann’s As Meat Loves Salt

Why that book?

Because it didn’t get the attention it deserved. It should have won prizes; it should have won the Orange. An historical novel - which I don’t usually read - set in Cromwellian England, it’s about a homosexual affair in the days that same-sex marriage was hardly in the headlines; rather, man-meets-man was a hanging offense. I relished the radical sexual tension McCann created, without ever becoming squalid or even very blow-by-blow (so to speak), and the story is sexy even for hetero readers. In fact, this riveting story works partly because it’s told by a straight woman, and so isn’t tainted by the faint self-justification of many gay authors’ work.

Is there anything else you’d like to tell website visitors?

Maybe I’d take this opportunity to set the record straight on one point. I was recently misquoted as having declared that I “hate children,” and these things have a way of passing into the cultural canon as fact. I have never said any such thing. I would consider indiscriminantly 'hating children' as ludicrous as 'hating men' or being a 'people person'.

As there are people and people, there are kids and kids. A friend of mine in DC has two no-longer-little girls who are bright, savvy, and hilarious whom I adore. Others I will not identify are perfect monsters, and they will probably grow up to become monstrous adults.

Indeed, this is a running theme in Kevin. As Eva writes herself, having sex without contraception is like 'leaving the front door unlocked.' There’s no telling who will walk in nine months later. Sometimes you’re lucky - your new houseguest is the sort who brings flowers for dinner and washes his own socks - and sometimes you’re not.

Thank you very much