I like awkward truths

Apr 19 2008 by Emma Pinch, Liverpool Daily Post

Emma Pinch talks to controversial author Lionel Shriver about tackling difficult subjects

LIONEL SHRIVER doesn’t shy away from awkwardness. In fact she relishes it. The woman who deliberately changed her name from Margaret to a man’s as an adolescent, abruptly pulls me up when the chat strays from the “anodyne”.

But it’s hard to keep her strictly on the path of “anodyne”.

Shining a torch in dark corners that we’d rather not visit is what she does best, and it’s what makes her books such compulsive reads.

Her Orange Prize winner, We Need To Talk About Kevin, dealt with ambivalent mother love, and the destructive seed it could sow.

“I’m a sucker for difficult subjects,” she says. “I like awkward truths. I’m usually inspired by an issue or myself, or an interaction of the two.”

It turned out that Kevin, which tells – through his mother’s eyes – the story of a boy who went on to commit a high school massacre, was an issue that struck a chord with many women, and Shriver received an avalanche of letters from prospective and existing mothers.

The 50-year-old, who never herself felt the powerful urge to reproduce (itself a sentiment that the world isn’t comfortable with) says the novel provided a platform to air untalked-about parental issues.

“This novel made it easier to be honest about what might confront parents,” she says.

“A lot of people said they were worried about loss of self, when you get so caught up in caring for someone else. It’s easy to lose a sense of yourself when you’re up to your neck in baby food, when you’re used to being a hard working professional.”

But the biggest taboo it seemed to break, she says, was the idea that we may not love our children all the time.

“The novel let parents admit that they don’t always love them, even though they do in the big picture. Parents and children go through whole phases of being on different sides and it becomes a war.

“Maybe eventually they come back round but they’re not emotionally always acting according to the script.

“Mother-child bonding isn’t always instantaneous. Individual experience is going to be different and you shouldn’t berate yourself.”

Her latest novel, The Post­Birthday World, out now in paperback, deals with the unsettling what-might-have-beens if romantic choices had gone another way.

The woman in question is Irina, a children’s book illustrator who has dinner with an acquaintance, snooker player Ramsey, and he kisses her. The novel then pursues two possible outcomes – she doesn't kiss him back, and goes home to her regular partner, Lawrence; or she does kiss him back, leaves Lawrence, and marries Ramsey.

It was a situation Shriver once found herself in.

“Two fabulous people who were different and I had to make a choice,” she explains. “I felt haunted by it for many years afterwards. Less so now.”

“We all live these questions,” she continues. “You had a relationship when you were 25 and it exploded and you ended up with someone else, and you wonder what it would have been like if you’d stayed together with the other guy. These decisions do feel like they could make or break your life.”

The book asks, does our choice of partner affect our friendships or relationships with our families?

“Does it affect your own character? I think it does a little bit. It’s fun and interesting to consider.”

Shriver’s currently interested another elephant in the room – immigration. She recently greeted a report by the House of Lords, dismissing some of the theories used by the Government to underpin its immigration policies, with something like glee.

“I’m always intrigued when the truth flies in the face of orthodoxy,” she says. “That report just issued by the Lords, that’s not what you are supposed to say – the concept that immigration is not good for the economy, it doesn’t improve anyone’s life in Britain at all.

“That’s completely the opposite of what the Government has been saying for years. I value that conflict.”

She’s always been interested in demography, she says, and immigration is one of the deepest forces of human history, its effects continue to be felt.

“I’m very sympathetic to the people born in countries that were poor, where there are very high fatality rates, and the people left behind. Those with get up and go, get up and leave.”

But the overriding feeling, especially in places where no one any longer speaks English, she says, is the uncomfortable one of colonisation. “The rhetoric is accept and tolerate the Muslim culture, the truth is much more awkward. The experience on the ground becomes one of being taken over and that is emotionally awkward, especially in the US which is a nation of immigration.”

LIONEL SHRIVER is in Liverpool today for the 2008 Orange Broadband Readers Day at the Bluecoat, Liverpool.

Tickets for the event are limited and cost £10, with £8 for concessions, including a book goody bag.

The Post Birthday World by Lionel Shriver is published by Harper Perennia, £5.99.

emmapinch