And, and that becomes a problem because it means that getting going on a fiction project can be infinitely delayed because there's always something else. If you've got a column due tomorrow, you can't say, well, I'd really rather work on chapter four. Lionel Shriver: Well, the difficulty is that non-fiction has a more hard and fast due date. And I guess also my heart.Īshley Rindsberg: And how do you manage the tension and how do you, how do you balance those two needs between the fiction and the nonfiction? So I would say that those two elements in my professional life are at some tension and there's there's competition between fiction and non-fiction for, for my time, if nothing else. I am currently a fortnightly columnists for the British Spectator, and also write for the London times with some frequency, though there's hardly a magazine or newspaper out there that haven't written something for. That includes hundreds of book reviews, many features, essays.
And in the process has, have also done a lot of journalism. That book became a little too successful but I've published many books since. My breakout book is widely acknowledged to be, "We Need To Talk About Kevin" published in 2003, about the mother of a school killer. Listen to the episode on your favorite podcast site: And it's given her remarkable freedom, not only to pen incisive, biting journalism but to write the kinds of books that will be remembered for decades to come, if not longer. The reality is that Shriver has had to blaze her own trail, which she's done. This counter-orthodox approach to ideas has certainly cost Shriver-after all, where is her Booker Prize, where is her National Book Award, where is her teaching gig at Columbia or Harvard or Iowa or wherever? As a journalist and essayist, she expresses views that diverge from those deemed acceptable by the literary establishment. She has published 14 (yes, 14!) novels, including the bestsellers The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047,Big Brother, So Much for That (a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award and the Wellcome Trust Book Prize), The Post-Birthday World ( Entertainment Weekly’s 2007 Book of the Year), and the Orange-Prize winner We Need to Talk About Kevin (a 2011 feature film starring Tilda Swinton).īeyond the astounding fact sheet, Shriver is a literary master, akin to the giants of literature in her ability to hone in on the emotional and psychic undercurrent shaping our lives, and translate this into compelling narrative wrought with a style that, in its precision and pacing, is uniquely Shriverian.ĭespite all this, Shriver has been shut out of the literary pantheon. Lionel Shriver is a literary force of nature.
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