We Need to Talk About Kevin
A Novel
by Lionel Shriver

List Price: $13.95
Pages: 432
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 9780061124297
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Lionel Shriver never wanted to have children. Public vs private angst on the subject provided the seed for We Need to Talk About Kevin, her seventh novel.

Read an essay by Lionel Shriver: Separation From Birth

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Q: Was writing We Need To Talk About Kevin a smooth creative process or did you find it to be more difficult -- technically or emotionally -- than you expected?

LS: It was admittedly draining. And throughout, I was anxious that because I had never had a child myself, I didn't know what I was talking about and readers who were parents would catch me out.

Q: Why did you decide to write We Need To Talk About Kevin as an epistolary novel?

LS: While I did write my first draft in the second person, addressing it directly to Eva's husband Franklin, the novel did not start out in letters. Later I decided to literalize her appeal to Franklin in order to avoid the implicit self-indulgence of her seeming to write in a journal or something, and also to deliberately help to disguise the nature of my ending.

Q: How closely did you research people who had actually been involved in these incidents?

LS: I did lots of online research, but I was mortified by the prospect of interviewing the parents of real-life shooters. So I didn't. I thought, their lives are hard enough without some stranger bugging them to spill their guts for her precious novel. And no amount of non-fiction research was going to tell a good story from scratch for me; there's no substitute for sitting down and making it up. That's my job.

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Separation From Birth
by Lionel Shriver

Summary: Novelist Lionel Shriver has been queasy about the prospect of having children since she was a child herself. By her early forties, with little time remaining before the biological clock struck twelve, Ms. Shriver decided to confront what she most feared. What could be worse than having a baby, and then concluding that you'd made a mistake, when it was too late? Composing her seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, she explored what may be American motherhood's greatest nightmare: a son who senses his mother's rejection, and takes out his despair, a la Columbine, on his fellow high school students. Yet rather than write herself through her anxieties about maternity and out the other side, Ms. Shriver scared herself witless. Still childless and now 46, this writer rues her own cowardice, and admires the faith, self-sacrifice, and trust that moves braver women, even with access to contraception, to perpetuate the human race.

I can roughly divide my novels into two stacks. They either address what I want, or what I fear. Perhaps to my spiritual detriment, the latter pile is the taller, and from my crowd of phobias -- of failure, other people -- one rose head and shoulders above the rest about three years ago.

I was petrified of having children.

I first foreswore motherhood when I was eight years old. The rueful, she'll-soon-change-her-tune smirk that this proclamation elicited from my elders only solidified my resolve. As for what prompted my precocious aversion, I can only speculate. Having borne my two brothers and me did seem to have further entrenched my own mother's firm second-in-command status in our family. As for my ambitious, restive father, he was forever relishing aloud that glorious day when he could finally have "adult conversations" with his children. While he may have meant us to take this impatience as a compliment, I couldn't help but reflect that it would have been more efficient by half should he have conducted his "adult conversations" with adults, period. Moreover, he made little effort to disguise the fact that until that day arrived we were an annoyance. But rather than feel wounded, I think I sympathized. We were annoying. We were loud and sneaky and broke things. At eight, maybe I was simply horrified by the prospect of being saddled with myself.

As a teenager, I began to hedge my bets. My future incarnation might prove subject to all manner of preposterous urges, even if I already suspected by 15 that an obstinacy -- a pigheaded commitment to doing what I'd always said I'd do if only because I'd always said it -- was with me for life. So I started to append casually to my I-don't-want-babies line, "Oh, at most I can see being one of those women who has a kid at 45." The caveat seemed safe, since when you're 15 the age of 45 is a distant abstraction. 45 = never.

Well, surprise, surprise. I'm 46.

It was the encroaching proximity of this adolescent due-date of sorts -- coinciding with the imminent closure of the reproductive window -- that moved me to address this matter at 42. I was in a stable relationship of six years' standing. If my own earnings were in freelance flux, my partner had a steady job; we could afford parenthood, financially. And my partner was nightmarishly accommodating on this issue; whether we had a family fell into the same category as the material for our living-room curtains. As I picked a washable rayon for the drapes, I could select the fabric of our domestic life, too.

So what, exactly, was I afraid of? Big, fat fears are often bundles of smaller ones, and any woman contemplating what never used to be a choice could rattle off the downsides of motherhood: hassle and expense (and not only of money). An acceptance that comes reluctantly to boomers of being a grown-up for keeps. The relegation of one's own ambitions so far to the back burner that they fall off the stove. A precipitous social demotion that I inferred from the chuckle of those smug adults who discounted my renunciations at eight: You say you want to be a writer, but you're a girl, and all you really want to be is a mommy.

And then there's the risk that the project does not go strictly according to plan, and little Tiffany or Jason has problems. (Shockingly, when asked in a recent poll what they would do if assured that their unborn child would become obese, a full 17% of American respondents would abort.) Since just about any stranger could come knocking nine months later, coitus without contraception is like leaving your front door unlocked. Unsafe sex, indeed.

Yet my greatest fear was of the ambivalence itself. I hadn't wanted to be a mother since I was eight. What if I bit the reproductive bullet, and this queasiness failed to abate? What if, even, it got worse? Imagine bearing a child and then realizing, with this helpless, irrevocable little person squalling in its crib, that you'd made a mistake. Who really, in that instance, would pay the price?

Meanwhile, a series of barely pubescent boys had started shooting their classmates. Like most Americans, I was appalled. The perpetrators were all white, substantially middle-class, and couldn't endure a little ribbing from peers or rejection from girlfriends without taking their tawdry, quotidian pain out on other people with a disproportionate vehemence that boggled the mind. I found myself taking a personal dislike to these kids. Apparently I was obliged to add to my list of motherhood's shortcomings, along with diapers and lost sleep: son might turn out to be a killer.

Out of this intersection of private and public angst I wrote my seventh novel, in which a woman -- a woman like me -- overcomes grave misgivings about motherhood to take the plunge. Yet once her baby is born, those misgivings burgeon to full-blown lament. Her difficult son twists into modern-day cliché: one more murderous high-school miscreant. Whether the boy is hopelessly mangled by his mother's coldness or is innately disagreeable in a way that fosters her dislike is a question the novel tackles but never quite resolves. After all, crude oppositions like "nature versus nurture" are rarely reconciled in real life.

But I have a confession. I faced my fears, and they bested me. Throughout the composition of that worst-case scenario, I continued to use contraception. I am still not trying to get pregnant. Last May, I turned 46. My teenage escape clause notwithstanding, I will never be "one of those women" who has a child at 45.

Nevertheless, there is something nihilistic about refusing to reproduce, selfish in the worst way. Granted, the latterday Western emphasis on personal satisfaction has a logic to it; to find meaning in life through children is effectively to foist the existential dilemma onto the next generation, which will presumably foist it onto the next, ad infinitum, and no one ever has to justify why we're here. Yet to remain deliberately childless expresses a lack of faith, as my protagonist puts it so ineloquently, "in the whole human thing." Take individual fulfillment at the expense of parenthood to the limit, and one generation has a cracking good time, after which the entire human race, poof, vanishes from the planet.

For a long time I felt vaguely superior to parents, whom I regarded as having been suckered. And certainly the list of reasons to give progeny a miss is long as your arm: tedium, exhaustion, son might turn out to be a killer. I couldn't do it; I am too much of a coward. But despite the money, the risk, and the bother, most folks -- with recourse to reliable birth control -- still have children. Nowadays, I'm anything but scornful.

I'm impressed.

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