Category Archives: Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver: ‘A chosen death is an authorial act – I’ve never cared for stories that end on ellipses’

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The author’s new novel centres around an elderly couple bound in a suicide pact. Watching her parents age, the subject of dying with dignity is never far from her mind

For those of us with elderly parents, countless news broadcasts of bewildered residents cruelly exiled in care homes during this pandemic have been especially raw. Even so, I can’t be the only one who’s thought reflexively: “That will never be me.”

My friend Jolanta in Brooklyn has made that vow official. Put through quite the medical ringer herself, she tended to a difficult mother through a drawn-out decline. Not long ago, she declared to me fiercely that she’d no interest in living beyond the age of 80. Dead smart and not given to whimsy, Jolanta was already about 60, the very point at which old age starts to seem like something that might actually happen. I couldn’t help but wonder, should she indeed turn 80, will she take matters into her own hands – or not?

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Lionel Shriver v Cynthia Ozick: hurrah for the new literary beef

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The books world was growing worryingly well-mannered, but Ozick’s response – in verse – to a bad review by Shriver has revived the fine art of feuding

Whether it is Henry Fielding mocking Samuel Richardson’s painfully virtuous Pamela with his spoof, Shamela; Lillian Hellman suing Mary McCarthy for millions of dollars over her quip that “every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”; or Norman Mailer knocking Gore Vidal to the floor at a party (“Once again words fail Norman Mailer,” remarked Vidal), there is little more cheering than a good literary feud.

But it’s been a while since a proper throwdown. Richard Ford famously shot an Alice Hoffman book and posted it to her after she wrote a bad review of his book (“It’s not like I shot her,” he told the Guardian in 2003), and spat at The Underground Railway author Colson Whitehead over a similar offence, but Ford has lately refrained from such behaviour. Tom Wolfe’s death in 2018 put paid to his long-running and gloriously vituperative beef with John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving. (Irving is now the only survivor from that contretemps: does that mean he wins?)

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Lionel Shriver: ‘Some people think I’m evil incarnate’

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The author on publishing when bookshops are closed, being an ‘exercise nut’ and the dangers posed to writers by mob rule

Lionel Shriver is a US-born writer whose novels include Big Brother, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 and the bestselling We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the 2005 Orange prize and was turned into a film by Lynne Ramsay starring Tilda Swinton. In 2014, she won the BBC national short story award. Her new novel, The Motion of the Body Through Space, is about a long-married couple whose relationship is almost destroyed when one of them becomes obsessed with exercise.

What kind of lockdown are you having?
One of the most horrifying things about this experience is that it’s having so little effect on my life. I live in lockdown all the time! I don’t think this reflects well on me, but either I don’t have a very keen social appetite or I’m under-aware of when I’m starting to get lonely.

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