LS: Oh yes, and then there is the whole Columbine business, which people have strong feelings about. RB: I would argue that there is more than one mine in this book. The main way I got around the unpleasantness of violating that taboo is by channeling my energies through that honesty into her forthrightness her willingness to look her own unpleasantness in the face. A mother who wouldn't have picked this person to be her son and was honest enough to admit that to herself.
That's commonly one of the deepest and least conditional of relationships.
I think that bond between mother and son is especially inviolable, I would say even beyond Western culture. Lionel Shriver: I certainly knew that if I was going to address a subject of a woman who essentially doesn't like her own son-I don't think that's a minefield, I think that it's just a mine- it was an idea that was intrinsically going to make my main character seem unattractive to most readers. Robert Birnbaum: As you are writing We Need To Talk About Kevin, do you have a sense of what a minefield this story is and the issues it raises? Eva, in her scathingly honest and often witty recollections of her relationship with Franklin, her agonized decision to give up a life of traveling for motherhood, and her painful years with (the truly hideous and apathetic) Kevin, faces the question head on: Am I responsible for what my child has done?" We Need to Talk About Kevin is about motherhood and the possibility that one's ambivalence about breeding might influence the growth and development of a child. As Suzy Hansen writes at : "What we get … is an interesting, thoughtful, and surprisingly credible thriller. We Need to Talk About Kevin is the story of Eva Khatchadourian's retrospective account of her son's life up to and beyond the day he went to his high school and began shooting his classmates.
Currently Shriver lives in New York and is, as one might expect, working on her next novel. She attended Columbia University and has lived for many years in Belfast, Northern Ireland and has written for the Wall Street Journal, The Economist and the Philadelphia Enquirer. Her previous novels are Double Fault, A Perfectly Good Family, Game Control, The Bleeding Heart, Checker and the Derailleurs and The Female of the Species. Lionel Shriver's latest novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, is her seventh.
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