Author as celebrity

When hotpress spoke to Lionel Shriver in February of last year, her seventh novel We Need To Talk About Kevin had just hit the shelves and was already becoming the talk of the book business.

Narrated by Eva Khatchadourian, the mother of a teenage Columbine-style high school murderer, it was not so much an investigation into blank generation sociopathology as troubled motherhood. In daring to explore the mind-set of a woman who had taken a plain dislike to her child from birth, the novel seemed to expose one of the few remaining taboos in western culture. It also sold by the truckload, re-established Serpent’s Tail (who took on the book after some 30 other publishers had rejected it) as a publishing house of taste and vision, and instigated countless talk show debates and think-pieces – not to mention winning its author the Orange Prize.
Success was a long time coming for Shriver, who first published at the age of 29, and will turn 50 next May. Before Kevin, she kept solvent by supplementing her fictional endeavours with a parallel career as a freelance journalist in the US, Belfast and London. She’s currently reaping the benefits of a bestseller in the form of prestigious journalistic assignments, and has also signed a whopper of a deal with Harper Collins for her next book The Post-Birthday World.
Shriver is in Dublin to promote Double Fault, originally published in 1998, but now re-launched by Serpent’s Tail. It’s a book that crackles with themes that were secondary but still very much present in its successor: namely the power struggles between married men and women.
The principal characters are Willy Novinsky, an ambitious tennis pro, who has lived and breathed the sport since she was a child, but at 23 is fast approaching the twilight days of her career with few garlands to show for her dedication. She meets and marries Eric Oberdorf, a younger man with a natural aptitude for a game he views more as a means of making money than a vocation. When Eric’s career begins to eclipse that of his wife, it sparks an emotional and psychological civil war.
One could of course read great significance into Shriver’s predilection for unsympathetic and single-minded female protagonists who adopt male non de plumes (she changed her name from Margaret Ann at the age of 15). Fellow journalists regard her as a somewhat fierce interview. She’s certainly spiky, a sharp woman with a gutbucket laugh that defrosts the rather severe writerly composure, her scrupulous diction offset by the occasional anomalous Ulster-ism. When she says “shite” it’s less a diplomatic American’s deference to Hibernian argot than a throwback to her 12 years in Belfast. Today she’s installed in the lounge of a Dublin 2 hotel, attired somewhere to the right of Diane Keaton and left of Donna Tartt.

Peter Murphy: When we last spoke, the word of mouth being generated by Kevin was considerable. The book seemed to acquire an impetus that no one could manufacture or control.
Lionel Shriver: That’s what’s been so fascinating about the whole thing. You just don’t see it very often, and you can’t buy it. And people try to buy it all the time.
I didn’t realise it was written as far back as 2001, but in the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York, its content was met with some queasiness. After 9/11, there was a feeling that the appetite, or tolerance rather, for darker material had been depleted by world events. In fact it the reverse was true.
I think that’s what happened, and I think the word “appetite” is probably more apt. Cinema thought for a little while that nobody wanted to deal with anything gory or traumatic, but in fact it worked the opposite way.
There’s the paradox of horror movies – the comfort gotten…
From such small terrors! (laughs) It’s about something made-up, and so it feels safe. Although watching Independence Day after September 11 is very eerie – have you ever done that? It was a terrible movie, but if I remember correctly they burned down the Empire State Building.
The most controversial thing about Kevin wasn’t the actual violence, but the cold, repressed tone of the narrator.
It’s not that violent a book. Not that much happens that’s gory. There’s that one scene where he kills his classmates, but that’s described quite clinically. Have you read Double Fault You still sense a resistance towards career-driven women?
I think that while we are perfectly happy for women to have careers, there is still a sense that for women, a career option is a luxury or a choice, it’s not a requirement. And the notion of a woman as driven as a man in the field of work is still a little bit foreign – someone like Willy who is willing to even destroy her marriage for a career that is pretty much over anyway. Everyone loses. It’s put together pretty much like a classic Greek tragedy, replete with fatal flaw.
Have you been wrestling with this subject your whole life?
Competitiveness? Or rivalry?
More being narked by the unspoken assumption that you must, as a woman, justify your own ambition.
To some degree. And I’ve certainly been involved with the issue of power in relationships. My family is a patriarchy, always was. My father called the shots. My parents love each other, they have the marriage that they want, I wouldn’t diss it for them, but I also wouldn’t have it on my own account for all the tea in China. And I grew up feeling that, quite fiercely, from an early age. I admired my mother on many levels, but I would not want the worshipful relationship that she has to her husband for myself. But because I have that imprint, more than once I fell into a dangerously similar kind of relationship where I had very little power and was being tyrannised by someone that I was smitten with. So yes, that’s an issue.
The invisible hard-wiring which determines our actions can be pretty scary.
It is really scary. But the trouble is that self-awareness is not necessarily a cure. In fact, it can make you just a little bit more miserable: “Oh yeah, I’m repeating the pattern of my parents’ marriage – shite!” Then you keep doing it! I mean, I think I have gotten out of it. I’m married to someone who does something very different, so rivalry isn’t that much of a problem.
You’re married to a musician.
Yeah, a jazz drummer. So that’s nice, that’s a little cleaner. And frankly, in terms of who’s wielding more worldly power right now, there’s not much question, and I don’t think he would be bothered if I said in public that I do, just because of things having really changed for me in the last year. My husband has an ego on him, that’s for sure, but he’s been exemplary in managing a huge transition in my life in a way that I’m not sure I could manage on the other side. I’m not sure that I could be that gracious.
How did he feel about your Orange Prize win?
He was at my side when it was announced, and you cannot fake that kind of instantaneous exhilaration, you could see it in his face. In fact, somebody snapped a picture, and it’s one of my favourite pictures on earth. It’s not an especially good picture of me, but it’s a great picture of him: his face is just suffused with joy and gratitude, and if anything it hit him harder and faster than it hit me. Y’know, I do a lot of interviews, I get huge offers of journalism lately, I do a lot of public appearances – too many – but he never gets stroppy. I think that he is truly happy on my account. I’m always amazed by that in people. Maybe that exposes me for being a bit of a shithead myself, but I admire being able to marshal that kind of emotion on other people’s account. I think that’s just great. And I think it’s rare.
It bespeaks a certain confidence in one’s own abilities and place in the world.
And some confidence in your place in that person’s heart.
More to the point.
Yeah, if we’re talking about the romatic-sexual thing, it requires all kinds of security. And there’s no substitute for the real thing either. Just being well behaved doesn’t do it. And that’s one thing you can say for Willy in the book. She at least expresses her feelings; she’s not a big fake. I prefer honest ugliness to false good behaviour.
But a shift in the balance of power can have a catastrophic effect on a marriage.
Couples do have trouble with rivalry all the time, from who wins at chess to who dominates at dinner parties. It’s hard to talk about, not just with other people, but with each other, and that’s what makes it so poisonous. You don’t want to confess that sometimes you resent your spouse or don’t feel happy at their triumphs. It’s embarrassing and it seems hurtful and so it’s a lot easier just to swallow it. But anything you swallow builds up in your system in poisonous quantities. I spoke to somebody yesterday who said after she’d read the book she wanted to ring her boyfriend and confess to everything mean she’d ever thought. I discouraged her! But it’s funny because it’s such a huge part of any relationship, and it’s the one thing that you hardly ever address directly. Even though this is part of what I’m talking about professionally right now, my husband and I never talk about the power balance in our relationship.
It would be like delivering a running commentary on your internal organs as they go about their functions.
And what you say about it is dangerous. If I say, “Well I’ve got a lot more power than you”, that’s actually an exercise of that power. And what man wants to hear that? In fact, what woman wants to hear it? Nobody wants to hear it, but it’s so palpable. If you walk out of this hotel and everyone recognises you on the street and wants your autograph and admires you enormously and your wife walks out the door and nothing happens, that affects how you relate to each other. The world gets in.
It’s a classic scenario, though. Somebody’s been working their whole life towards their professional goal, achieves it, next thing their personal life falls apart.
Yes. The more meteoric the success, the more unstable the relationship that was formed before that success is likely to prove. That is a classic set-up.
Your situation was different. You had a long career as a novelist before achieving any notable success. Would it have screwed you up ten years earlier?
The success? No. (laughs).
How about if it been another five years coming?
Yes, because it wouldn’t have happened five years from now. It just wouldn’t have happened. Because I wouldn’t have kept writing books.
Really?
Yep. I’d at least have taken a breather. I have a feeling that another idea would have come along and it would have been hard to resist but, y’know, I was just exhausted. Eventually when you hit your head against a wall for so long, you get past the thick skull, you begin to hit brain. I hadn’t been able to publish the book I wrote before Kevin at all, it’s still sitting on my C-Drive. If I’d gone through two manuscripts that hadn’t seen the light of day after six books had been published… in career terms it just felt like hurtling backwards. I couldn’t stick that kind of humiliation. I don’t write for a desk drawer. There’s a huge proportion of people who publish a book or two, and then they just can’t get into print anymore.
Has the success of Kevin changed your approach to any serious degree?
Knowing I have an audience right now – and I have to append “right now” because I don’t trust any of it, I’ve been through too much to assume that this will carry on – but let’s say it holds and I will remain sale-able… I feel a renewal of the kind of ferocious, confident embrace of new subjects that I felt in my earlier books when I wasn’t as worried whether anyone was going to read them or not. I’m toying with the idea of doing a novel that contends with the travails of the American health care system, a book that has a lot to do with money, something about which I have strong feelings and everyone has to deal with one way or another.
Is it easier to contemplate the subject of money now you don’t have to worry about it so much?
Y’know that’s a good question. I can’t get used to not worrying about money. I can’t shake the habit. I still can’t turn anything down.
Freelance disease.
Yeah, freelance disease. Anything that comes in, I’ll do it. Monday, I had things to do up to the eyeballs, a review, I’d to go into the BBC and do a radio interview, I had to get ready for this tour, I won’t bore you, but The Guardian rang up at noon and wanted a 500-word piece. I said no, but the editor knows me pretty well, he knew what to do. He dangled two things: he dangled the topic: “There’s this survey out that says many British women prefer cleaning to sex and they spend 16 hours every week cleaning their home.” And I just said, “Bollocks!” And he said: “Two hundred and fifty!” (laughs) Right? And I just thought, one hour, 250 quid… It’s funny, I just can’t break the habit. I’ve been a freelancer for virtually all my life, whether as a journalist or a novelist, and I don’t ever assume that I’m going to see another cheque again.
How about becoming a more public face, which is a different currency. For instance, Kevin booked you a regular seat on BBC2’s Late Review panel.
Yeah, I tended to accept that stuff too, since, after all, it pays! And also it’s generally good for my books.
But it’s fun too, right?
It gets me out of the bloody house. But it’s dangerous. I don’t want to become one of those people who is entranced at the sound of her own voice. I mean, this whole thing about being regarded more highly or occasionally being recognised in public, it makes me a little queasy. I think it should make me queasy. You can become a parody of yourself, you can become just the kind of pretentious wanker you used to find insufferable when you were in obscurity.
Still, with writers it’s different. 95% of people don’t give a hoot. It’s not like you’re some ubiquitous actor who can’t finish a meal without getting bugged for an autograph.
Well, the whole scene has changed, because it used to be understood that writers like to keep to themselves, they might be curmudgeons or very shy.
I have a weakness for Googling images of authors I read when I was young, people like Philip K Dick and Ray Bradbury.
Yes, it used to be that you didn’t know what any of those authors looked like, many of their books would have been published without a photograph, and you didn’t care. I would’ve read some of those same books, I was a big science fiction fan when I was a teenager, and I wasn’t especially tortured with wondering what they looked like. To me an author was disembodied. I think there’s a loss in the industry’s eager promotion of these authors – us authors I’m afraid I have to say – it doesn’t seem to be very attuned to the fact that remoteness serves mystique, and the more you get to know somebody, inevitably the less impressive they get.
I suppose one of the reasons writers pick up a pen, apart from an obvious love of books, is because they don’t belong with the cool kids. Therefore when they grow up they shouldn’t be part of that club either.
That’s very well put. I wasn’t cool as a kid, I had buck teeth and very poor social skills. I just didn’t know how to handle myself. So I was the perfect type. And now I feel as if I’ve finally been admitted to the premiere seating in the cafeteria. But y’know, when you’ve been sitting in the geek seats for long enough, you’re a little suspicious of that ‘cool’ table. I mean, the degree to which my life has changed and how differently people treat me in the last year is a little scary.
I get the impression that you’ve always thrived on adversarial situations.
Yes. And I got quite used to having a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. It’s so weird, y’know, I go to a festival do or a library appearance, they’ll be sold out, and I really can’t get used to that, I’m staggered, it’s like, “Where do these people come from and why do they want to see me?” And it’s so easy, they already love me, I don’t have to do anything, I can read crap! It’s outrageous! (laughs) I’m not Little Miss Household Word right now, but proper celebrities just walk in a room and everyone’s pleased as punch just to be able to touch the hem of their garment. And I don’t think it’s an entirely pleasant experience.
Bob Dylan is probably the template of how an artist should handle that: just shut up and do your work.
I’m sure you saw the Dylan documentary (No Direction Home). I’m remembering the clip they had of that press conference, and he regards himself with a kind of militancy. What I recognise in those scenes is, “I’m not going to change for you and I’m not going to become your performing bear.” He’s holding onto his understanding of himself quite fiercely, and I have regard for that. It was interesting to see the footage of the present tense interview. He’s still the same person, he still owns himself, you can see it and hear it.b

Double Fault is published by Serpent’s Tail.