The essays in Lionel Shriver’s new collection of non-fiction, Abominations, were chosen with clear criteria. “These pieces have stuck in my mind; they continue to pertain to the present; I can still stand to read them.” Three were chosen for another reason. “After publication, they brought hell and damnation down on my head.”
Shriver is best known for We Need to Talk about Kevin, her Orange Prize-winning tale of an ambivalent mother whose teenaged son goes on to barbarically murder rooms full of people, but many of her readers – she’s written 18 works of fiction – may also not be aware that she’s written opinion pieces for decades, often provocative ones.
She writes: “From the start, I especially relished supporting points of view that were underexpressed, unpopular or downright dangerous.” In the book, its essays mostly chosen from the past decade, she wades in on many of the cultural flashpoints of the 21st century: identity politics, cultural appropriation, free speech and religion, but also on matters of the heart such as the death of her brother, and more whimsical subjects, such as her “philological conservative” views about language, being a tag-along at Cannes, flat-pack furniture.
The real problem, she tells over a video call from New York, where she travels for most summers from her home in London, visiting friends and playing “mediocre at best” tennis, is that her essentially libertarian views are out of kilter with the overwhelmingly left-liberal view of most fiction writers and certainly book publishing as a whole. In the literary world, Shriver is considered an iconoclast, a troublemaker, the “Cassandra of American letters”. In person, she is serious and thoughtful, her speech after living in the UK for nearly 35 years a mixture of “iss-yoo” and “gob” as well as words like “yammer”, but she also laughs like a drain.
