An Hour with Lionel Shriver

Written by Rachel Ogier

An Hour with Lionel Shriver in conversation with Charlotte Grimshaw

Death and So Much More

Lionel Shriver is one of the literary superstars of this year’s Auckland Readers and Writers Festival. Despite her ten novels from 1986 onwards, and a journalistic career which includes a spell at The Economist and a current place at The Guardian, Shriver was relatively unknown until her Orange Prize Winning We Need To Talk About Kevin hit the shelves in 2003.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is a nightmare story of a mother’s relationship with her son, Kevin. It describes how she comes to terms with Kevin’s crime: a school massacre. It’s a heavy story. Shriver’s latest novel also deals with some pretty serious subject matter.

The conversation focused on her new novel, So Much For That. It’s a story about family, dreams, and death. The narrative follows a dying woman, and the astronomical expense of her world-class - and inevitably futile - health care.

So Much For That was released in the US in the same month that Obama’s healthcare reform bill changed much of the political landscape. Shriver believes that the extra publicity which this bill lent the book also hurt it commercially. After all, no one wants to read a political treatise about death. But that, explained Shriver, is not what the book is about. Instead, the book “errs on the side of story” and the very human characters are the reason why - despite the subject matter - the book has been called ‘a page turner’.

Shriver spent a lot of time speaking. Her monologues answered the questions posed by Charlotte Grimshaw, a literary giant in her own right, and anticipated the next three. “My father was a minister. I guess you can tell" she said.

Death, Shriver pointed out, is a natural part of life. “Illnesses and death cannot be legislated away by congress or anybody else". She spoke of an idyllic past, when dying took place in the home and children grew up watching their grandparents die.

Shriver argues that “we have medicated the end of life". Now death takes place not at home, but in a hospital bed. This separation of dying from everyday life has affected our ability to deal with death and the dying.

“This novel is anti-western-world" said Shriver, noting she had travelled extensively and the non-western-world isn’t so bad. So Much For That attacks large parts of America (I counted health care, education, the suburbs, New York city, the artistic lifestyle, aged care, insurance, working life), but to me, the novel felt more anti-American than Anti-Western. It may also be worth noting that Shriver lives in London.

Terminal illness, said Shriver, can be an opportunity to “reflect on life and leave relationships in a state of grace”. I have heard this view before (and once from a doctor) and find it hard to equate this with the reality of a loved one dying by inches. Shriver had obviously struggled with the idea of a terminal illness being a blessing. She professed that personally, she would find it easier to be hit by a bus. “I like to imagine I would be better at facing my own death than [the character, Glynis], but maybe I fear I would be just like her… the way she faces death is what I am afraid I will do".

In So Much For That, Glynis goes about the business of dying poorly. Glynis is told that cancer is a battle and she must be a good solider and fight against it: “whether or not she perishes is a test of her own will power”. It’s a common conceit around cancer, but Shriver’s not buying it. “I think it’s hard enough to be dying without being blamed for it".

The reading from So Much For That focused on the “poor emotional endurance” of Glynis’ friends who disappear just when they’re most needed.

Shriver spoke at length about the desertion of friends when people are sick, and went as far as to propose that it is universal. Avoiding sick people may be, said Shriver, a biological survival instinct, even when the disease, like Glynis’ cancer, is not contagious. Overcoming this instinct to spend time with the sick and dying is at best a struggle. After all, “illness is a reminder of everything we want to avoid”, including our own mortality.

Believe it or not, So Much For That manages to have a happy ending. They all, said Grimshaw, “die happily ever after”. I wouldn’t go that far, but in the end and despite herself, Glynis dies a good death.

I found it odd that Shriver didn’t mention her own experience with death. A heart-wrenching article on The Guardian click here tells of how she dealt with the death of a close friend, which has obviously influenced So Much For That. I didn’t get a chance to ask at question time, so I took my copy of So Much For That along to the signing to ask Shriver in person. Turns out, it wasn’t a deliberate oversight,something she was trying to keep secret, but just something she hadn’t quite mentioned. “That’s good” I said, “because you wrote about it in the afterword too”.

I asked Shriver if she felt the book was an Atonement, wondering if she would notice my literary pun. She said it was, in a way, and she wished her friend had lived long enough to read it.

But it was also, she said, like much of her work: an attempt to turn something bad into something good.