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P.S. Insights, Interviews & More…
About the author
Meet Lionel Shriver
About the book
“If Only Poor People Would Go Away”: Writing Game Control
Read on
Read an Excerpt from The Post-Birthday World
Author’s Picks
Have You Read?
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About the author
Meet Lionel Shriver
AH WAN OW! It took a while for my mother to decode the first words from my crib as “I want out.” Since, Ah wan ow has become something of a running theme.
I wanted out of North Carolina, where I was born. I wanted out of my given name (“Margaret Ann”—the whole double-barrel; can you blame me?), and at fifteen chose another one. I wanted out of New York, where I went to university at Columbia. I wanted out of the United States.
“I wanted out of the United States. ”
In 1985, I cycled around Europe for six months; one hundred miles a day in wretched weather fortified a lifetime appetite for unnecessary suffering. The next year, I spent six months in Israel, including three on a kibbutz in the Galilee helping to manufacture waterproof plastic boots. Thereafter, I shifted “temporarily” to Belfast, where I remained based for twelve years. Within that time, I also spent a year in Nairobi, and several months in Bangkok. Yet only my partner’s getting a job in London in
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1999 tore me decisively from Belfast, a town that addictively commands equal parts love and loathing. As We Need to Talk About Kevin attests, I’m a sucker for ambivalence.
Though returning regularly to New York, I’ve lived in London ever since. I’m not sure if I’ve chosen this city so much as run out of wanderlust here. London is conventional for me, and I’m a bit disappointed in myself. But I’ve less appetite for travel than I once did. I’m not sure if this is from some larger grasp that people are the same everywhere and so why not save the plane fare, or from having just gotten lazy. My bets are on the latter.
At least the novels are still thematically peripatetic. Their disparate subject matter lines up like the fruit on slot machines when you do not win the jackpot: anthropology and a May-December love affair ( The Female of the Species), rock-and-roll drumming and jealousy ( Checker and the Derailleurs), the Northern Irish troubles and my once dreadful taste in men ( Ordinary Decent Criminals), demography and AIDS in Africa ( Game Control), inheritance ( A Perfectly Good Family), professional tennis and career competition in marriage ( Double Fault), terrorism and cults of personality ( The New Republic, my real seventh novel, which has never seen the light of day), and high school massacres and motherhood ( We Need to Talk About Kevin). My latest, The Post-Birthday World, is a romance—about the trade-offs of one man versus another and snooker, believe it or not—whose nature seems in context almost alarmingly innocent.
For the nosey: I am married, to an
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accomplished jazz drummer from New York. Perhaps mercifully for any prospective progeny, I have no children. I am confessedly and unashamedly fifty years old, and never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.
Lesser known facts:
I have sometimes been labeled a “feminist”—a term that never sits well with me, if only because connotatively you have no sense of humor. Nevertheless, I am an excellent cook, if one inclined to lace every dish with such a malice of fresh chilis that nobody but I can eat it. Indeed, I have been told more than once that I am “extreme.” As I run through my preferences—for dark roast coffee, dark sesame oil, dark chocolate, dark meat chicken, even dark chili beans—a pattern emerges that, while it may not put me on the outer edges of human experience, does exude a faint whiff of the unsavory.
Illustrating the old saw that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I cycle everywhere, though I expect that eventually this perverse Luddite habit will kill me, period. I am a deplorable tennis player, which doesn’t stop me from inflicting my crap net-game and cowardly refusal to play formal matches on anyone I can corner on a court.
“I am confessedly and unashamedly fifty years old, and never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year. ”
I am a pedant. I insist that people pronounce “flaccid” flak-sid, which is dictionary-correct but defies onomatopoeic instinct; when I force them to look it up, they grow enraged and vow to keep saying flassid anyway. I never let anyone get away with using “enervated”
to mean “energized,”
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when the word means without energy, thank you very much. Not only am I, apparently, the last remaining American citizen who knows the difference between “like” and “as,” but I freely alienate everyone in my surround by interrupting, “You mean, as I said.”
Or, “You mean, you gave it to whom,” or “You mean, that’s just between you and me.” I am a lone champion of the accusative case, and so—obviously—have no friends.
I read every article I can find that commends the nutritional benefits of red wine; if they’re right, I will live to 110. Though raised by Adlai Stevenson Democrats, I have a violent, retrograde right-wing streak that alarms and horrifies my acquaintances in London and New York.
Those twelve years in Northern Ireland have left a peculiar resid-ual warp in my accent—house = hyse, shower = shar; now = nye.
Since an Ulster accent bears little relation to the more familiar mincing of a Dublin brogue, these aberrations are often misinterpreted as holdovers from my North Carolinian childhood. Because this handful of mangled vowels is one of the only souvenirs I took from Belfast, my wonky pronunciation is a point of pride (or, if you will, vanity), and when my “Hye nye bryne cye” (= how now brown cow) is mistaken for a bog-standard southern American drawl I get mad.
“I read every article I can find that commends the nutritional benefits of red wine; if they’re right, I will live to 110. ”
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About the book
“If Only Poor People
Would Go Away”
Writing Game Control
LIKE PARENTS, authors have favorites among their unruly broods, and Game Control is a favorite of mine. Of course, in fiction, effort and accomplishment can have an exasperatingly inverse relationship; nevertheless, I have never worked harder on any novel, before or since. I must have read enough seminal works in the field to have earned myself a de facto master’s degree in demography. Indeed, every time Game Control arises in our conversation, a friend of mine in London chides that the novel’s primary flaw is that it contains
“too much research.” (Last time I told her I’d got the message and to put a lid on it. Before publication, I culled out a good one hundred manuscript pages’ worth of “research,” so readers count your blessings.)
When I started this novel in the early 1990s, scientists were sending completely contradictory signals about Africa. (FYI: they still are.) Demographers were alarmed by the continent’s soaring population; epidemiologists were alarmed by its prospectively plummeting population due to AIDS. So were Africans overreproducing, or dying off? Surely you couldn’t have it both ways. Hence I tracked down all seven of the studies then available on the projected interaction between Africa’s AIDS mortality and population growth.
“I have never worked harder on any novel, before or since. ”
I was fascinated to uncover a pattern: Computer models by demographers
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predicted that AIDS would have a modest to negligible effect on population growth. Computer models by epidemiologists predicted that AIDS would eventually cause Africa’s population to implode.
In other words, however unconsciously, each scientific community managed to rig the results so that their problem of choice was the more dire—thus making their own field the more important. This confirmed what became a central thesis of the novel: that intellectual positions reliably arise from less rational, emotional wellsprings, and generally front
for self-interest. The hidden motives and suspect desires teeming beneath the field of demography made it perfect material for fiction.
When I turned the finished manuscript in to my editor in New York, he rejected the novel, characterizing its content as addressing the same old “man versus woman” stand-off that he saw my previous books as having tackled. The novel’s subsequent editor in the UK aired the view that Game Control was at core about “Eleanor and her relationship to her own fertility.” Both these thumbnails are a load of hooey, and are typical—here’s a real “man versus woman”
gripe for you—of the intellectually reductive way that men in publishing often regard fiction by women. Certainly this novel is about Calvin Piper and Eleanor Merritt, temperamental opposites who desperately need each other. But it is also about demography.
“Certainly this novel is about Calvin Piper and Eleanor Merritt, temperamental opposites who desperately need each other.
But it is also about demography. ”
I realize that for many readers that summation is a turn-off. I hasten to add that I have tried to tell a good story—a deliciously wicked story—with lively, distinctive characters. But demography 284
is not just a dry, bean-counting subject. It’s about people—whether they have children, and why. (In this sense, Game Control and my more widely read We Need to Talk About Kevin share a thematic thread.) Moreover, our relationship to demography tells much about our relationship to others, and to ourselves. I came to understand that I was drawn to this subject because I was raised in a guilt-ridden liberal household; my parents were always trying to make their children feel bad about being privileged (although we were merely middle-middle-class). I was eternally to bear in mind the starving Armenians or the starving Chinese or whoever it was who was starving that year. So I resented all those poor people, who were ruining my good time. Like Calvin, something in me wanted them to go away.
“While Game Control is often read as a satire, it isn’t, quite. ”
Runaway population growth—and in 2007 this issue has hardly vanished; a worldwide population of at least 9 billion is now a statistical certainty, and that is right around the point that we run out of fresh water—tempts us to blame suffering people for their own plight. If they just wouldn’t have so many kids, they’d be better off by half. The perspective is a little mean-spirited, but secretly consoling. It lets us comfortable folks off the hook.
Thus while Game Control is often read as a satire, it isn’t, quite.
The premise may be outlandish, but as a fantasy—just making those pestersome poor people go away—it’s serious as could be.
After the novel’s UK release, one fan letter arrived that meant more to me
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than any other. The head of Rockefeller University’s prestigious Laboratory of Populations admired the book not only as a story, but also as the product of impressive amateur research. I wrote back, and in time this connection led to my writing an essay on population in literature for Macmillan’s 2003 Encyclopedia of Population. That essay in turn became the lead article in the June 2003 issue of Population and Development Review, a professional journal I had come greatly to admire while writing the novel. ( PDR is more compelling and better written than the average New Yorker.) I relished having leapt from the dilettantish world of fiction writing into the scientific-ally exacting world of Calvin Piper, and still count that publication as one of the highlights of my career.
“[ Population and Development Review] is more compelling and better written than the average New Yorker. ”
I moved to Nairobi for more than a year to set this book, dragging my demographic library in a massive leather case to the airport, where check-in dunned me $400 in overweight charges. Yet once the project came to fruition, this novel lost me my American publisher. I would be orphaned without a U.S. house for not only this novel but the next. Game Control netted a farcically tiny advance in the UK, until this American edition the only country in which this book has ever appeared, and there briefly. If critically a modest success, commercially the novel went nowhere, and most of the hardback run was pulped.
Therefore I might sensibly conclude that all that effort was wasted.
But between
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reading dozens of books and moving to Africa, I got one of the great educations of my life. The vengeful misanthrope Calvin Piper and the guilty do-gooder Eleanor Merritt—Eleanor personifying that excuse-me-for-living sensibility I was pushed to embrace as a child—made for marvelous company over two very fine years, and I’d never wish to have spent them any other way.
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Read on
Read an Excerpt from The Post-Birthday
World
(2007, HarperCollins)
Can the course of life hinge on a single kiss? That is the question that Lionel Shriver’s The Post-Birthday World seeks to answer with all the subtlety, perceptiveness, and drama that made her last novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, an international bestseller and winner of the 2005 Orange Prize. Whether the American expatriate Irina McGovern does or doesn’t lean into a certain pair of lips in London will determine whether she stays with her smart, disciplined, intellectual American partner, Lawrence, or runs off with Ramsey—a wild, exuberant British snooker star the couple has known for years. Employing a parallel-universe structure, Shriver follows Irina’s life as it unfolds under the influence of two drastically different men. In a tour de force that, remarkably, has no villains, Shriver explores the implications, both large and small, of our choice of mate—a subject of timeless, universal fascination for both sexes.
Chapter One
What began as coincidence had crystallized into tradition: on the sixth of July, they would have dinner with Ramsey Acton on his birthday.
Five years earlier, Irina had been collaborating with Ramsey’s then-wife
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Jude Hartford on a children’s book. Jude had made social overtures.
Abjuring the airy we-really-must-get-together-sometime feints common to London, which can carry on indefinitely without threatening to clutter your diary with a real time and place, Jude had seemed driven to nail down a foursome so that her illustrator could meet her husband Ramsey. Or, no—she’d said, “My husband, Ramsey Acton.” The locution had stood out. Irina assumed that Jude was prideful in that wearing feminist way about the fact that she’d not taken her husband’s surname.
“It is always difficult to impress the ignorant. ”
But then, it is always difficult to impress the ignorant. When negotiating with Lawrence over the prospective dinner back in 1992, Irina didn’t know enough to mention, “Believe it or not, Jude’s married to Ramsey Acton.” For once Lawrence might have bolted for his Economist day-planner, instead of grumbling that if she had to schmooze for professional reasons, could she at least schedule an early dinner so that he could get back in time for NYPD Blue. Not realizing that she had been bequeathed two magic words that would vanquish Lawrence’s broad hostility to social engagements, Irina had said instead, “Jude wants me to meet her husband, Raymond or something.”
Yet when the date she proposed turned out to be Raymond or something’s birthday, Jude insisted that more would be merrier. Once returned to bachelorhood, Ramsey let slip enough details about his marriage for Irina to reconstruct: After a couple of 289
years, they could not carry a conversation for longer than five minutes. Jude had leapt at the chance to avoid a sullen, silent dinner just the two of them.
Which Irina found baffling. Ramsey always seemed pleasant enough company, and the strange unease he always engendered in Irina herself would surely abate if you were married to the man.
Maybe Jude had loved dragging Ramsey out to impress colleagues, but was not sufficiently impressed on her own behalf. One-on-one he had bored her silly.
Besides, Jude’s exhausting gaiety had a funny edge of hysteria about it, and simply wouldn’t fly—would slide inevitably to the despair th
at lay beneath it—without that quorum of four. When you cocked only half an ear to her uproarious discourse, it was hard to tell if she was laughing or crying. Though she did laugh a great deal, including through most of her sentences, her voice rising in pitch as she drove herself into ever accelerating hilarity when nothing she had said was funny. It was a compulsive, deflective laughter, born of nerves more than humor, a masking device and therefore a little dishonest. Yet her impulse to put a brave, bearable face on what must have been a profound unhappiness was sympathetic. Her breathless mirth pushed Irina in the opposite direction—to speak soberly, to keep her voice deep and quiet, if only to demonstrate that it was acceptable to be serious. Thus if Irina was sometimes put off by Jude’s manner, in the woman’s presence she at least liked herself.
“When you cocked only half an ear to her uproarious discourse, it was hard to tell if she was laughing or crying. ”
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Irina hadn’t been familiar with the name of Jude’s husband, consciously. Nevertheless, that first birthday, when Jude had bounced into the Savoy Grill with Ramsey gliding beside her—it was already late enough in a marriage that was really just a big, well-meaning mistake that her clasp of his hand could only have been for show—Irina met the tall man’s grey-blue eyes with a jolt, a tiny touching of live wires that she subsequently interpreted as visual recognition, and later—much later—as recognition of another kind….
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Author’s Picks
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE, by Edith Wharton
I love virtually all of Edith Wharton, but this one’s my favorite. Why Wharton, in general? I admire her prose style, which is lucid, intelligent, and artful rather than arty; she is eloquent but never fussy, and always clear. She never seems to be writing well to show off.