This book was beautifully written, insightful, questioning and heartbreaking. It was nothing at all like I expected, and even guessing the things that I guessed (which turned out to be true), it didn't make the impact any less. This book was so incredible at making me sympathize and empathize with each person's perspective, though we only see these through Eva's brutally honest memory, that it was impossible for me to lay blame anywhere, even though the potential for assigning blame was huge. If Real Mother could see herself now, would she wish her elderly self were dead? Even Fraudulent Mother often asserts that she’s ready to die. This may be the most content-rich statement I’ve heard from her since 2015: “I don’t want to die, but I need to die.” In most meaningful senses, my mother is no longer here, but I’ve been cheated even of my own bereavement. It's rare that I dream about books. It doesn't matter if I read it up until the minute I drop off; I only dream about a book I'm reading, or have read if it pulled me into its world first. I dream about the books that touch my soul. *cue dramatic music* This book should be sold at the pharmaceutical counter right next to birth control pills, I can’t think of a better deterrent for unwanted pregnancy. It did a great job of confirming a few truisms, maternal instincts are not a given, some children are just born bad, and the worst mistake a couple can make is to allow a child to divide them. It’s the story of Kevin, a lethal mix of nature and poor nurturing resulting in the child from hell. Yet it’s the character of his mother Eva that I found the most disturbing. Totally self-absorbed, high-octane critical; full of discontent, no wonder she’s completely unable to form healthy relationships with anyone including the husband she purports to adore. Ergo a neurotic son. First of all an apology to my GR friends Debbie and Amanda who I know really loved this one...sorry gals I didn't so I'm going to rant !!

So was Kevin born that way or was he made that way because he didn't have a mother that wanted, loved or nurtured him? Arendt, Paul (June 6, 2006). "Ramsay needs to shoot a film about Kevin". The Guardian. Guardian News & Media. p.21 ( G2 supplement). Myerson, Julie (May 11, 2013). " Big Brother by Lionel Shriver – review". The Observer . Retrieved June 28, 2020. BBC News– Cannes gets talking about British Kevin drama". BBC. May 12, 2011 . Retrieved December 23, 2011.Eva, I worked out, was born in 1945. Part of the time therefore when she would have been considering having a child would have been in the late 1960s, when Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb was hugely influential. With the plethora of reasons for and against having a child that Eva muses on, it is hard to credit that she would have completely missed out on agonising about the problem of over-population. In fact her eventual reason for having her son seems to have been an impromptu masochistic one, which I found barely credible. Similarly, when she chose to have a second child, I cannot believe she would have ignored the warning bells about Kevin, especially when she would not even have a pet dog for fear of what he might do to it.

This book is just devastating ... and devastatingly good. I've just finished it, and had a little cry on the balcony in the bright sunshine, thinking about my mom and motherhood and blame, self-recrimination, guilt and remorse and parental love and the painfully ambiguous, sometimes tortured complexity of it all.The book was told in a series of letters by Kevin's mom, Eva to her husband, Franklin. Most of the letters Eva talks about Kevin, why she decided to have him, what it was like raising him, ways that she might of failed at being a mother, and confessions of her own about Kevin.

Shriver is a Democrat. [27] She is a patron of UK population growth rate concern group Population Matters, [28] and supported the UK's exit from the European Union. [3] Portes, Jonathan (September 1, 2021). "An obsession with migration figures is about more than just numbers". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved September 17, 2021. That, in a nutshell, is the genesis of my new novel, Should We Stay Or Should We Go. A nurse and GP in the NHS, Kay and Cyril Wilkinson have treated numerous patients eroded by ageing’s remorseless decay. After Kay’s father finally dies in a state of ruinous dementia, the couple are determined to avoid the same grim fate. Having concluded, like Jolanta, that beyond the knell of about eight decades life is all downhill, they make a pact: once they’ve both crossed that threshold on Kay’s 80th birthday, they’ll kill themselves. They’re still in their early 50s, and this prospect seems a long way off. Some books stay with us forever! After reading them we cannot stop thinking about them. We keep contemplating each chapter on our minds and thinking of different scenarios about what we would do if we were in the characters’ shoes! This is a spoiler .... If a mother suspected that her son put out her baby daughter's eye ...there is no way in hell that she would allow him near her again !!This is a personal matter for me, and not only because I’m already 64 myself. Both my parents are still alive – although in my mother’s case that may be stretching the meaning of the word. My father is 93; my mother turns 90 in July. Watching their old age progress has been mystifying, painful, and sometimes heartening. Lionel and her brother Timothy with their mother in Massachusetts, 1971. Photograph: Courtesy of Lionel Shriver