A century on, such fears of “white decline” have returned in certain circles. Until recently, issues of “white identity” and of “white decline” were confined to the far-right fringes, where notions such as that of the “great replacement”, the belief that white people are being driven out of their “homelands”, flourished. Kalfus, Ken (June 20, 2016). "The bankruptcy of liberal America: 'The Mandibles,' by Lionel Shriver". The Washington Post . Retrieved September 24, 2016. What did you make of the decision of Hachette , Woody Allen’s original publisher , to cancel the publication of his memoir following protests from Ronan Farrow and several company employees?

The best story in Property, the powerful novella The Standing Chandelier, begins with a dissection of what it means to be disliked. Does Shriver want to be liked? "If your main project is to be liked then that could seriously damage your work," she says. "But it's more fun to be liked than to be despised. I owe my father for my occupation. Growing up in a literate household, 'echelon' and 'peripatetic' were as common at our table as 'dog' and 'go'. My father's publishing several volumes of non-fiction helped foster the audacity required to write books myself. Watching him move whole congregations was good training for public speaking; I bet if I heard him tell the story of the Velveteen Rabbit from a pulpit today he could still make me cry. The author, who is best known for her 2003 book We Need To Talk About Kevin, asked her: “Did you read the original op-ed? Did you read the piece, he was standing up for Muslim women’s right to wear whatever they want.” I segue to her last novel, The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047, which depicts a United States plunged into a hyperinflationary tax-and-spend dystopia. Do her politics always seep into her fiction? "It just tends to happen," she says. "I don't have a waterproof Chinese Wall in my head between the nonfiction and fiction part of my brain." Whoosh, whoosh. After a massive stroke in 2015, my mother can’t walk. She can’t use her right hand. She’s incontinent. Her body has grown plump and soft. She can still talk – sort of. That is, she can form words, but rarely has much to say. Much of her scant discourse comprises polite vacuities. Asked how she is, she’ll say: “As well as can be expected.” Our sparse, formal phone conversations are full of silences.

‘You should not mock someone’s religion’

No wonder then that some girls want to avoid it all – leering men, college rape, the hypersexualization of women, pornified sex – by halting puberty and staying childlike boys. It’s a sad statement on how they feel about become women. There are detractors I accumulate whom I did not go looking for. It’s not my purpose to make myself as obnoxious as possible. But it is true that, when I write, sometimes I’m mischievous and I rub people up the wrong way. All things considered, that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make. But I wouldn’t call it a pleasure . . . In the age of social media there are a lot of people finding out what it’s like to be disliked. And it’s disagreeable and very disconcerting.” Serenata has a harder time ageing than Remington. Is the unfairness of the way women age – and are seen to age – at the heart of your story? Freeman identifies her “trigger” at 14 for dropping an alarming amount of weight as a single moment. Sitting beside a prominently bony classmate in gym class, Freeman asked, “Is it hard to buy clothes when you’re so small?” “Yeah,” the girl replied. “I wish I was normal like you.”

I’ve always been inclined to sympathise with people you are not meant to sympathise with,” says Shriver. Lionel Shriver was born in 1957 in Gastonia, North Carolina, into a deeply religious family. Her father, Donald, was a Presbyterian minister. She changed her name at the age of 15 from Margaret Ann to Lionel because she 'was a tomboy' who grew up with brothers. She has worked as a teacher and journalist and her first novel, The Female of the Species, was published in 1986. Her seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, won the 2005 Orange Prize. Her latest novel is The Post-Birthday World

‘Why is that so insulting?’

She doesn't just write unflinchingly about her politics; she has also risked the ire of her own family. Her novel Big Brother, centred on a morbidly obese man based on her late older brother, and A Perfectly Good Family, about siblings squabbling over an inheritance, upset her parents. "I probably knew that there were a few things in there that would rile them, but I did not anticipate that they would take the scale of the offence that they did." Population Matters welcomes Lionel Shriver". populationmatters.org. Archived from the original on August 7, 2014 . Retrieved June 28, 2014. Boys meanwhile start growing in earnest. They become more powerful. Their voice drops. Yes there is a vulnerable aspect to this but it is moving towards more respect, more power, more ability to assert their will. And for the most part it doesn’t happen until 8th grade but really not until high school and it takes years. It is a very slow process. Producer Says Tilda Swinton to Star in "Kevin," Adaptation of Lionel Shriver Novel". New York Times Blogs. March 18, 2009 . Retrieved March 21, 2009. Like me, my father is wilful; after three decades in New York City, his soft, genteel Virginian accent is unadulterated. (In kind, my accent after 20 years in the UK remains American. It's a matter of self-respect.) Thus he has a weakness for 'PE-can pah' (pie), and summons my mother Peggy, 'PAY-GEE!'.

American president: “I take no responsibility for Trump,” Lionel Shriver says. Photograph: Mark Wallheiser/Getty a b c Barber, Lynn (April 22, 2007). "We need to talk ..." The Guardian . Retrieved January 31, 2017. The kind of disrespect for others infused in Lionel Shriver’s keynote is the same force that sees people vote for Pauline Hanson. It’s the reason our First Peoples are still fighting for recognition, and it’s the reason we continue to stomach offshore immigration prisons. It’s the kind of attitude that lays the foundation for prejudice, for hate, for genocide. Olivia O’Leary marshals a discussion of political poetry. Sarah Webb hosts a fairy-tale-writing workshop for children. Miriam O’Callaghan talks to Stefanie Preissner. Dermot Bannon indulges our property obsessions. Oliver Callan lampoons everyone at the festival (probably). There are also wonk-filled discussions on everything from #metoo to Putin’s Russia to Trump’s United States to the ascent of China to Middle Eastern politics.

According to Shriver, there have been three attempts so far to cancel her, of which this was the first (the second, and potentially most deleterious, occurred in 2018 when she ridiculed the language of diversity as it appeared in a questionnaire sent by Penguin Random House to its authors). The failure of such campaigns involves a certain satisfaction for both sides, I think. If Shriver is glad still to be in business – like anyone, she has bills to pay – her critics are able to regard the existence of a book such as Abominations as proof that cancel culture, supposedly an invention of the right, doesn’t really exist. But it’s not as simple as this, of course. Even if there are currently no forces actively moving against her at her publisher, I find it hard to imagine Shriver being invited, in 2022, to several of the festivals that commissioned pieces in this book. Whatever the reading public may feel, the organisers just don’t like her any more, whether or not they care to admit it. Miller, Phil (September 14, 2007). "Why does this author need to talk about filming Kevin?". The Herald.

For the organisations involved, or the companies, they’re a terrible drain but what’s happening is that these whole layers of management are being maintained as a protection. It’s a little bit like the sensitivity readers. They don’t cost that much and it’s good PR: “look at us, we have a whole department of 30 people who do absolutely nothing”. And furthermore, the ideology, which began in the universities, is still being promoted in universities. At places like UnHerd, we may feel we’re winning the argument because the essays are so good but that doesn’t mean that they’re teaching UnHerd essays in university, as they should do. I’m afraid that none of the people who need to be persuaded are reading this stuff. It’s a very atomised media situation.I’ve always been an exercise nut, so in some ways this is putting that under the microscope. But like Serenata [the wife in The Motion of the Body Through Space] I have drastically arthritic knees. That’s sobering. There’s the feeling of being punished for having been good; the first intimations of limitation. In August 2023 Shriver gave an interview with the Evening Standard in which she claimed "You don’t have free speech in the UK anymore". [40] Personal life [ edit ] Such double standards are not peculiar to Shriver. The writer Douglas Murray, for instance, is similarly hostile to identity politics, arguing “skin colour is of no significance, which is what I think and I hope society can end up thinking” while also denouncing the fact that “white Britons [are] a minority in their own capital city” and asking: “Were your derided average white voters not correct when they said that they were losing their country?” It’s a common thread running through much conservative criticism of identity politics. Rightwing critics have never been hostile to identity politics. They just want to push their form of identity politics Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver, in Gastonia, North Carolina, to a religious family. Her father, Donald, [1] was a Presbyterian minister who became an academic and president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York; [2] her mother was a homemaker. [3] At age 15, she changed her name from Margaret Ann to Lionel because she did not like the name she had been given and, as a tomboy, felt a conventionally male name was more appropriate. [4] My mother’s eyes bore into me, urging me to remain calm, to follow social convention. I shook my head, as if to shake off my lingering doubts.