By Neha Kale
Lionel Shriver believes that rules are made to be broken. The acclaimed American writer, who changed her name from Margaret Ann as a 15-year-old and who won the 2005 Orange Prize for We Need to Talk About Kevin, a novel whose gripping take on maternal ambivalence lingers in your psyche years after you've read it, revels in skewering accepted wisdom and holding a mirror up to well-worn norms.
Ahead of her appearance at Sydney's Festival of Dangerous Ideas, we caught up with Shriver (whose new novel, The Mandibles, maps an America on the cusp of financial apocalypse) to talk about the payoffs of population growth, the lows of being a female renegade and why we should all spend some time shirking the status quo.
Lionel ShriverCredit: Roberto Ricciuti
DL: We Need to Talk About Kevin explores whether or not women should be mothers by asking, 'What would it be like if your child grows up to be a school shooter?' Why do you think the notion that motherhood isn't a given for women hits such a cultural nerve?
LS: Because the species depends on women reproducing. We haven't yet progressed to test tube babies so it makes biological sense that our culture encourage women to bear children. Population growth is one of my obsessions. The fact that women have a choice at all is a luxury, borne of biological prosperity.
I was grateful to be able to make the choice to not have children and don't think that I've suffered that much from it. If I was part of my mother's generation, I would have been a lot more stigmatised. I've benefited from not only being able to choose whether or not to raise a family and spending my life in another way but also from the conduct of the discussion.
All your novels are experiments that pivot around a question. Big Brother looks at what it's like to have a morbidly obese brother; The Mandibles examines the lives of an upper middle-class family in an America on the brink of ruin. What motivates your writing and to what extent should writers say things that society is afraid people will say?
I don't think there's an obligation for writers to say things people are afraid to say. I say things that need saying. There are plenty of lessons that we are going to keep repeating, in every generation, such as the nature of love, betrayal, family and illness. I would never put the burden on anyone who chooses to be a writer to break taboos.
I am, however, very interested in money. This comes up in more than one book. I'm very suspicious of glamour and luxury, I think there's very little that money can buy. That's what fascinates me about it; its limitations and how befuddling it must be if you do become mind-blowingly rich, how little money can actually get you what you want.
At FODI, you'll explore whether compliance with regulations defies the freedom at the heart of democracy and if we should be breaking a rule a day. In a world in which we're increasingly under surveillance, why is rule-breaking subversive?
I don't obey rules, or even laws. I obey the things that make sense and ignore the things that don't. I don't have a high regard for the law because I know too much about laws that have been passed that have been horrible. It used to be illegal to be homosexual and I'm supposed to have regard for the law?!
I will continually question all kinds of rules, especially when they're in my way. There are rules that are stupid and I break them gleefully. If I'm on my bike at 3AM and I'm at a red light and there's no traffic or pedestrians. Am I going to sit there? No. I don't like the atmosphere that's created by a whole nation of people slavishly adhering to how things are supposed to be done. But I am interested in other people's relationship to rules. Through history, there have been points at which feeling free to break the law has been very important. The FODI topic comes from one line in The Mandibles. The protagonist says: "Perhaps the definition of a free society is one in which you can still get away with something." That is one instance of a character speaking for the author. Another character chimes in saying "breaking a rule a day is much better for your health."
Obviously we have problems with terrorism and criminality. But we also have the opposite problem, when society becomes too orderly and it kills off something. Fiction and cinema are heavily consumed with writing about criminals because we are torn when it comes to criminality. We're afraid of it but we're also envious of it. I'm sure that drug dealers find the fact that a large proportion of people are volunteering half of their income to the government utterly incomprehensible.
Our culture still views female renegades with suspicion. Why do we judge women who deviate from the script?
We also celebrate women who break the rules. Fictional characters such as Bonnie and Clyde, for example. We have an extra fascination with women who break the rules because women are supposed to be the keepers of peace and order. I'm not sure if we are especially hard on female renegades but the discrimination is on a different level. We're more likely to cast men as renegades and admire them whereas female renegades will be cast as obnoxious, shrill, opinionated or uncooperative. Women will be difficult and men will be renegades. Traditionally, ambitious women have been given a hard time, as women are expected to be much more modest.
Your new novel, The Mandibles, imagines a dystopian America and given the impending Trump presidency, it almost feels as if we're living in the end-times. What prompted the novel?
I often explore what I'm afraid of and what other people are afraid of too. Right now, there is an insecurity in American culture about how long the American empire is going to last, there's a lot of anxiety about China and it's just not as unified a country as it used to be. It's much more atomised.
There's always been division and the race problem has been huge from the get-go but it's getting worse. That lack of cohesion is not just across ethnic and religious lines, it's also across political lines. It's a new order of dysfunction.
Lionel Shriver appears at The Festival of Dangerous Ideas on September 3 at Break A Rule A Day.