WONDERLANCE: Lionel, thank you very much for taking this interview, it’s a great pleasure to have you answer our questions. You’ve lived in very different countries such as the US, Ireland, Israel, Kenya, Thailand… Do you think that thanks to immersing yourself in such diverse cultures definitely allowed you to perhaps have a greater understanding of the human psyche and the apparently opposite perceptions of life it can adopt?

LIONEL SHRIVER: Extensive travel has clearly informed my books, which have been set in Kenya, Northern Ireland, mainland Britain, and Portugal, as well as the United States.  Yet I am less reliant than I once was on airplanes for inspiration.  Life is short; I'm getting older and humbler.  Though I wouldn't want to constrain myself in future, right now coming to grips with the two cultures I've invested in most heavily--America's and the UK's--seems ambitious enough.  I find most readerships are more keenly interested in the familiar than in the exotic, or to put it more kindly: they are more interested in discovering the exotic in the familiar.   Besides, travelling is always circular. Human beings are remarkably, often depressingly similar the world over, and at a certain point you save a great deal of money on airfare by registering that fact.  I travel now more to promote translations than to investigate foreign climes.  Lazy?  Probably.  But I am a closet agoraphobe, and love nothing more than staying home.

WONDERLANCE: You’re a bestselling author who after twenty years of writing, her novel number eight, the world-famous ‘We need to talk about Kevin’, won the Orange Prize. Although not before being rejected by at least 30 publishers first. What’s your greatest advice to any aspiring author, Lionel? In your opinion, could the internet change the way things work in the literary industry the same way it's changing things in the music and even film industries? Is it perhaps changing things already?

LIONEL SHRIVER: If you really want to write novels, say, and can't imagine yourself doing anything else, then don't give up.  The caveat: only keep at it so long as you're enjoying yourself.  The odds in this business are still crap, and ebooks or the internet can't change that.  Writing can be frustrating, of course, but if it's actually a form of suffering for you--or if what gets you through isn't the thrill of the process but the vision of being a famous author--do something else.  You know what famous authors do all day, don't you?  Sit in front of the bleeding computer.  It's not all parties and photo shoots (the latter being odious anyway).  If parking in front of a screen while the sun shines isn't your idea of fun, give it up.  Oh, and lastly: do not in any event write books if you don't read them. 

As for technological changes in publishing, sure, obviously ebooks are shaking the industry up.  But the issues are piracy and finance. Thus far, not enough people seem to care about books to bother to pirate them (I'm a little insulted).  Whether once the dust settles at Amazon we will arrive at a business model whereby authors can still make a living, and established publishers can stay in business, remains to be seen.  I do think there's nothing at all wrong with ebooks, and I gather that people who buy Kindles read substantially more than they used to without one.  The "enhanced ebook" will provide an exciting new art form for some, though I predict this bells-and-whistles product will enjoy only a faddish vogue, at least in fiction. What matters is the text, and while I have some sentimental attachment to bound books the packaging is not the point.  As long as I still get paid, the ebook is potentially a method of widening readerships and it's a roundly beneficial development.  My one sorrow is that so many books are bought through the internet now that the demise of the bookstore is a veritable certainty. 

WONDERLANCE: Your first novels, ‘The female of the Species’, ‘Checker and the Derailleurs’ and ‘Bleeding Heart’ delve into complicated love affairs between people of original and sometimes difficult personalities, fraught with deeply ingrained fears. However, those characters although fictional, are not very different to many of us. As an author, do you put parts of yourself into the protagonists of your novels or are they a compendium of the opposite to your traits plus a fair amount of other people’s?

LIONEL SHRIVER: Oh, God, don't ever, ever cite that title, 'The Bleeding Heart'!  I despise it.  That's the only title I've ever chosen that I regret.  (I thought I was being ironic.  Word to the wise: do not try to cram irony into a title.  Most of the time it doesn't work.  This one just came out bathetic.)  I changed the title of that novel when it came out in the UK to "Ordinary Decent Criminals" and never looked back. 

Sure, there are parts of me in most of my characters, who are notoriously difficult.  But I don't think parsing what traits can be traced to me and what other traits can be traced to friends, family, or acquaintances is a very fruitful exercise.  I use whatever I can get my hands on, whatever or whoever captures my imagination.  And in my latter years, I don't capture my own imagination.  I consider this a healthy evolution: I am no longer fascinated with myself.  Maybe I've used myself up?  I'm afraid this boredom with introspection makes me a little impatient with readers and interviewers who expect me to be interesting.  My books have to be interesting.  I don't. 

What probably distinguishes the bulk of my more memorable characters is that they aren't conventionally likable. Way back when, I used to get reams of those trite editorial rejections, "We here at blah-de-blah didn't find your protagonist sufficiently attractive."  Yeah, that's right, motherfuckers, my characters are not ATTRACTIVE.  I've long been inclined toward looking forensically at emotions we try to keep hidden. Envy, for example, plays a big part in 'Checker' and a bigger part in 'Double Fault'--and even there, when the very subject matter is the painful, ugly professional competition between two spouses, I still got mewling from reviewers, "Shriver's protagonist is NOT ATTRACTIVE!" Well, duh.  Morons.  Of course she isn't.  Wrangling with the horribleness of wishing your own husband ill is the central subject of the book. And most famously I suppose, I took on a mother's discomfort with motherhood, and growing dislike for her own son, in 'Kevin'.  

WONDERLANCE: As you've just pointed out, your inclination (and capacity) for analysing and depicting complex thought-processes, even those tainted with psychological trauma or deviation, as well as some mental illnesses like the sociopathic and psychopathic have also and sadly gained you fame in a not such positive manner, for you’ve been too easily appointed as an expert in all the criminal behaviour behind school mass murders. Have you ever regretted writing on this subject even more than you have celebrated the success it's brought you?

LIONEL SHRIVER: I've never regretted writing 'Kevin', no.  But I have grown increasingly hostile to the role of school shooting expert. Ever since that novel took off, media outlets have turned to me to fill air time and column inches (if only because there's so little to say besides 'this is a bad thing that shouldn't have happened and we wish it hadn't').  I started noticing that one of the few comments I reliably shopped in interviews is that the media frenzy surrounding these shootings perpetuates the phenomenon--since these kids always seem to crave attention, recognition, even if they get it posthumously.  So I had to conclude that I was colluding in that coverage. For me to continue to inflate broadcasts and broadsheets with my own two cents was hypocritical.  After the Virginia Tech massacre, I closed down the school shooting rent-a-quote biz for good.  Just recently Brazil had one of those shootings, and several journalists came to me for comment. I turned them down. 

Moreover, I'm sympathetic with viewers who point to me on the television news and say, 'What does she know about it?  She's a novelist! She just made some story up!" Dead right. 

WONDERLANCE: ‘Game Control’ takes us to Kenya where the characters serve the very clever purpose of a societal analysis within matters of a grand scale such as world poverty and intellectual ideals vs. reality and ‘A Perfectly Good Family’ brings us back to the first societal unit, the family, and what the limits are to which we all should draw certain lines, if any. Why do you think people, at large, feel so uncomfortable discussing or even pondering certain issues that, nonetheless, form part of our world and even our daily lives respectively?

LIONEL SHRIVER: 'Game Control' is about the underbelly of our feelings regarding overpopulation, a concept that has grown more politically sensitive now that virtually all population growth is in the third world.  Although I do take our species' excessive numbers seriously, 'overpopulation' conveniently blames the poor for their plight.  And the issue sometimes fronts for misanthropy.  But hey, given what our race gets up to, misanthropy has plenty of appeal.  Calvin Piper is therefore a rather beguiling anti-hero.

'A Perfectly Good Family' is a more conventional novel, about an inheritance dispute over a house.  It's less uncomfortable subject matter, though it does raise the question of why we think we're entitled to inherit anything.  Also, whether we're condemned to repeat the patterns and behaviours that we can't seem to help inheriting from our families.

In general, I try to go for subjects that are difficult in some way.  Otherwise, I don't have a job to do.  There's no reason to write a novel about the self-evident. 

WONDERLANCE: With ‘The Post-Birthday World’ you are back on the love-wagon but in a very different way to what is expected, for this novel not only offers a choice to the reader but also from a very analytical standpoint, and this on a subject that makes most people lose all objectivity.  What do you think is what makes us most unprepared to understand and even handle love?

LIONEL SHRIVER: Some people thought my going for romance after a controversial novel like 'Kevin' was a retreat.  But love may be the ultimate challenge for any novelist, and it will always be a central subject for fiction writers.  In this case, I wrote a parallel universe novel in order to explore: what difference does it make which partner we choose?  How does it affect our family relationships, our friendships, our careers, and most importantly our own lives, who we are to ourselves?  I found the project fascinating, and the answers, such as there are any, satisfyingly subtle.

WONDERLANCE: Your latest novel, 'So Much for That', is your brave and celebrated take on the American health care system. Who do you think that you are going to upset with this work, Lionel and how much do you care about that...or not?

LIONEL SHRIVER: I annoyed an oncologist who otherwise liked the book because the doctors were not given enough star billing in the story, and that pleased me.  I said, You're always the stars.  You've got 'ER'!  I like the fact that the patients are the main characters and the doctors are mere walk-ons.

I would love to have upset the entire private health insurance industry in the United States--some of whose appalling practices are exposed in that book.  I would even like it if Obama were upset--over the fact that the health care reform bill is not nearly as brave and drastic as it needed to be.  And I hope I also disturbed anyone who has disappeared on friends or relatives who have fallen ill--a cowardly tendency that has grown perplexingly widespread.

WONDERLANCE: Again, thank you so much for your time and words; we certainly could not recommend more your powerful novels. Would you say that the UK is going to be your final ‘home’ or a nomad is always a nomad?

LIONEL SHRIVER: There was a time I imagined I would keep scurrying from country to country until I swallowed the world whole.  But as my grandfather used to say at Thanksgiving, "Her eyes were bigger than her stomach!"  I've used the UK as my base of operations for over 23 years, and if Britain sometimes drives me crazy that just means I truly live here.  It's possible that as I grow more decrepit I'll crawl back to New York.  But in the meantime, the UK is stuck with me.

WONDERLANCE: Well, we're certainly glad about that last bit!