One of her later works, Big Brother: A Novel (2013), was inspired by her brother, who died of complications due to obesity. She is the author of 15 books, including her first short-story collection Property in 2018. I just had a problem figuring out what was going on.” “I was frustrated that it wasn’t made in a more accessible way. But Shriver didn’t feel the film was as easy to follow as her book. It was her “make or break novel” and was adapted into the acclaimed 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton. It was rejected by 30 publishers in the UK before it found a home. We Need to Talk About Kevin depicted a mother coming to terms with her son, who has gone on a murder spree at his school.

“I’ve always been inclined to sympathise with people you are not meant to sympathise with,” says Shriver. “He needs to redeem himself – he’s been humiliated.” But while critics will argue that it’s insensitive to those genuinely fighting inequality, she hopes it makes her novel feel “current” in its examination of what it’s like to be a straight man in America right now. How does Shriver justify this political subplot turning up in her sports saga? It’s simple she needed a backstory that would help to explain Remington’s need for this sudden obsession with endurance sport. ‘Yo, bro, dat bitch ain’t no better than a ho, true dat.’ She’d given the line an aristocratic English snootery…” I’m now supposed to deliver the dialogue of a coke dealer in Crown Heights as if he’s a professor of medieval literature at Oxford. Especially of POCs,” her cleaner Tommy explains.) But Serenata – much like Shriver herself – is flabbergasted. (“It’s kinda not so great for white readers of audiobooks to use accents. Serenata is getting stick online for her accents in audiobooks that she does for a living. It’s no surprise, really, that Shriver’s latest book is taking things even further, ticking all the wrong boxes and prodding at “various silly comical super-sensitivities” like a matador does at a bull that might tear him apart. I admit it, I made fun of it, and you are never meant to make a joke around diversity, but I did,” says Shriver. “I’m not anti-diversity – but I don’t like quotas. Maggie O’Farrell: ‘Shakespeare resurrected his dead son in Hamlet’.Evie Wyld: ‘It’s not the men who are toxic, but masculinity itself’.Alexander McCall Smith: ‘The virus shows us we have abused the world’.

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