Lionel Shriver on Immigration, Identity and Why She Refuses to Stay Quiet

24:05Let's create smarter business, IBM.

24:12You were born in North Carolina? Yes. Why did you leave the US as a young woman back in the mid-1980s?

24:23Lionel Shriver:Yeah, that would have been about right. That's right. And I spent most of my adulthood outside of the country. Yeah, 40 years, nearly 40 years away. Yeah. What was the cause? I just had an appetite for adventure. The United States seemed like a known quantity, which is probably ignorant on my part. It wasn't. But I just wanted to find out about other places. And I also was motivated to learn about other places and set books in other places. So initially, I was thinking I would lead a very peripatetic life, and I would change countries every time I wrote a new book. This was a tall order, and it was a complete misreading of my own character.

25:07Lionel Shriver:I'm much more of a homebody than that. And also, even in terms of international travel, I discovered that I was far more interested in staying in one place for a long time and really learning about it, and knowing people, making friends. I stayed in Belfast long enough to make enemies. That's when you've really arrived. Belfast, I did wonder about moving to Northern Ireland. I lived there for a dozen years. So Northern Ireland in the 1980s was in the midst of the troubles. Yes, although, you know, it was a lot safer than people thought. You know, it was not a brave choice. But were you attracted to it because it seemed risky?

25:49a contrast to growing up as the daughter of a minister?

25:53Lionel Shriver:I don't think it was the risk exactly that interested me, but I had a story that I wanted to set there. I had a character that I wanted to use who belonged in that context. But eventually I became engaged by the politics. My 20s were not particularly political. I wanted to be a novelist, but I was interested in stories and language. And it was only when I arrived in Belfast that I started getting much more political. That period of my life was a real PhD in conflict studies. Because you have then often drawn on current themes for your books, right? We need to talk about Kevin, your most famous book.

26:39There's a school shooting at the heart of it. These were the years after the Columbine high school massacre. So I can see that thread running through your books. They're not divorced in any way from issues and from current affairs. But the early influences in your life, that sitting in church, listening to your father preach, does some of your skill with language come from that, seeing how your father used words?

27:07Lionel Shriver:Yes, probably. I mean, I couldn't stand going to church as a kid, and I rebelled against it. And I'm still not a practicing Christian of any kind. However, my father was a fine orator, and I think that helped me. I also grew up in a household where, as you're advised to do with children, they use their full, complex, educated vocabulary. So I grew up learning fun, long words, right? And that was a huge favor to me. I've always been grateful for having become very fluent in the English language as a child. I've been crushed to discover that this ability to learn English as a child does not transfer to being able to learn any other language.

27:56Lionel Shriver:It's not the same skill. I've been so disappointed. So you rebelled against church. You also rebelled against femininity. Would that be right when you decided to change your name to Lionel from Margaret? Yeah, I think that was part of it. I was not a girly girl. I grew up between two brothers, and I've always been ambivalent about being female. I'm used to it. But I don't know. If I had a choice to start with, I'd probably choose to be male. That may be simplistic. You know, men have their own problems. The thrust of my approach to feminism as opposed to femininity is that I'm interested in minimizing the importance of sex.

28:48Lionel Shriver:I feel that I have more in common with men than I have differences. And I like the company of men. I accept that there are differences between the sexes. but when I was younger the thrust of feminism was really more interested in erasing the hard line between the sexes and and recognizing our commonality and I'm still in that place. It's interesting to hear you talk about that in the knowledge that your next book is around transgender issues. That's one of my biggest problems with the transgender movement is the emphasis on the importance of sex and that being so determinative of identity. And I think that's a false version of identity.

29:39Lionel Shriver:I don't derive a lot of the meaning of my life and who I think I am from my sex. It's just not that important to me. It's one of the reasons that I haven't been a big advocate for feminism. Not that I think there's anything wrong with it, but it's not what interests me. And just because I was born female in a certain era doesn't mean that that's what I wanted, that I'm obliged somehow to put all my energies into that. But did your engagement in seeing transgender issues play out make you feel more female in that that's kind of where the battle lines were drawn? That for those who have objected to the growth of the transgender movement, it was like, no, we are female.

30:25We're going to stand on that hill. I think you're coming to it from a slightly different direction. Yes, I am coming from a different direction.

30:31Lionel Shriver:So it's not that I'm defending my sex from people who want to invade and know you can't have it. I'm saying, what's to have? What's so great about being female? What's so great about being either sex? That's not what I understand to be an identity. When I was growing up, having an identity, it didn't have to do with race. It didn't have to do with sex. It had to do with what bands did you listen to? What books did you fall in love with? What movies knocked your socks off? What did you want to do? What were you good at? What were your interests? What did you hate? You know, whom did you love? That's in the mix.

31:12Lionel Shriver:But the trans thing doesn't even have to do with sex, you know, having sex. It's all about really stereotypes of what it means to be male and female. And those are the same stereotypes that I rejected when I was, you know, 15. Can I share one observation where my heritage plays into how I see your issues? In the 80s in the UK, yeah, no one would have asked me where my parents were from. That was just, it just wasn't part of the conversation. but now that people do comment on that and I might talk about it a bit or it's just more recognized as part of me I appreciate that it's not the be all and end all it's not like a more important aspect of my identity than something else but it's kind of nice that it's recognized absolutely nothing wrong with like no one's skimming over it um what is your background My parents came to the UK from Pakistan, Muslim, Pakistani Muslim.

32:12Okay. Yeah. But recently through Who Do You Think You Are? I found out that I have American revolutionaries in my ancestry. Oh, that's fascinating. And actually, reading your book, it's titled A Better Life, the ancestor I thought of was not my father moving to the UK as a doctor, but the great grandfather four generations back who decided to leave Massachusetts for India because that's where the opportunity was back in 1815 rather than the cold winters of Massachusetts.

32:44Lionel Shriver:Well, that sounds like a fascinating history. But there's a long sweep, right, of the kinds of shifts that you're talking about. And they are linked to empire and the global economy and nations having interests all around the world, powerful nations. Well, I mean, it sounds to me as if your family has a unique and compelling history. Not unique, I'm sure. Well, maybe not perfectly unique, but particular. And there's nothing wrong with finding that story rich and identifying with it. But you also have a considerable career. and I would be surprised if that's the only thing that you, you know, that's what you reduce yourself to.

33:28Lionel Shriver:It's one ingredient in many. The UK, the country that you lived in for nearly 40 years before leaving, I'm curious about why you left. What was the cause? You live in Portugal now. Yes. I mean, there was a host of positive reasons. We have friends that preceded us there, good friends. My husband is a jazz drummer, and he's played with Portuguese musicians for years, so that we had a kind of ready-made alternative social life. And we were both reaching an age that if we were going to ever make a major geographical change, we'd better do it soon, because otherwise that would pass us by. We'd probably just age in place, or even worse in my view, just withdraw back to the United States.

34:18Lionel Shriver:That kind of a future I found a little disappointing. And on the negative side, I felt things are not going very well in this country. And I didn't have to be a part of that deterioration. And there were little things. I mean, the new tax system that they were bringing in for self-employed people. But also immigration. No, that was not a major factor. Really? I've heard you suggest that. I read a profile that misquoted me altogether. Well, tell me in your own words, because I've heard you say things like that the neighborhood you were living in in London became very changed. It became very Nigerian.

35:10Lionel Shriver:It was mostly, yes, mostly North African. and it had been a white working class area and the original population had completely disappeared. And that was part of your thinking, wasn't it? That you felt you weren't functionally living in England anymore. Well, that is correct. London is no longer an English city. But that was not the driving reason that I left the country. I mean, you have, again, I've heard you say several times on podcasts that the experience of Muslim immigrants in particular to the UK and Europe has been catastrophic. I am worried that we're dealing with a certain civilizational incompatibility.

36:10Lionel Shriver:And I think that's especially the case when we're dealing with mass immigration. And the experience of Muslims in the United States has been very different because the quantity has been small. And American Muslims are overwhelmingly well integrated with the rest of the country. They're usually well educated. They earn a lot of money. They're prosperous and they fit in well with U.S. society. And I think that's one of my concerns about mass immigration as opposed to immigration is that when you establish whole communities of people from elsewhere, then there's no need to fit in with the larger population.

37:06But what you call mass immigration, and I think specifically your issue has been largely with Muslim immigration, right? Well, not in the United States. No, in the UK.

37:17Lionel Shriver:In the UK, that's obviously one of the big issues. And what are the problems that you see more broadly? Because these are very broad things you're saying about assimilation. But the Home Secretary in this country is a Muslim. The mayor of London is a Muslim. The youngest Nobel laureate in the world is a Muslim who lives here. So you're generalizing, aren't you? Of course I'm generalizing. We're having a conversation. We are, but I mean, when you make sweeping generalizations— There is certainly, you know, there's been a lot of integration at the top politically and socially. but on the ground, you know, there is a discomfort.

38:08Lionel Shriver:Okay, I'm going to make generalizations, and it doesn't apply to everyone, but I'd happily make generalizations about Americans. So discomfort with freedom of speech, right? Pressure for censorship, pressure for the larger society to recognize what are de facto blasphemy laws. Practices like female genital mutilation coming out of North and East Africa.

38:41That's something that comes, is not rooted in Islam. No, it isn't, but it comes with Muslims. Not necessarily. Not all of them, not necessarily.

38:50Lionel Shriver:We're generalizing. Yeah, we are. I guess I feel like I've read your books for so many years. There are such deep and beautiful portraits of individuals, of relationships, of characters within them. And then I read your nonfiction and I hear you on podcasts and you're very willing to extrapolate massively from social problems that definitely exist that perhaps might be better tackled without the big generalization, without making people feel you're seeing a mass rather than individuals? Well, when you write a column, I mean, you're devil's advocating because you understand this better than you're pretending.

39:35Lionel Shriver:As a journalist, and you're an opinion journalist, you have to make generalizations. You have to make a point. That's what I do. I have a column in The Spectator. Yeah. And if you're going to make a broad point, you inevitably make generalizations that don't necessarily apply to everyone. And if you restrict yourself to making assertions that apply to absolutely everybody, you basically don't write a column. Right. I get that. But I still think there's something about evidence, isn't there? I always try to use evidence when I'm backing up a position. And in fact, I do in a novel as well. And A Better Life is set, I would say, profoundly in a time and place.

40:23And all of the events in the novel that are not to do with my particular little story are real-life events.

40:31Lionel Shriver:And therefore, that's evidence. I mean, it's—and that's what happens in nonfiction as well. you assemble a set of facts and try to persuade the reader that your general view here is valid. Do you think that your fiction has been changed by your immersion in social and political issues? I'm trying to think of another novelist who writes as much nonfiction as in as many regular columns as you do at the same time as they're writing numerous novels. And I'm wondering what the crossover is between the two? I think there's considerable crossover. I'm interested in the world. I'm interested in the big issues of my day.

41:17Lionel Shriver:And I'm getting older and life is short. And if I'm going to participate in the world, as opposed to stay back and be an artist and and write these rarefied, you know, pretty sentences. You know, that's a choice, and I've made my choice. I'm going to be part of the world. I have made, some would say, a sacrifice in exposing, cheerfully exposing, what I think in nonfiction, and therefore I have sacrificed any sense of mystery, right? I am horribly accessible. And you don't have to spend a lot of time wondering what I'm like and what I think really, because you just have to open the newspaper. Or listen to podcasts.

42:12Or when you're in the UK, you are frequently on news programs, for example.

42:16Lionel Shriver:And the other sacrifice is that, you know, everyone doesn't agree with my positions. You don't. And therefore, I alienate, I potentially alienate part of my audience. And I guess I accept that. That's what happens when you take positions on things. Other people are going to disagree with you, which is fine. It's a large world. Totally. And that's okay. And there's freedom of speech in it, thankfully. Yeah. But in fairness, I would like to clarify that it's not that I'm disagreeing with you. I'm curious about your evidence. And I think that you do often make very broad assertions that do leave things out of it.

42:59And again, that's your prerogative. You're concentrating more on an individual. And social ills are important. Don't get me wrong. I think a lot of the issues you highlight are really important and deserve to be properly tackled through conversation and action. I'm just wondering if that process is a bit harder when there are lots of generalizations.

43:20Lionel Shriver:I feel that you're really talking about my columns and not about the novels. Okay. Well, actually, I did want to talk about the novels because I was reading We Need to Talk About Heaven again. And it made me think about the depth of the way you write, that you could easily think about this book as being about a school shooting, but actually it's about a female protagonist, about her attitude to motherhood and marriage. And there's so many really deep characterizations. And in A Better Life, I think you're not going quite as deep into the characters. Are you writing books perhaps faster than you did in the past?

44:07Lionel Shriver:No, I don't think I'm writing them faster. I think they're a little shorter. part of that is uh i'm editing more i think that the that readers in general insofar as there are any of them left uh prefer shorter books now because of the you know the famous crap attention span and there's a there's a sacrifice there there are things you can accomplish with a much longer book that you can't with a shorter book. I mean, there's only, and when you have a certain number of characters, there's only so deep you're going to get. You've also come back from having a major illness. You've had a serious autoimmune disorder that affected you a lot in the last few years.

44:55And how has that changed your routine, what you feel able to do, how you want to spend your day?

45:02Lionel Shriver:Well, nowadays it hasn't changed anything. You're back. I had back surgery and it kicked off Guillain-Barre syndrome, which is an autoimmune disease that means your body is attacking its own neurological system. And in a weird way, this was perfectly designed to fell me in particular because I'm a fitness nut. And the effect of dissolving your neurological system is to dissolve your musculature. musculature. So within weeks, my biceps had drooped down into bingo wings. All my muscles just disappeared. And I could not stand anymore. I could only lift a cup of coffee by using both hands. I couldn't open my own hair clip.

45:55Lionel Shriver:So I was reduced almost to an infant. And little by little, once I was given a medication to stop the process. I recovered my strength, but it was tedious as hell. Yeah. So you've had to really work hard at getting your body back to where it was. And has it changed you, having such a shock to the system, realizing how frail we are when something like that hits us? It was humbling. It made me incredibly grateful to particularly my husband and my younger brother who helped me through it. It certainly gave me a renewed appreciation for the importance of marriage and family who really redeemed themselves and did more for me than I would ever have expected them to do before this happened.

46:55Lionel Shriver:And so I came out with a sense of gratitude. I certainly was reminded that I was mortal. And I would like to say that I've carried that gratitude into my every waking hour. I'm so glad to be here. I'm so glad that I can now, you know, I can do calisthenics. I can jump up and down. I can walk down the street. and I would love to be able to tell you that I hold that with me all the time, but I don't. I'm a normal person. And, you know, once you can go back to walking around and jumping up and down, you take it for granted like anybody else. Yeah, we forget pretty quickly, don't we? We move on. That's probably part of necessary humanity also putting things behind us.

47:43Lionel Shriver:Yes, well, that was one of the things I learned that you never learn. Lionel Shriver, good luck with the next book. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure to talk to you.

47:55And that's where we left it. In the written version at bloomberg.com forward slash Michel, you'll find some of what I used to research and prepare for this conversation, including data, historical context, and Lionel Shriver's comments elsewhere. And so to the team. The producers are Jessica Beck and Chris Martlou. The video producer is Andy Haywood. Social media is by Alex Morgan. Production assistance by Jennifer Seeley. Audio mixing by Richard Ward. Our music is by Bart Walshaw. And the executive producer is Louisa Lewis. At Bloomberg Weekend, the director of audio and special projects is Brendan Francis Newnham.

48:35And our executive editor is Catherine Bell. Just to remind you, the email is michelshow at bloomberg.net. And we do right back. Until next time, goodbye.

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