The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047

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Shriver has argued against migration into the UK, in 2021 she wrote an article which stated "For westerners to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired is biologically perverse." [24] [25] [26] Political views & activism [ edit ] Merritt, Stephanie (May 8, 2016). " The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 by Lionel Shriver – review". The Guardian . Retrieved June 28, 2020. 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 LS: It’s partly a matter of fashion. Publishing is utterly obsessed with diversity. And that means that they are not choosing books strictly on the basis of whether they’re any good. This is a huge, society-wide problem and it’s not just publishing — we have ditched excellence and even competence, and all we care about is what category you belong to — but publishing is the worst of it. Women are slaves to fashion, including ideological fashion, and have this drive to please, and regard talking about diversity all the time as pleasing because that’s what you’re supposed to do now. However, I do not think the problem is female readers. I sense no demand, from the ground up. “Listen, stop foisting these male, white writers on us. We only want to read books by people from Zimbabwe.” I do a lot of events and I just don’t hear it. The readership wants good stories and good characters, and also something with a little edge, which is where I come in. But it’s worth pointing out that transparent cowardice is not so much on the authorial but on the publishing level. As I wrote in a Spectator column, one of the reasons that publishing has become so timid, and frightened, and compliant, and risk-averse, is because it’s been taken over by women. I do not say that with any pride in my sex, and there are many exceptions, but women err on the side of being fearful. They also have, as a group, a fatal desire to please. What’s needed in this circumstance is balls, and I don’t care whether they’re literal or figurative.

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 a b "Lionel Shriver's full speech: 'I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad' ". The Guardian. September 13, 2016 . Retrieved September 29, 2016. Shriver, Lionel (August 28, 2021). "Would you want London to be overrun with Americans like me?". The Spectator . Retrieved September 17, 2021. We had just moved from Belfast to London, where we were living precariously in a short-term furnished let in Bow. I was intimidated and unnerved by the vastly greater financial burden of living in the capital. The flat was small and ex-council. My computer rested on a desk covered in poster paint intended for a six-year-old.Yes,” my partner remarked after reading over my shoulder. “That’s just right.” He wouldn’t read another word until the book was finished. Yeah, but I think this idea for young women is by no means new nor one that their mothers necessarily laughed at. The puberty of boys and the puberty of girls are quite different. Girls go through it earlier, which explains some of it. They are literally still children. But puberty is not a good thing, it is a cessation of power. You stop growing. You start bleeding. Even if your periods aren’t a big deal, it hurts (and for many girls they are a deal). Your body changes in a way that brings you problems. You go from a feeling of control to becoming prey, not simply to the boys around you but grown men, some of them your friend’s dads or coaches, etc. And all this happens in the space of a year. There is refinements later, and warnings earlier but the process generally, is rapid and dizzyingly transformative. All to kids who are barely out of elementary (and some in it). At Dalkey Literary Festival this month Shriver will be on a panel discussing the #metoo movement. There's something about it that makes her anxious, she says. "I didn't like how so many people were being swept up in it with very little examination on a case-by-case basis of who was telling the truth and what is a fair punishment . . . I along with everyone else of my gender don't want men to think that my body is their plaything, that they can put their hands all over it or assault me in any way. But I'm sympathetic with young men negotiating the landscape of courtship these days, and I'm sure they're very confused about what's allowed and how you signal your interest." Shriver was dropped from a judging panel for a writing competition hosted by a Mslexia after she wrote a column on the Spectator blasting publisher Penguin Random House for its diversity and inclusion policies. She said the publishing house was "drunk on virtue" after it announced new regulations to further inclusivity and diversity among their writer base and criticized its "new company-wide goal" for "both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025."

Lionel and her brother Timothy with their mother in Massachusetts, 1971. Photograph: Courtesy of Lionel Shriver 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. Shriver, Lionel (June 7, 2016). "Lionel Shriver's teenage diary: bad spelling and unreturned affections". The Guardian . Retrieved April 4, 2019. Malik, Kenan (September 5, 2021). "To be truly British, the country needs to stay largely white. Really, Lionel Shriver?". The Observer. ISSN 0029-7712 . Retrieved September 17, 2021.American president: “I take no responsibility for Trump,” Lionel Shriver says. Photograph: Mark Wallheiser/Getty

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!'. 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 ] We’re less willing to accept that the human mind has frailties also, that its health can be similarly impacted by pollutants and excesses, albeit of different kinds. The mind we regard as almost infinitely adaptable. Properly formed and maintained, we assume that it can stand up to almost anything. Shriver is a Democrat. [27] She is a patron of UK population growth rate concern group Population Matters, [28] and supported the UK's exit from the European Union. [3] 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."Portes, Jonathan (September 1, 2021). "An obsession with migration figures is about more than just numbers". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved September 17, 2021.

So what did happen? What did Shriver say in her keynote that could drive a woman who has heard every slur under the sun to discard social convention and make such an obviously political exit? I’ve always been inclined to sympathise with people you are not meant to sympathise with,” says Shriver. 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. Shriver expressed her opposition to woke and identity politics in a 2021 interview with The Evening Standard, stating that "I don't like discrimination of any kind" but adding "there is nothing malign, initially at least, in the impulse to pursue a fairer society. The biggest problem with the 'woke’ is their methods - too often involving name calling, silencing, vengefulness, and predation." [39]In the 2014 film Still Alice, Julianne Moore plays a linguistics professor diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at 50. She leaves a list of simple questions for her future self, along with the location of the sleeping tablets if she draws a blank. But when Alice fails her own competency test and finds the tablets, she gets distracted and forgets what she was about to do. She’s missed her chance to exert control. In dementia circles, this is known as the “five-minutes-to-12 syndrome”. The temptation is to hang on until it’s too late, and the opportunity to exercise agency over the end of your life has passed. 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." It is and they are. That once-trusted institutions have not only succumbed to this sexually dysfunctional ideology but are also actively promoting it is very much a cause for concern. There seems to be a self-reinforcing loop at play here where authority figures love-bomb young people by affirming their delusions while at the same time denouncing those who refuse to participate in this massive lie as bigoted troglodytes who need to be silenced. I’m not anti-diversity – but I don’t like quotas. I admit it, I made fun of it, and you are never meant to make a joke around diversity, but I did,” says Shriver.