The sins of the mother

Lionel Shriver discusses her chilling new novel "We Need to Talk About Kevin," her fears about motherhood and how Columbine monsters are made.

By Suzy Hansen

May 8, 2003 | In "We Need to Talk About Kevin," Lionel Shriver's seventh novel, 16-year-old Kevin Khatchadourian locks seven teenagers, an English teacher and a cafeteria worker in the high school gym and systematically offs every one of them -- with a crossbow, no less. It's a parent's worst nightmare. Kevin's not only a killer, and a chillingly creative one, but he's joined the exhausting litany of troubled white boys taking out their angst on innocent peers; he's the grisly topic of nightly talk shows.

And so are his parents. After all, at some point between hanging a mobile above Kevin's crib and shepherding him to school dances, something went horribly wrong.

What went wrong is what Eva, Kevin's mother, tries to figure out in a series of letters to her "estranged" husband Franklin, a year or so after their son unleashed his not-so-secret rage on their quaint, affluent New York suburb (Kevin is very upset when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris steal his spotlight a few weeks later). The Khatchadourians (there's a younger daughter named Celia, too) are wealthy and white; Kevin grows up never wanting for anything. But while Shriver attacks the phenomenon with unflagging gusto (she heavily researched the real-life school murders of the late 1990s), she isn't preoccupied with figuring out what motivates these young men, nor does she ruminate on how a vapid American society creates adolescent monsters.

Thank God for that -- what we get instead is a much more interesting, thoughtful, and surprisingly credible, thriller. "We Need to Talk About Kevin" is about motherhood and the possibility that one's ambivalence about breeding might influence the growth and development of a child. Eva, in her scathingly honest and often witty recollections of her relationship with Franklin, her agonized decision to give up a life of traveling for motherhood, and her painful years with (the truly hideous and apathetic) Kevin, faces the question head on: Am I responsible for what my child has done? While the plot -- that a woman's uneasy confusion about motherhood could create a killer -- is over-the-top (Shriver admits as much, too), the grandiosity of it allows Shriver ample room to explore Eva's deepest, darkest feelings about her son. It's only when Eva has lost everything that she can admit her ugliest thoughts.

Salon spoke to Shriver about her own reservations about having kids, the question of whether people can be born evil, and the phenomenon of school shootings.

You had anxieties about having children yourself, correct?

Yes, so many anxieties that I haven't had any.

And what's the main reason you didn't have children?

I wouldn't say that I didn't have children because I was petrified that my son would turn out to be a school-shooting killer. But I was anxious about a pervasive ambivalence that dates back to age 8, which was the first time that it even occurred to me that I would be expected to have children. There were things about the marriage to which I was born that made me queasy as a girl because it was pretty traditional. I worried that even if I decided to have kids, the ambivalence wouldn't go away. As I went into my 40s, I kept thinking, well, something's going to happen to me, I'm going to be hit by this biological bolt of lightning, and suddenly the way will seem clear. But it became more and more apparent that the way would never seem clear, that I would never feel enthusiastic and I would always have reservations. Now, what if those reservations proved profound enough to contaminate my experience of motherhood and therefore my progeny?

So you were worried that they would be able to detect your ambivalence. Much of the book is about Eva's concern that her son Kevin can tell that she didn't totally want him.

For example, a hypothetical situation: After writing myself through the issue, I go ahead and decide to have a child. I still would have written "We Need to Talk About Kevin," and my child might have read it. How would they feel?

Do you know what exactly you didn't like about the idea of having children?

The list is as long as my arm. In fact, there's a point in the book where I list them by number. A lot of it has to do with this sense of loss of self, which for a lot of women is the central issue. It's potentially diminishing rather than something that makes you feel more fulfilled. And I don't think that fathers feel the same potential diminishment. As I reflected on it, I felt that a lot of people, especially in the professional sphere, would think less of me rather than more.

Certainly, there was always this feeling when I was growing up that it was all very nice if I wanted to start a career, but there was always this implicit, "Well, at length, you'll get married and have babies."

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