When I was a kid, I had a habit of coming home from school on Friday afternoons and immediately doing my homework. So I'd wake up on Saturday morning with this wonderful sensation, a clean, open feeling of relief and possibility and calm. There'd be nothing I had to do.
Those Saturday mornings, they were a taste of real freedom that I've hardly ever experienced as an adult. I never wake up in Elmsford with the feeling that I've done my homework. A gift conspicuously at odds with your tastes serves only to betray that the benefactor has no earthly clue who you are. We met too late for that; I was nearly thirty-three by then, and my past without you was too stark and insistent for me to find the miracle of companionship ordinary. It was as if some folks got dunked in plastic, vacuum-sealed like backpacking dinners, and could do nothing but sweat in their private hell.
In the domestic polity, myth dictates that parents are endowed with a disproportionate amount of it. I'm not so sure. They can break our hearts, for a start. They can shame us, they can bankrupt us, and I can personally attest that they can make us wish we were never born.
What can we do? Keep them from going to the movies. But how? With what do we back up our prohibitions if the kid heads belligerently for the door? The crude truth is that parents are like governments: We maintain our authority through the threat, overt or implicit, of physical force.
Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story. He doesn't have any real concept of other people--that they feel pain, even that they exist.
There are situations that are unbearable and ongoing: excruciating pain with no possibility of relief is especially awful. Nest eggs put aside for future care can be wiped out. A planned exit at Dignitas could be pre-empted by a bus crash.
Shriver knows one woman who stockpiled a stash of pills with which to kill herself but is now too demented to use them. Illness and mortality are recurring themes for Shriver.
Should We Stay is a vehicle for other preoccupations. She picks playfully at the scab of Brexit. Cyril and Kay voice her belief that the economic damage caused by lockdown will be worse than the pandemic. These days, to even include them as characters at all is considered by some as cultural appropriation. Serenata is getting stick online for her accents in audiobooks that she does for a living. But Serenata — much like Shriver herself — is flabbergasted. I realise that. That is not my intention.
I think it would be a pity if critics zero in on that exclusively as it is not the primary focus of the book. How does Shriver justify this political subplot turning up in her sports saga? 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. It was rejected by 30 publishers in the UK before it found a home.
I just had a problem figuring out what was going on. The book provoked an incendiary reaction, partly because it was published in the post-Columbine climate and partly because it explored maternal ambivalence.
Shriver dared to imagine a mother who felt anything other than unconditional love towards her child and the reaction prompted her to observe that she had stumbled upon "the last taboo".
Does she still feel that way? You can't call someone with five o'clock shadow who's wearing a skirt Shriver's latest book, The Mandibles: A Family, , is another uncomfortable read, but for very different reasons. It is set in the not-too-distant future of and while it has been described as dystopian, the future she imagines feels forebodingly plausible. The dollar has collapsed. Water is scarce. Robots have made most jobs redundant. The alarmingly perspicacious novel is no beach read, not least because the characters aren't particularly likeable people.
I like to think of them as complex and having sometimes infuriating qualities. It's this attitude that helps Shriver excavate the darker side of human nature with ease. Like the rest of us, she isn't perfect - the difference is that she's okay with it. This aspect of her writing has no doubt informed her reputation for being austere, misanthropic even.
Interviewers often mention the fact that she wears gloves indoors she suffers from Raynaud's, which makes the extremities overreact to cold temperatures before bringing up her supposedly regimental calisthenics workout routine.
In a world of 6am spin classes and FitBit Flex-wearers, it's curious that much is made of Shriver's at-home workouts. I wouldn't say fanatically. I would say steadily and with some resolution. Now that Sunday newspapers come with whole exercise supplements, this is not something to make fun of me for.
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