From The Times
March 13, 2010
We need to talk about Lionel Shriver
Tough, funny, angry, the award-winning writer talks about life, death, being a batty old lady and having seriously eccentric eating habits
Janice Turner

Left - Lionel Shriver, photographed at home

Lionel Shriver is angry. It doesn’t help that her house is blockaded with unpacked boxes and she’s given her lax internet provider such a verbal scorching it terrified her builders. She is fierce, this 5ft 3in hard-body with the unblinking gaze. Rage seems to fuel and sustain her, and it surges righteously through her latest novel, even into its exasperated title, So Much for That.
This is a scalding and timely attack on the US healthcare system for how it makes neurotics of the well and bankrupts of the sick. And, at 52, Shriver is railing not only against the recent deaths of friends but also her own mortality.
The house she has bought outright, on an ugly main road south of Tower Bridge, is the first she has owned: she’s lived in rented places all her adult life, first out of poverty, but since her celebrated Orange prizewinning novel We Need to Talk About Kevin because she remained uneasy about spending money. “To an extent this whole structure is tied around my ankle like a ball and chain,” she says. “When I was younger I wanted money for adventure, to research my books abroad. Now my old age is far less abstract. I want money to be safe.”

Wealth and health and how, in Shriver’s native America, these are grimly interlinked, is her central theme. So Much for That concerns Shep, who has sold off his handyman business for a decent sum with which he plans to escape to a remote African island, Pemba. But just before his departure, Glynis, his wife, a metalsmith, discovers that she has a rare and rabid cancer caused by asbestos exposure. Shriver baldly illustrates the toll on Shep’s fortune by starting chapters with his bank balance, which takes stomach-lurching dips as his wife grows more gravely ill.
The book’s genesis was the death of Shriver’s friend Terri, also a metalsmith, with the same disease and cause. (Shriver, who also forges metal sculptures, may even have the same condition: “I don’t like to think about that much.”) Terri taught Shriver how cowardly most of us are in the face of terminal illness: “It’s easier not to ring, to put it off, to rationalise that you don’t want to disturb someone. But one of the things I found most distressing with Terri was how avoidant people are. I don’t think I was as good a friend as I would like to have been.”
Watching her friend’s crucifying treatment gave Shriver a horror of chemotherapy. “I can’t stand the idea of sitting there watching poison dripping into your veins. I feel there will come a time when we will look back and wonder what were we doing. I’d rather get run over on my bike as long as I was killed outright.” Then she adds sardonically: “We’ve seen cancer enough now, so it’s not even that interesting.”
Except Shriver has made it compellingly so, in part by creating a cast of sick people — Glynis, a teenage girl with an incurable disease and Shep’s aged father — who are maddeningly capricious and sharp-tongued. Shriver claps her hands with glee at this reflection: “Yes,” she cries. “They are like real sick people!”
The full piece at The Times online.