What to expect from an evening with Lionel Shriver? Spikiness? Controversy? It’s not going to be dull. ‘I don’t set out to offend people,’ she told interviewer Cathy Galvin, with a smile.
Shriver fans and fellow-writers had gathered at Waterstones in London’s Piccadilly for the Word Factory event. ‘So the short story doesn’t sell?’ was the Shriver-ish title for the evening, during which we discovered that her latest collection, ‘Property’, went for ‘a six-figure sum’ – the kind of number only dreamed about by short-story writers in the audience.
Shriver read from her story ‘Vermin’, part of the collection, about a couple in a rented house in Brooklyn. On discovering that someone wanted to buy the house because the street was ‘good for a family’, they decided to buy it themselves. They became home-owners, and that’s when the trouble started…
Although she prefers reading novels to short stories – or was that just a provocation? – Shriver writes stories in between her books because ‘it’s satisfying to have something complete’. She admitted that her novels suffer from being pushed aside to make way for work that has an imminent deadline, such as journalism. She’s ‘more loyal to something with a due date’.
Her early novels were critical, but not commercial, successes. She was ‘fortunate to be rescued by [We Need to Talk About] Kevin before I quit’. She admitted that ‘bad reviews still irk me’. She used to think that ‘writers who didn’t read their reviews were cowardly or lying’ – but wished now she could do the same. But ‘I don’t have the discipline’. She was scathing on the ‘capricious and faddish and arbitrary’ literary world. What does your success mean to you, she was asked. It ‘should make me take the whole farce less seriously’, she replied. One suspects it matters too much.
Writers hoping to learn about Shriver’s own process would have been disappointed, although there were some nuggets: she has no second readers – ‘never, ever’. She knows what’s wrong with her work. ‘Why would I ask someone else?’
It was a shame there was so little insight into the process of selling and marketing short stories – and why Shriver believes they sell. Writers who had come to hear insider tips, or how to get their collections out there, must have left disappointed. People would always rather read novels, she thought.
For fans of the short story, not much insight. She was surprisingly ambivalent.
For fans of Lionel Shriver, it was right on the money.
Sarah Hegarty 
I enjoyed the Word Factory evening with Lionel Shriver too, Sarah, but I do agree with your thoughts here. It was a brilliant showcase for Shriver’s work but disappointing for those of us who had been lured along by the evening’s theme, which was never really touched upon. Looking forward to reading ‘Property’ as I enjoyed the story she read.
Thanks for your comment, Tracy! Perhaps Lionel will always be unpredictable… always interesting to hear writers talk about their work. Thanks for reading!