When Taking Control of Your Death Takes Over Your Life: Lionel Shriver on Getting Out Just In Time

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 20 June 2021

⏱️ 67 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Novelist Lionel Shriver is known for placing social topics (sometimes radioactive ones) inside the frame of fiction. Her 2003 novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was made into a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton, was told from the perspective of a mother whose son commits a school shooting akin to the Columbine massacre. Lionel's thirteen other novels take on such subjects as obesity, the US healthcare system, the national debt, global overpopulation, and homegrown terrorism. Her new novel, Should We Stay Or Should We Go, is about suicide, specifically the pros and cons of ending your life on your own terms before nature-or modern medicine-prolongs it in ghastly fashion. Lionel spoke with Meghan about her new book and also her feelings about illness, medicine and her own death. As an American who's lived in the UK for several decades and still lives in New York part time, Lionel also offers her thoughts about single payer health care and what the venerated National Health Service does right as well as often gets wrong. Guest Bio: Lionel Shriver's fiction includes The Mandibles, Property, So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, and the London Times, and she currently writes a regular column for The Spectator in the UK. She lives in London and Brooklyn, NY.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I find the current cultural climate, especially in, you know, liberal circles, so exhausting and so overtly stupid so that I'm lured into having conversations that are degrading just because I'm having them.
0:21.8	Even if I'm winning the argument, I shouldn't be having this conversation.
0:25.3	This is a waste of my life.
0:26.9	I do start thinking, okay, you know, maybe I should quit.
0:33.2	Maybe I should withdraw.
0:34.3	It's a little bit like that business of wanting to have the medication
0:41.3	in the fridge, right? And it's, you don't have to take it, but you, it's very comforting
0:47.1	to know it's there.
0:52.6	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dow. My guest, novelist Lionel Shriver,
0:59.2	is known for taking social topics and placing them inside the frame of fiction. Her 2003 novel,
1:06.2	We Need to Talk about Kevin, was told from the perspective of a mother whose son commits a school shooting
1:11.9	in the vein of the Columbine attacks. That won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was made into a
1:17.5	2011 film starring Tilda Swinton. Lionel's 13 other novels take on such topics as obesity,
1:25.1	the U.S. health care system, the national debt, global overpopulation,
1:29.9	and homegrown terrorism. Her new novel, Should We Stay or Should We Go, is about suicide,
1:36.3	specifically the pros and cons of ending your life on your own terms before nature or modern
1:41.9	medicine prolongs it in some painful or otherwise ghastly fashion.
1:47.2	Lionel spoke with me about this new book and also about her feelings about her own death.
1:54.8	Lionel Shriver, welcome to the unspeakable podcast.
1:58.7	I'm thrilled to be here in some kind of ethereal way.
2:04.4	Yeah, you're not really here, but nobody ever is anymore.
2:08.2	This entire podcast has been conducted remotely since it started, so it's going to be
	...

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