My father is 93 my mother turns 90 in July. Both my parents are still alive – although in my mother’s case that may be stretching the meaning of the word. This is a personal matter for me, and not only because I’m already 64 myself. Derek Humphry’s 1991 self-published how-to, Final Exit: The Practicalities of Self-Deliverance and Assisted Suicide for the Dying, became an unlikely New York Times bestseller for 18 weeks. Elderly people have the highest global suicide rate of any demographic. Whether or not we feel like thinking about it now, many of us will turn to this issue in time. If they cut their lives artificially short, what delights might they miss out on, and what horrors might they escape? The novel considers what we all do, fleetingly, as the years advance: under what terms will we concede to keep living? Beyond what line does sticking around entail such suffering, diminishment, or humiliation that we’d rather call it quits? Some chapters veer into speculative fiction – cryogenics, a cure for ageing. The novel spins out a dozen alternative scenarios: one spouse goes through with it, the other doesn’t they enter a Club Med care home, or their children section them into a Cuckoo’s Nest care home. What do the couple do?ĭespite the morbid premise, I’m hoping a playful parallel-universe structure makes Should We Stay improbably fun. Whoosh, whoosh, we fast-forward their story, just as our time on this earth seems to race by before we know it in real life. They’re still in their early 50s, and this prospect seems a long way off. Having concluded, like Jolanta, that beyond the knell of about eight decades life is all downhill, they make a pact: once they’ve both crossed that threshold on Kay’s 80th birthday, they’ll kill themselves. After Kay’s father finally dies in a state of ruinous dementia, the couple are determined to avoid the same grim fate. A nurse and GP in the NHS, Kay and Cyril Wilkinson have treated numerous patients eroded by ageing’s remorseless decay. The Motion of the Body Through Space is out now in paperback (Borough).That, in a nutshell, is the genesis of my new novel, Should We Stay Or Should We Go. To colleagues and aspirants I would only advise, then: you’ve no idea when you’re writing a bestseller. Though once stuck in I had a good time, I was often dismal about my project’s prospects. No archangel appeared by my desk proclaiming that this child of my hand would be blessed by God. The point being: when I started “Kevin”, the heavens didn’t part. To wit, I completed my final edit in New York in concert with 9/11, after which surely no one would care to read about something as paltry as a difficult boy and his ambiguous relationship with his mother. I didn’t even feel proper self-pity, because plenty far more dreadful things happen to people than failure to publish a book. I hadn’t lost faith in myself, but I had lost faith in the outside world meeting my efforts with anything better than indifference. In its own terms the book seemed to be working, but all my other novels had seemed to be working, too. To the contrary, I’d no idea if it would ever see print. When I returned to London, we shifted to nicer digs in Borough, where I soon grew exasperated I had hundreds of pages, and my nefarious kid was still only four years old! (That’s why the narrative jumps from the age of four to 14: I didn’t want to write War and Peace.) Nine months after I’d begun in Bow, I wrote the last line, and I surprised myself: I cried.Īt no point during this novel’s composition did I feel any confidence that I was writing a life-changing manuscript. Weekends and evenings, I worked on the book.
#We need to talk about kevin by lionel shriver full
Needing the money and intrigued by a different kind of challenge, I soon shifted to Brussels to work three months full time for the Wall Street Journal Europe’s editorial page. My computer rested on a desk covered in poster paint intended for a six-year-old. I was intimidated and unnerved by the vastly greater financial burden of living in the capital. We had just moved from Belfast to London, where we were living precariously in a short-term furnished let in Bow. “That’s just right.” He wouldn’t read another word until the book was finished.
“Yes,” my partner remarked after reading over my shoulder.
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