Post-Birthday World (Shriver) - Author Bio

Author Bio
• Birth—May 18, 1957
• Where—Gastonia, North Carolina, USA
• Education—B.A., M.F.A Columbia University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York, and London, England

At age seven, Lionel Shriver decided she would be a writer. Years later, her first six novels were all well received, and they created a loyal fan base among her readership. A graduate of Columbia University, Shriver has also written for the Wall Street Journal, Economist and Philadelphia Enquirer. This work, About Kevin, was inspired in part by the author's personal determination not to procreate.

Shriver's debut novel, The Female of the Species (1987) is a daring page-turner, with characters readers love to root for. Gray Kaiser became famous when she discovered a remote African village as a young anthropologist. Now, Gray is returning to the village to make a documentary, with an assistant and Raphael, a graduate student 35 years her junior. When Raphael and Gray become lovers, their relationship transforms Gray from a brilliant scholar to a lovesick, helpless victim.

In Checker and Derailleurs (1988), the Derailleurs and their enigmatic drummer, Checker, find themselves in the middle of a local band showdown. When a rivalry ensues with another, less talented drummer, Checker marries and leaves the club where he has made a name for himself. In a clever and touching novel, Shriver captures what it's like to be 19 years old with rock-and-roll dreams.

Shriver's third novel, The Bleeding Heart (1990) was written while she was living in Belfast, Northern Ireland, which is also the setting of the book. American Estrin Lancaster falls in love with a single-minded bomb maker, and she becomes involved in the tangled Irish politics of the region and an equally knotted love affair. True to life, Shriver doesn't present a solution to these fictional situations either.

Her next books deal with subjects as varied as international intrigue and family politics. Game Control (1994) is set in modern-day Nairobi. Misanthrope Calvin Piper develops a plan to reduce global population by one-third, under the guise of ‘population control.' In A Perfectly Good Family (1996), the conservative children of wealthy liberals are left to deal with the estate after their parents' death.

Love and sports clash in Double Fault (1997). When two mid-ranked tennis players meet and fall in love, their married life is idyllic until they begin to compete for recognition on the courts. When Willie, always the better of the two players, suffers an injury, her jealously spins out of control when her husband plays the U.S. Open. As only Shriver can do it, this novel doesn't let the reader off easy with a simple love-conquers-all story; instead, we get the full brunt of Willie's irrational rage, and a truthful record of its effects.

Although Shriver had written daring and absorbing novels since 1987, it wasn't until 2003's We Need to Talk About Kevin that Shriver became a household name. Beautiful and deeply disturbing, the novel asks one of the toughest questions a parent can ask of themselves: have I failed my child? When Kevin Khatchadourian murders nine of his classmates at school, his vibrant mother Eva is forced to face, openly, her son's monstrous acts and her role in them. Interestingly enough, when Shriver presented the book to her agent, the agent rejected the project. Shriver shopped her book around on her own, and eight months later it was picked up by a smaller publishing company. As Publisher's Weekly comments, "A number of fictional attempts have been made to portray what might lead a teenager to kill a number of schoolmates or teachers, Columbine style, but Shriver's is the most triumphantly accomplished by far.

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When asked what her favorite book is, here is her response:

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller. The first "grown-up" novel I ever read, at 12, which convinced me that fiction for adults needn't be humorless, or laborious to read. I had read it eight times by the time I hit the tenth grade. There's an amoral, anarchic quality to Heller's satire that struck a chord. After all, in the end Yossarian goes AWOL in WWII, which is hard to make sympathetic.

(Author bio and interview from Barnes & Noble.)