Lionel Shriver, a conservative novelist, critiques liberal "toxic empathy" toward illegal immigrants in her new book A Better Life, inspired by NYC Mayor Eric Adams’ 2023 (unimplemented) migrant housing proposal. She links post-2016 identity politics—sparked by her early "cultural appropriation" speech—to stifling literary freedom, while her work explores duty and resentment amid societal conflicts. With 50M+ undocumented immigrants in the U.S., she dismisses ICE raids as deterrents, not failures, and blames Biden’s policies for border chaos. Shriver advises young conservative writers to reject progressive compromise, despite publishing hurdles, and praises her own uncut prose, even when publishers balked. Her sharp, ironic voice cuts through liberal literary dominance, offering a defiant take on free speech and immigration’s cultural toll. [Automatically generated summary]
As I said, they compared you to Melania Trump, which is what the New York Times does.
Just purchase.
I guarantee you I'm a better writer than Melania.
I suspect that is true.
Hey, it's Andrew Klavan with this week's interview with Lionel Shriver.
I am so excited to have this fine novelist on my show.
I read her book, We Need to Talk About Kevin, many years ago.
I was deeply impressed with its absolutely unflinching view and its incredibly graceful prose.
And then I lost track of her, the truth is.
And I opened the Wall Street Journal the other day and found her interviewed as someone who, let's say, goes against the politics of the day.
I don't even know what her politics are, but I know that they're not the politics that is being sold by every other novelist out there except for me.
And it was a little bit, I felt a little bit like Robinson Crusoe finding a footprint in the sand.
I was very excited to talk to her.
Among her many works is a collection of essays called Abominations, Selected Essays from a Career of Courting Self-Destruction.
I know all about that, so I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome Lionel Shriver, and who has just brought out a new book called A Better Life.
Lionel, thank you so much for coming on.
It's a pleasure to meet you.
I'm glad to meet you too.
And I have to take myself to task because I have been apparently misadvertising myself for some time because I like to boast that I am the only conservative literary novelist writing in the United States today.
And apparently I have a fellow traveler.
20 years ago, I looked in the mirror and I had already won many awards in my field.
And I said, do you realize you're never going to republish what you're writing now?
You'll never win another award.
And 20 years later, I got nominated this year for an award.
You have just brought out this book called A Better Life.
And I just, maybe I should let you tell the story of a better life.
I've read the beginning of it.
I laughed out loud several times.
Your prose is absolutely lovely and it's incredibly graceful.
Your irony is hilarious.
But the New York Times hates you so much that they compared you to Mrs. Trump.
It makes me laugh out loud.
Have you seen The Atlantic?
Did I say no?
I didn't see the Atlantic.
What did they say?
That one is even more extraordinary, partly because it goes on for thousands of words.
You know, David Mammet told me that after he came out as a conservative, the Times showed up as his next play twice in a row so they could review it badly, they could pan it twice.
So I think you're in good company.
If you tell people the idea of a better life, I think they will get the idea.
It takes its inspiration from a program that former New York City mayor Eric Adams proposed in 2023.
It was during the migration crisis initiated by Biden's passivity in relation to the southern border.
And as we know, New York was inundated with literally hundreds of thousands of migrants who expected to be put up and cared for.
So Adams proposed that he would pay regular New Yorkers to put up migrants in their spare bedrooms.
Well, he never manifested this program, but I did.
In fact, I rather liked the fact that it didn't come to pass.
So I basically had a clean slate and I didn't have to do any kind of onerous research of the people who had participated in a real program.
And so it's about a mother and her 26-year-old son in Brooklyn.
And the mother is a progressive Democrat and wants to support the disadvantaged and decided to participate in this program and ends up inviting one Honduran migrant to live with them.
The story is seen completely through the eyes of the 26-year-old son, who is a university graduate, but for the last four years since graduation, has done absolutely nothing and is living at home.
In fact, he aspires to nothing.
He's proud of it.
He claims to be a perfectly contented person until this woman, Martine, comes to live with him and shakes up his gloriously inconsequent life.
And Nico, the son, is much more conservative than his mother and is skeptical about mass immigration.
And, you know, it's a little, his motivation is a little confused because obviously he doesn't like his nice, peaceful, nothing life being interfered with with this woman.
So he has a dog in this fight.
Right.
But he is a little bit of a hypocrite because one of the things he doesn't like about these migrants is that they're dependent.
They're expecting New York City taxpayers to pick up their bills.
And yet a New York City taxpayer picks up his bills, his mother.
Right.
Conflicted Views on Duty00:07:01
So the rage that this inspired, as I said, they compared you to Melania Trump, which is what the New York Times doesn't say.
I guarantee you I'm a better writer than Melania.
I suspect that is true.
Now, I have to hear.
Where did you see that?
I think I've missed something.
Yeah, that was the opening line.
It's like Melania Trump has her fashion weird hats or something like that.
I can't remember it exactly.
And this carping novel of mean spirit.
I wish I could remember the exact words, but they were all there, all the things that you want to hear.
And it was so obviously a political hit that it was kind of.
Oh, they're really pulling out all the stocks on the phone.
And I have to say, it's kind of satisfying.
We just got notified that Michelle Goldberg wants a copy.
Oh, boy, that's going to be.
Ooh, that's going to be great.
That's going to be a bloodbath.
So I want to know how you got to this terrible pass.
When I read your book, your book won the Orange Prize, right?
In the UK, which is a very prestigious.
We need to talk about Kevin.
Yes.
That was back when literary prizes meant something besides DEI.
One of the last ones.
Yeah.
So I read that book and I was incredibly impressed with its unwavering eye.
I mean, for those people, it's been made into a movie, but it's basically about the mother of a mass killer.
And it like looks on this evil that comes out of nowhere, really.
I mean, the poor mother is sitting there going, I can't connect with this child.
And some reviewers said it was about that causing the problem, but the way I read it, it was really about the kid just coming out evil.
And I'm wondering, is there a connection between accepting the idea of evil and taking a different political tack than the rest of the literary establishment?
You know, I think that's for literary critics to decide.
I don't consciously make big connections between one book and another.
And I tend to move rapidly on.
It's funny.
I have conversations with people and they remember the names of my characters better than I do.
Yeah.
I know about that.
It's like I'm finished with that and I move on.
So I'm not busy making interconnections between them.
There's probably a certain, there's certain consistencies of concern.
I think one of the things that you can see in more than one book is a conflicted relationship to duty.
And I do mean conflicted, because in some ways I'm a big believer in duty, but I also resent being called to it.
I don't think you're alone in that.
I mean, I think, and I think that our culture has a conflicted relationship to duty.
In fact, if anything, it's not conflicted enough.
That is, we reject duty.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you write this book.
You're celebrated for the book.
You know, movie is made of the book.
At what point did you start to feel that you were at odds with the literary establishment?
And was it because they had moved or had you moved or was it both?
Oh, it was definitely because they moved.
And there was a pretty identifiable break in 2016.
I had been invited to a Brisbane book festival in Australia.
It's not especially famous, you know, it's, but they wanted me to do the opening address.
And I said yes, because I was promoting a book at the time.
And they asked me initially to do an address on community and belonging.
And I said, you have to be joking.
What did that mean?
So I instead did an address about the concept of cultural appropriation.
And this was very early on with that particular concept and hadn't been imposed on fiction to a large degree.
But I was sounding the alarm and saying, you know, this idea that you can't steal from other cultures is antithetical to the nature of fiction.
And if you can't write about people who are different from yourself, then you're just going to be reduced to writing memoir.
And, you know, if anything, I think literary writers today tend to be too self-involved.
I think we need to encourage each other to write more about the rest of the world and less about, you know, ourselves feeling sorry for ourselves in our bedrooms.
You know, it's just, let's turn outward.
And I actually thought it was so obvious that this was an unworkable idea, that you have to keep your hands off what doesn't belong to you, that it would be boring, that it would be a dull speech.
Instead, it lit up literally an international controversy.
And boy, was I surprised.
I just thought, wow, where'd this come from?
And maybe I was slow to the party, but that was right around the time that I had to really get up to speed on the identity politics front.
And, you know, I've never looked back.
The more I found out about identity politics, the more I detested it.
And so ever since then, the last 10 years, it's been issue after issue that.
progressives have been promoting that I have been resisting.
And to some degree, of course, that makes it into my fiction.
I also do a certain amount of nonfiction, mostly comment journalism.
And I have a column in the British Spectator magazine.
So, you know, I don't make a mystery of my views.
Yes.
A lot of novelists do.
You know, there's a whole other model for this profession that, you know, you're rarefied, you're mysterious, you're an artist, you're unknowable.
And once in a while, you come out with your great works and others are to poor over them to try to discern something about you, but you're behind the curtain.
And I'm not one of those people.
I am not interested in mystique.
Life Is Short00:06:30
And life is short.
And I'm going to get my views out there however I like.
So it won't surprise anybody who reads my column that I'm a restrictionist on immigration.
You know, I have to, I can't tell you how refreshing it is to hear somebody talk like this because I talk like this.
I was basically hurled out of Hollywood.
I was working in the movie business for a while.
And once I started doing what you do, which is writing my ideas and opinions, I thought my phone broke.
It turned off so fast.
It was like, I thought, wow, something's wrong with my electricity.
But I don't understand how a writer can live without saying what he thinks.
I don't understand how you can do what you do without feeling free.
I know, I mean, I know for a fact that Cormac McCarthy hid his politics possibly.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
So I think it's safer.
It's obviously keep your head down and it hurts.
Yeah, but if you have any artistic ambition, who wants safety?
Who's seeking safety?
Safety is not doing anything or writing anything.
Right.
Exactly.
And, you know, yes, the book I just published is dangerous.
That's what's fun about it.
I think that's what's fun about it for the reader as well as for the writer.
So when you lived as long as I have, you have seen a lot of stuff.
Dinosaurs, you know, woolly mammoths, like guys who could barely walk.
They had to use their fists to walk on.
But through it all, I've come through, through all I've come through, my family is by far the most important part of my life, which is why I want to make sure they're taken care of if something were to happen to me, which obviously is not after these thousands of years.
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Well, you know, that actually leaps off the page the minute you open the book, you find somebody having a good time, which is just intoxicating.
You know, I mean, it's like watching an actor really get his teeth in a roll or something like that to listen to your prose is just, you just sit there and I started to crack up right away, which is tough.
I'm not that easy to laugh, you know, when I'm reading.
We're talking about a novel called A Better Life by Lionel Shriver.
Did you have any clashes with your publishers?
Did your publishers, because I've had those too.
You know, you're published by Harper, which is a good company.
I did have some run-ins.
But I would say up front that I was very concerned that I would have a hard time selling this manuscript.
I knew that it was full of passages that were going to freak people out.
And good for HarperCollins.
They really didn't hesitate and bought the book.
I go way back with HarperCollins, so that's part of it.
But they were not under any contractual obligation to buy this one because I long ago stopped putting together contracts in advance of writing the book.
I write it without any obligation to deliver on a particular date.
And the sacrifice of that is, of course, that the publisher is ever even more unencumbered in terms of their future relationship to your work.
I did find, however, that after they bought the book, there were editorial concerns, editorial cold feet, that there were passages that went a little too far.
And sometimes it would be represented to me as an artistic flaw.
You know, this is just going on a little too long.
Or, you know, I really don't understand what you're getting at here.
Maybe you should cut it.
The problem was usually that my editor understood all too well what that meant.
And I stuck to my guns.
And again, you know, kudos to HarperCollins and to my editor, both editors.
I have two, one in the UK.
And at no point did they threaten, well, you know, if you won't do it, we say, you know, we're not doing this book.
There was none of that.
And so if I said a passage stayed, it stayed.
You know, I think if publishers had brains, they would take all the angry quotes out of all the papers and just take out a full-page ad in like a venue where people read, like the Wall Street Journal.
I actually, you know, it's funny you should say that because I actually had an idea.
There was another book of mine who was several books ago called The New Republic.
And in a number of instances, it was a book that was widely misunderstood.
And I guess that could be my fault.
I can't say because other people got it.
But I had this idea of putting together a paperback edition that was just covered in these lacerating quotes.
I swear it would sell the book.
Living Abroad's Perspective00:07:59
It's great.
I know.
Of course it would.
Gorza would.
The last time the New York Times reviewed me was so long ago, I hardly remember, but they called me Two Macho.
I said, please take a full-page hat.
True macho.
How much better can it get?
Now, are you an expatriate?
Yes.
You are.
Okay.
Yeah.
I mean, I'm speaking to you from New York right now.
My husband and I keep a small home in Brooklyn.
So I return to the U.S. and to New York, usually in the summer.
And now that it's February, I know why I come back in the summer.
It's horrible.
It's horrible.
But I'm currently living in Portugal.
And that's a recent phenomenon because I had been living for 36 years in the United Kingdom.
So I went to the United Kingdom for seven years in the 90s to get away from what was then called political correctness.
I mean, I went for a year and I just couldn't leave.
I just stayed for seven years.
Did you do that for the same reason or was this just personal?
Did you want to get out of America?
It happened virtually by accident.
I moved to Belfast to set my third novel and just got stuck in there and ended up staying for 12 years.
I had originally gone for nine months.
And then my then partner got a job in London.
So we moved to London.
Yeah, I just ended up there.
It wasn't a life plan, but I didn't fight it because I enjoy living outside the country.
It's not a matter of fleeing.
I'm not flouncing out because the wrong person got elected president.
Right, right, right.
But I like living in a large world and I like being able to essentially change the channel by hopping an airplane.
And it's a new set of friends and a completely different politics and different problems.
It's fun.
And I like having a large range of concerns.
So, you know, I care about Europe.
And I've been to a lot of Europe, mostly for work, actually, because I am widely translated in Europe.
So I'm brought over.
And so I care about what happens to France.
You know, France drives me crazy.
I don't understand why it's even remotely solvent.
And that goes back decades.
That country shouldn't work at all.
It shouldn't work as much as it does.
And I care about what happens to Spain and Italy and Germany, you know, and therefore I like following all these different stories.
It just, as I said, it means living in a large world.
So once again, we're talking to the novelist Lionel Shriver, whose new novel is called A Better Life.
And I hope you will go out and buy it and show some support for this incredibly graceful writer.
It's funny and you'll like the viewpoint of it.
So let's talk about Europe for a little bit.
I mean, from where I'm sitting and I haven't been there for a while, it really feels like, for instance, the UK has lost its way entirely.
I mean, maybe beyond reclamation, but you're writing for the spectator.
They haven't put you in prison yet, which is nice.
Maybe because you're in Portugal.
Maybe they haven't caught up with you.
But you basically are telling them to stop bringing in Muslim migrants who hate them.
Is that a fairly fair way of putting it?
And that's the way the vast majority of the population who live there feels also.
So my viewpoint isn't popular among what we now call the elite, but it is certainly popular with everybody else.
And that's the irony, actually, about the reaction so far to this novel in that it really plays to the mainstream.
I mean, that's the real mainstream.
Regular people do not like vast numbers of illegal immigrants pouring into their countries.
And in the case of the UK, it really is drastically transforming the demographic makeup and the ethnic makeup of that country over the course of only about 25 years.
And, you know, there is no tradition of absorbing waves of foreigners as there is in the United States.
And the left in the UK has started describing Britain as having always been a nation of immigrants, which is ridiculous.
It's historically ignorant.
But they copy everything about the United States, and so they pick up all the catchphrases.
Yeah, I asked recently an English person why they did that.
And he said, we have America brain.
And I remember when I lived there, John Major saying we're a multicultural country.
And I thought, like, you know, what since when?
Yeah, this is like white and whiter, like pale and paler.
So are you worried?
I mean, I asked Douglas Murray why he wasn't afraid of getting arrested for saying the things he said.
He said they wouldn't dare.
They only come after ordinary people who have no way of fighting back.
Are you worried?
That's not entirely true, though.
I mean, Douglas is kidding himself.
Graham Lenahan was not an ordinary person.
And yet, the fact that he wrote some of the most popular sitcoms in Britain didn't protect him at all.
He was busted in the airport.
He was arrested at the airport.
And for all I know, I'm going to get on the plane on Saturday night and be arrested at Heathrow on Sunday morning.
Yeah, yeah.
I worry about it.
I haven't gone back to visit my friends recently in Britain because I worry about it.
No, there's no dedication to freedom of speech.
And they don't really have laws that protect freedom of speech.
They have laws that protect minorities, and you can't insult them even faintly.
And I despair.
They don't have a First Amendment.
And you can be literally arrested for putting something out on the internet that anyone interprets as somehow insulting of these so-called protected minorities.
And I have actually reflected that this book makes me endangered.
I hope that doesn't come across as vain because you can, I don't want to exaggerate my importance or something, but Britain does not allow free speech.
It's a truly dangerous place to be a conservative.
Britain's Conservative Dilemma00:06:42
And do you haven't, but you haven't had problems writing for the spectator about this?
No.
Yeah.
No, because, you know, that's much as I am grateful to HarperCollins for continuing to publish me, despite the fact that I am not a good little woaxer.
This spectator has loyally published every column I've ever sent them.
Every once in a while, a little tinkering or like, maybe you shouldn't say that, but very little.
So it's been a great forum for me.
But I've been surprised that some of the columns that I've published haven't got me in trouble with the authorities.
What are you thinking now about politics in the U.S.?
Yeah, it's incredibly entertaining here.
Oh, that's become such a big subject.
Well, just to stay on the immigration thing, I'm exasperated that the ICE operations going wrong, and I'm not a big fan of those shootings.
I have a hard time seeing them as justified.
I'm exasperated that these unfortunate incidents are being used as proof that we cannot enforce U.S. immigration law at all.
We can't deport anybody because, look, when we do, we become a police state.
And I don't think so.
I think you can criticize the methods without abandoning the purpose.
There's no way that Trump ends up deporting all illegal immigrants in the United States.
I mean, I think credibly there may be as many as 50 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.
It's actually an impossible figure to come up with reliably.
So that's as good as any.
You're not going to get rid of 50 million people.
I haven't kept up with the latest figures, but as far as I know, Trump is still going to have a very hard time matching the number of illegal immigrants that Obama deported.
But I think that it is still at least a useful kind of anti-advertising for the rest of the world.
The fact that these raids get a lot of press is it sends the signal, no, you cannot come to the United States and set up shop without permission.
And that prevents some extra illegal immigration that would otherwise have happened.
So that's good.
I'm not a big, you know, I'm not a big Trump supporter, Trump fan.
I didn't vote for him in either instance.
Although in the last election, I confess I did not vote at all.
I was paralyzed.
I simply couldn't bring myself to vote for Kamlaw.
It was like, no, no.
And rebels against the So I'm out of time.
I got to ask you one last question.
Talking to Lionel Shriver, the novelist who has written A Better Life and refuses to compromise with our woke masters.
What do you say to young novelists?
Because I get this all the time.
Young novelists who have a similarly non-politically correct approach to life and come to you and say, how can I even get started?
I mean, if even J.K. Rowling is constantly under fire, how is a nobody like me going to get started?
What do you say to them?
Well, there are a few literary agencies and a couple of upstart presses that are seeking to publish more conservative voices.
So don't despair.
There are people out there who want to help you.
It isn't, though, it's still not going to be easy.
The ostensible vibe shift after the last election hasn't changed everything.
So, you know, publishing has not changed its spots.
It is still incredibly difficult to be published if you are a young white man.
You could always trans your way in.
I look great in a dress.
Lionel Shriver, author, the book is a better life gotten by it.
Wonderful writer.
It's so nice to meet you.
It really is like finding somebody else on the island that you didn't know was there.
And it's just an absolute pleasure.
And I hope you will come back when you're going to be able to do it.
Oh, I would definitely.
And I'm not kidding.
I have the same feelings.
I don't think I have met another self-confessed conservative novelist in the last 15 years.
It's amazing.
It is absolutely amazing.
All right.
Well, I'd love to come back.
It's a pleasure to meet you, Lionel.
Thank you so much for coming on.
My joy.
Once again, the author is Lionel Shriver.
The book is A Better Life.
And if you read novels, if you love novels, I have to say, I've only had a chance.
We put this interview together very quickly.
And I only had a chance.
I've read one of her novels.
We need to talk about Kevin, which was terrific.
But this is funny and light and beautifully written and just ironic.
And I think you'll love it.
I hope you will go out and get yourself a copy because obviously, you know, those of us who live to please must please to live.
And so you have to help us out and let us entertain you in order to keep us alive.
And this is a great, a great place to start, a better life by Lionel Shriver.
And then when you're done, come to the Andrew Clavin Show on Friday.