Lionel Shriver "Big Brother"

I'm very excited to welcome Lionel Shriver tonight she's the author of 12 novels including one of my own favorites the post birthday world she's the winner of the orange prize for the novel We Need to Talk About Kevin which was also made into a really artful if very chilling film starring Tilda Swinton she's also also a National Book Award finalist for so much for that and her journalism has appeared in many places including the Guardian the New York Times The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times she's here tonight to talk about her latest book Big Brother which is a novel about a woman who puts her life and marriage on hold to care for her morbidly obese brother a book that was evidently inspired by personal experience to use her own words from an essay she wrote for the Financial Times this this and much of her writing combines the social with the profoundly private Big Brothers just out and it's receiving great reviews please help me welcome Lionel Shriver good evening thanks for coming out on such a beautiful day I personally would be in the park big brother is about fat it's not just about obesity but also the whole constellation of issues that we've come to associate with weight our relationship to food why we eat in addition to just feed our bodies how we use food in relationships with each other and how complicated that relation the relationship to food has become both privately with ourselves and and socially it was inspired by the death of my own older brother in 2009 to the complications of morbid obesity and so the fact that this issue hits so close to home in my own family gave me the feeling that this was my material and it it seemed to belong to me and I think help reprieve me from feeling a little anxious that I would otherwise just be perceived as some skinny [ __ ] who is lecturing people on the evils of cupcakes it's about a woman who whose name is Panda or a half-ton arson she's the narrator of the book and she grew up in a family in LA the father Travis was the star of a television drama in the 1970s that lasted for eight years called joint custody I made a note of the fact when I was trying to come up with a TV program that hadn't actually been made that all the shows that I watched when I was growing up bizarrely seemed to feature either widows or widowers as the parent and it seemed demographically improbable and there is clearly something of a conspiracy in the network's to make sure that there were no divorced parents and at the same time of course half of marriages in the US were ending in divorce and I so I thought that that it might seem cutting-edge to have a show that was specifically about a ribbon family and the way in which the kids were torn between two warring parents the trouble is that for Pandora and her brother Edison they have also have a younger sister who doesn't feature prominently in the book this show was not exactly was a mirror image of their family in terms of the you know the little sister middle sister older brother and they were roughly the same age as the kids in the show but the kids in the show two or the three were prodded jeez and the the the father on the show was in many ways a wonderful father whereas their real father was very neglectful and I liked the fact that if you put that situation together surely the the real kids would really really hate the fake kids so and I also like that that would bond the siblings and because this is a book in many ways about a sibling relationship it was important for them to have a particular and intense childhood together that bonded them well Pandora's relation reaction to growing up in celebrity family was to see through it and to not aspire to be famous herself her father was an [ __ ] not to put too fine a point on it and she wanted she wanted for herself the kind of wholesome solidity that she identified with her father's parents who lived in Iowa so the book is set in Iowa because Pandora fled LA and sought a very ordinary wife for herself by design she liked modesty and authenticity but her brother Edison had a very different reaction was more competitive with the father and wanted to make his mark in the world and see his name in lights and he became a jazz pianist and moved to New York and had always wanted to be famous so it's a very different trajectory for these two people but they've kept in touch and Edison has historically been a very attractive man tall just felt he was a track star in high school very popular with the ladies and Pandora has always admired him the odd thing that's happened in midlife however is that Edison has fallen on hard times and Pandora has become accidentally successful she started a business called baby monotonous it was based on a present she gave her husband Fletcher for Christmas she handmade him a pull string doll that looks a lot like Fletcher Fletcher is a fitness and nutrition freak she's tired of it she makes fun made fun of it by putting together a set of recordings that the doll says what the kind of thing that Fletcher says all the time like I want dry toast I want dry toast well her younger sister saw it and said oh I didn't I really want one of those for my boy that makes fun of my boyfriend because he's driving me nuts with all these little phrases that he uses you know like it's good to go would you please make one and before she knew it Pandora was had started a company that makes these things and they become a national fad so that hurt her you know her picture as the entrepreneur ends up on the picture on the front of Forbes magazine and everyone wants one in New York so even New York magazine does a cover story called monotonous Manhattan and so she's she suddenly a minor league celebrity herself and yet here is this person who has deliberately wanted to be a quiet modest normal person and you can imagine that this is a little bit this is a setup from your author because you know you've got the older brother who really wanted that for himself lives in New York and finds his sister on the cover of New York magazine oh great well I'm I wanted to explore in this in this book not only not only the fat situation but also Fame and celebrity and career success so that's a running sub theme in the book now the novel starts at the point where Pandora picks up her brother at the airport and they have not seen each other for four years and that's longer than usual but she's been busy building this business and finally got a phone call from an old friend of Edison's who well he seemed to want to get Edison off his hands which is a little weird and we're concerned that Edison is in in bad shape but Pandora's doesn't realize how I mean how literally bad a shape he is so when he shows up at the airport she looks straight at him and doesn't recognize him and that's because he has gained hundreds of pounds in that last four years so the rest of the story is Edison comes to stay outstays his welcome for two months and finally it's it's time to put Edison back on the plane back to New York and pandora has to decide whether or not to try to stage some kind of an intervention because Edison just keeps getting fatter or just let him go because of course it's his life and his problem and I think all of us with families can identify with that sense of conflict this is a book that tries to look at the larger issue of appetite and that's the sense in which the the fame career success theme and the food thing come together that is its it's trying to put forward a theory that as Pandora finally says in the end of the novel we are meant to be hungry that was taken out of context and some British publicity made to make me look like a complete lunatic I think there's something to recommend having an appetite and in in many different realms and the state of satiety is not to be envied I like the fact that when you are have desires you have a sense of direction of trajectory of energy there's something to do there's something there's a place to go toward when you have everything you want it's a static experience and and you just sit there it's like what's next and I I have said there there was definitely an element of of the autobiographical here not in terms of my own baby monotonous company but my own reaction to my career suddenly going better I was in the literary wilderness for at least a dozen years not only had I done an event like this in those years would nobody be here but I wouldn't be invited and finally things turned around in about 2005 and it was nice but I actually say it was in majority an absence of pain which is a big shock I mean when you've been looking forward to something wrong time you really you think it's going to be intense and it was incredibly mild it was pleasant and it's still Pleasant no and I wouldn't go back there but suffering has an intensity that contentment doesn't and I sometimes miss the drive that sheer spite used to give me and that's what I miss that I'll show them [ __ ] you thing and and I you know if things don't go well for me now I have only myself to blame and you know maybe I'm not writing well enough or I'm not I'm not writing the right books or but I can't say I haven't been given the opportunity and in fact I I am doomed to consider myself very lucky one of the one of the small sacrifices of having a higher profile I had to go through this last May which is when Big Brother was released in UK and for those of you don't know I live three quarters of the year in London and partly because I I live there I get a lot of attention from the press and by the way I I have come to question that whole notion that there's no such thing as bad publicity one of the sick things about releasing this book in the UK was that the attention rapidly shifted from the book and not only from the book not not as I had anticipated from the book to my real brothers real story I knew that the the UK press would be interested in that it's the nosiest and most intrusive press in the world to the point where you know that's now hit the headlines with News Corp I mean that they it's a very very gossipy journalistic culture but they they grew rapidly bored with asking about my brother no it it all had to do with me and so you know even book reviews would start talking about my diet and exercise regime I mean the reviews and some of those reviewers had obviously in having read profiles in which I was a little too forthcoming I had fashioned a fierce hatred of the author before they even started the book and what's what was interesting to me about that experience was was how it Illustrated a lot of what the book is about and that is the the excessive importance that we now place on physical size and how how screwed up it has become how how much we interpret our our value as human beings as being reflected in our bodies and I think there's a there's a way in which we we have almost gone existentially backward if anything we are much more concerned with physical appearance than ever before whereas you would think that as a species we would be coming we become more sophisticated know we have had selves now for a long time and I just don't understand experiencing the self as merely a body and an image I just find it mystifying because that's not my experience of myself and why why have we become so materialistic in relation to what it means to be a human being and no even in doing some of the promotional journalism for this novel I've I made the ugly discovery that there are whole websites dedicated to what celebrities weigh and publishing nasty photos of the cellulite in celebrity thighs and it's it's sick it's become a sick spectator sport and you know I was exposed to that for weeks and I guess one of the things that was revealed to me is that it's not the assumption now is that just because you're your weight is obvious to other people it is therefore their business and it's I just I don't get I don't get it I don't know how we got here so as often with my books the experience of publication has been almost as interesting as the experience of writing the book I thought I'd read you a passage from the very near the beginning which sets up the the celebrity career success theme that I talked about and then moves on to our first meeting with Edison for me baby and monotonous had become too successful meaning all that remained was for the enterprise to become less so only a tipping point waited beyond which orders would decline it wasn't a problem with which I expected others to sympathize but recently I'd been suffering from an insidious lassitude that derived from having everything more than really I had ever wanted on the personal side I had found Fletcher fewer Bach to others tightly wound but warmer and funnier behind closed doors than most suspected stripped he was a surprisingly handsome man and he had once said the same of me we were stealth attractive I'd had none of my own children but my adoptive ones were still speaking to me which was more than could be said of the average teenager one had born I'd skipped the bawling babies too of child-rearing and gotten in on the best part on the career side I had never been ambitious and suddenly I headed a thriving business of the most improbable sort one with a sense of humor I'd made just enough money that the prospect of making a little more left me cold wise high fires kept this battle with the baffling flatness of success discreetly to themselves picture how bitterly hordes of the frustrated disappointed disappointed and dispossessed would greet any complaint about being too satisfied and too wealthy be that as it may it really isn't a very nice sensation to not want anything warded hopes are no picnic but desire itself is energizing I had always been a hard worker and this damnable replete 'no sinner fated nearing the airport i look forward to having edison around again finally company with appetite my brother had been imbued with all the verb the flair the savoir faire that I lacked tall fit and flamboyant he'd inherited our fathers Jeff bridges bridges good Luck's without also assuming the oiliness that had always contaminated Travis Edison's younger features were fine almost delicate and last I'd seen him the somewhat broader lines of his face at forty still hadn't buried the high cheekbones he kept his dirty blonde hair just long enough to flare in an unruly corona around his crown the manic keyboard of a smile glinted with a hint of wickedness the predatory veracity of a big cat in my early teens my misfit friends were always smitten with my brother he had an energy an eagerness a rapacity even into adulthood he never hugged me without lifting me off the floor Edison was bound to breathe some life into that vast blank house on Solomon Drive a residence that since the advent of Fletcher's mad cycling and cheerless diet had aired on the grim side for I was a homebody I hated travel and gladly let my brother act as my alter-ego catching red eyes while I slept i recoiled from attention from childhood Edison could never get enough of it aside from the obvious competition with our Father I was mystified why my brother wanted so badly for other people to know who he was I could see coveting recognition for his talent but that wasn't what made him tick ever since I could remember he'd wanted to be famous why would you want to sell millions of people on the illusion that they knew you when they didn't I adored the fortification of proper strangers whose blithe disinterest constituted a form of protection a soft oblivious a speck of apathy in which I could hide like a square of fruit cocktail and strawberry jell-o how raw and exposing instead to be surrounded by strangers who want something from you who believe they not only know you but own you I couldn't imagine why you'd want droves of nitpickers to comment on your change of hairstyle to regard everything from your peculiar furniture to the cellulite in your thighs as their business for me nothing was more precious than the ability to walk down the street unrecognized or to take a seat in a restaurant and be left in peace but then the joys of obscurity were my own discovery like everyone else in LA I was raised to regard being a nobody as a death it may have been easier for me to reject that proposition because from the age of 8 I grew up with celebrity at ready hand or celebrity by association the worst kind unearned cheap I found being admired myself unpleasant and far preferred looking up to someone else while I'd looked up to numerous teachers as a child that comfortable hierarchy in which the weaker party isn't humiliated by the submission is decreasing Leon offer in adulthood grown-ups are more likely to despise than adulate their bosses and in my own self-employment I could only despise or adulate myself long gone where the day's American electorates looked up to a president like JFK we were more apt to look askance at politicians celebrities splashed across magazines excited less a duration than Envy in an era of the famous for being famous the assumption ran that with the right PR rep this talentless no-account all the goodies could be you I used to look up to my father and the fact that I did no longer paint me more than I admitted I loved Fletcher's graceful sinuous furniture but I didn't look up to him in fact maybe if you look up to your spouse there's something wrong I looked up to Edison I knew little about jazz but anyone who tripped out that many complicated notes without creating sheer cacophony was accomplished I was never sure the level of recognition Edison had achieved in his rarefied circles but he had played with musicians whom folks in the know seemed to recognize and I'd memorized their names in order to rattle off an impressive list to skeptics like Fletcher Stan Getz Joe Henderson Jeff Ballard Curt Rosen Winkle Paul motion Evan Parker and even once Harry Connick Jr Edison Appaloosa was listed on dozens of CDs a complete set of which enjoyed pride of place beside her stereo even if we didn't play them much since none of us was big on jazz I was in awe of his travels his far-flung colleagues his fearless public performances and his sexy ex-wife the vast canvas on which he'd painted his life he may often have made me feel mousy tongue-tied not quite myself I didn't mind so long as someone in our family was dashing and flashy gunning a harvester through the hay of the daily grind fine he smoked too much and kept in sensible hours Fletcher and I were up to our eyeballs in sensible and a splash of Anarchy was overdue still I pulled into short-term parking with a pang of misgiving Edison himself wasn't the beanpole he'd been as a track star in high school and though he hadn't kept up with the running he'd always been one of those men they simply don't make women like this whose naturally athletic builds and all manner of drinking in sloth my brother was sure to ride me mercilessly for looking so shopping mall and middle-aged Cedar Rapids Airport was small and user friendly it's beige decor a picture frame for whatever more colorful passengers deplaned there at the end of September baggage claim was deserted and I was relieved to have arrived before Edison's flight landed if people divided into those who worried about having to wait and those who worry about keeping others waiting I fell firmly into the second camp soon the connecting flight from Detroit was posted on carousel three and I texted Fletcher that the plane was on time while passengers threaded from the arrivals hall and clumped around the belt I loitered from a step back in front of me a lanky man in neat cocky slacks with a tennis racket slung over a shoulder and the remnants of a summer tan was conversing with a slender brunette the young woman must have saved her Apple from the in-flight snack she polished it against her cashmere sweater as if the fruit would grant three wishes I can't believe they gave him a middle seat said the tennis player I was grateful when you offered to switch said the woman I was totally smashed against the window but letting him have the aisle didn't help you much they should really charge double and leave the next cent his next seat empty but can you picture the ruckus if on top of having to put your hemorrhoid cream in a clear plastic bag you had to stand on a scale there be an insurrection yeah not socially practical but I lost my armrest and the guy was half in my lap and you saw how hard it was for the attendant to get the cart past him what gets me the woman grumbled his luggage emerged on the belt is we all get the same baggage allowance our friend in aisle 17 was packing a quarter ton and carry-on I swear next time they tried to charge me extra because of one pair of shoes having pushed me over 26 pounds I'm going to offer to eat them the man chuckled meanwhile no sign of Edison I hoped he hadn't missed the plane I gathered they've had to recalculate the number of average passengers older planes can take said the man but you're right normal people are subsidizing what normal people the woman muttered look around you searching again for Edison I scanned their fellow passengers to whose geometry I'd become so in EUR that at first I missed the snotty woman's inference earlier generations built on acute angles today's Americans were constructed with perpendiculars and the posterior lining the baggage belt were uniformly square given the perplexing popularity of low-rise jeans tight waist bands crossed the hips at their widest point and bit under the gut which the odd shortcut top exposed in all its convex glory I avoided the unfortunate fashion but with those 20 extra pounds I didn't stand out from the crowd myself so I felt personally insulted when the sportsman muttered to his companion welcome to Iowa oh that's mine the woman slipped her Granny Smith now very shiny into her handbag before leaning close to her acquaintance by the way on the plane with that guy but I really couldn't stand was the smell I was relieved this woman's suitcase had arrived since the pariah whom she and her seat mate had so cruelly disparaged must have been the very large gentleman whom two flight attendants were rolling into baggage claim in an extra-wide wheelchair a curious glance in the heavy passengers direction pierced me with a sympathy so searing I might have been shot looking at that man was like falling into a hole and I had to look away because it was rude to stare and even ruder to cry yo don't recognize your own brother wheeling to the familiar voice at my shoulder was like striding through a sliding door and smacking flat into plate-glass the smile I'd prepared and welcome crumpled the muscles around my mouth stiffened and began to twitch Edinson I peered into the round face its features stretched as if painted on a balloon searching the brown eyes nearly black now so hooded I think I was trying not to recognize him the long ish hair was lank too dull but the keyboard grin was unmistakable if sulfurous from tobacco been tinged with a hint of melancholy along with the old mischief sorry but I didn't see you find that hard to believe somewhere under all that fat was my brother's sense of humor don't I get a hug of course my hands nowhere near met on his curved back the forms soft and warm but foreign this time when he embraced me he didn't lift me off the floor once we disengaged and I met his gaze my chin rose only slightly Edison had once been three inches taller than I but he was no more it was now less physically natural to look up to my brother did you not need that wheelchair then now that was just the airline being impatient don't walk fast as I used to Edison or the creature that had swallowed Edison heave toward the baggage belt but I thought you didn't see me it's been over four years I guess it took me a minute please let me take that he allowed me to shoulder his battered brown bag visiting my brother in New York I trailed after his ground eating Colombe nervous of getting left behind in a strange city as he threaded nimbly through slower pedestrians without colliding with lit cigarettes yet walking with him toward the airport exit I was obliged to employ the step close step close of a bride down the aisle so how was your flight dull what but my mind was spinning Edison had stirred a range of emotions in me over the years Oh humility frustration he never shut up but I had never felt sorry for my brother and the pity was horrible plane could take off he grunted even with me on it that what you mean I didn't mean anything then don't say anything I'm not supposed to say anything I was already climbing the steep learning curve of an alien modern etiquette Edison could crack wise at his own expense and had he shown up in a form barring some passable resemblance to the brother I remembered he most certainly would have hounded me about my hips but when your brother shows up at the airport weighing hundreds more pounds than when last you met you don't say anything Thanks be willing to elaborate a little bit on why London why UK and not here you're writing about here in most of your words um I ended up in London by accident I moved originally to Belfast to write my third novel I was only planning to spend about a year there and I ended up spending 12 and then my my partner got a job in London so I I kind of owed it to him he'd put up with Belfast for six years a bit out of the way so we moved to London we split up I was left in London I have some career reasons for being there I'm actually better known in the UK than I am here so I've got a lot of I've got a very large readership there which is satisfying I have a lot of connections with the journalistic community there so I may give them a hard time but I'm one of them and I I am accustomed to living abroad I'm I've been in the UK now for 26 years and I guess it's become a big part of my identity if I sometimes do think about what it would be like to come back here permanently and in some ways it would be relaxing but I think I would lose a big chunk of myself and I would probably go through some tires in my den any crisis which I would rather skip or at least delay um way we're talking about Big Brother you mentioned about just how deeply personal the subject is in this novel and I was just wondering is that different than your other novels like is this more of a personal work than your previous ones and how do you feel about that as part of your writing process of fiction actually wouldn't say it's it's exceptionally more personal than some of my other books there's usually some personal element that has drawn me to a story or to a topic it's not it's not a requirement but it there's usually a reason that that I write one book and not another and at that time and not in another time so it makes perfect sense that if I was going to write this book that it would be after I lost my brother and who knows maybe if that hadn't happened to me I wouldn't feel a sense of ownership about this material and wouldn't need to get something out of my system but as I said I don't I don't think that's any time kind of a requirement in I'm always perfectly happy to draw the connections the one between my way no my personal motivations and more more Wittering ambitions or more social or political ambitions I think that sometimes misinterpreted is therefore I am an autobiographical writer and I go to a lot of effort to write fiction and to create new things and make them work in their own terms and I get a little impatient that just because I'm forthcoming about you know why I think I wrote this book and my eye Brooke chose to write it now then I get the autograph autobiographical thing thrown back in my face and I think especially with female writers that's meant to be a diminishing categorization because the the underneath it is you you can't make anything up right and that when your job is to make stuff up that means you're kind of crap at your job but it did help in the writing of this book to have have something to work through for myself but there have been other books that I I also had something to work through I mean so much for that I had lost one of my closest friends and I had something to work through on that one too not just on account of losing a friend to the disease that that that book features but also starting to content for the first time with my own mortality which is what happens when people start dying on you so I mean I think that's one of the nice things about fiction is the way that it can can combine these more abstract or impersonal social issues with something very very personal and close to the bone and when fiction works especially in any fiction that has a social or political side it's an illustration of of the minutia of that of that issue you know the only reason that that obesity matters is the is that it matters to individual people and how their lies you know and that's what fiction is good for is is looking at the vivid tiny illustration of perhaps what maybe also a larger phenomena I just wonder you you talked about how you achieved success and recognition I was just wondering similar to some baseball players who are stars for a long time then they did a season where they wondered can I still do it I just wondering you as you kind of I don't know if this is book number nine or I can't remember exactly this is eleven eleven well I'm just worried if you kind of go through that kind of creative process of anxiety and challenge because you want you now have achieved a certain level of success in other words if I fail I fail in Plainview I still get plenty anxious the weird thing and the unpleasant surprise for me of proceeding well into the middle perhaps even post prime of my career is that writing books has not got any easier and that doesn't seem fair I mean I've been doing it so surely I should be getting better at it at least a little bit blase and it seems to be working absolutely the opposite this book I had no confidence in for the entirety of its composition and I only decided I liked it when I finished the very final draft this is veins I'm in a state of semi misery for a long time and I can't blithely seem either that oh that's just some little game I'm playing with myself because you know you can easily come along and you don't like what you're writing for good reason right so yeah it's very anxious making I don't I don't I don't think it's so much the being a little more successful I think it's becoming slightly more aware of how much has already been written and just becoming less self impressed as the years go by more impressed with some people who are better than I am but it doesn't Wow me that I can write a sentence anymore it has to be a really good sentence and I think that's what potentially leads to paralysis in in late career is it kind of killing humility in writing this is inspired by your brother's death by wait in writing this what did you learn about out-of-control appetite if anything what insights did you gain from exploring the issue and the second question did you gain any understanding or appreciation or insights into why we are such a celebrity obsessed culture mm-hmm and then can you sign my book I put forward a few theories about about out-of-control appetite I mean I I I think that when you are turning to food to satisfy other appetites that food simply isn't capable of saving you can eat an infinite amount because you keep you keep you're still empty somewhere I mean there's a there's a line in the book that Pandora's tells Edison that it's as if he's been turning on the temps of the sink to fill the bathtub so that you can keep turning the sink on more and more fall but you're not going to fill the bathtub and you know if if you're if you're eating because you're a lonely you can go through the contents of the entire refrigerator you're still lonely at the end of it I always find this expression comfort eating a little weird I don't think I don't think eating is comforting and and especially the kind of eating that comfort eating is referring to it's usually going to be eating by yourself and and at the end of it you're not going to feel better comfort eating is is fail is failed is always failed it doesn't make you feel all soft and happy and warm it generally makes you feel dumpy and a little irritated with yourself and I you know I think that's a lot of it that we we reach for food for the wrong reasons I often you know why I have sometimes fine when I'm working on a scene in a first usually in a first draft and it's not going well and I don't know what comes next and I I'm it's just not working I will end up staring in the refrigerator and then I have to kind of like get a grip close the refrigerator go back upstairs what's wrong as the scene isn't working not that I'm hungry but that's going to be a kind of default impulse and the other question is why are we so about why we I'm a little mystified what what I don't understand is why why kids today never trust anyone who says that why don't you people have more ambition to achieve something to make something to be well-regarded I mean that's what I find odd is the there's there's a difference between career success in celebrity and we seem to have blurred the difference that the thinner version of of what it means to accomplish something has replaced real accomplishment so that the point is not to even to say write really good books it's to have your name in the paper and to have your picture on matte in magazines so the even if your pictures and magazines for the book that's incidental the point is your picture in a magazine why is that interesting why is that even as an idea exciting why does that whet youthful appetites why is that supposed to be the pinnacle of what it means to have really made it I don't understand it I mean it's may have something to do with the prevalence of visual image in this culture because the celebrity has a lot to do with the proliferation of one's own visual image but beyond that I'm I'm a little flummoxed it seems like just like television and movies characters and books tend to be skinny or their weight isn't mentions and if it is they're either a peripheral character or something kind of hideous or they're the heroine in a book who that's out there to remind women with love handles that someone will indeed embrace them did you feel like you were in conversation with these types of books and these type of characters did you feel like there was a body of literature out there about weight and that you had something to say about it or was that it was it kind of like a brave new world that you felt like you were entering of course I mean you're right about the conventions and fictions that for the most part characters are going to be thin and the fat characters are usually there for comic relief and they're going to be side characters they could be a bestfriend character the best friend can be fed and I was aware of that and I liked shaking up that paradigm on the other hand there is there is an awful lot of literature if you can call it that about weight now in most of its nonfiction that did complicate matters in times previous I have addressed subjects that we have avoided we're not avoiding this subject we talk about it all the time it's in the paper every day it's in every single women's magazine you know that made this a lot harder to write because I didn't want to reiterate all that junk you know and I didn't want to give diet tips I didn't want to publish recipes in the back so it was but I in order to make a contribution I had to deepen the level of discussion and I've tried to do that in passages in this book you know just take it down a level and I'm hopeful you know that I have succeeded but it was it was a [ __ ] it really was and I I am hopeful as well that I came up with a memorable fat character and I deliberately made my narrator a little overweight I thought that was important I that helps the dynamic between the brother and sister because it's not just holier-than-thou skinny sister saying look bro you need to lose weight and I thought that it was also helpful for the reader identification with Pandora so that she's not this she's not prissy stick figure but she has her own food issues and that means that you know she's able to speak candidly in a way that we don't always I mean it's funny how how you can have a subject that people talk about all the time but that doesn't mean they're telling the truth and there's a there's a passage in this book about which starts a chapter in which she explains that whenever she sees a photograph of herself she immediately measures what she weighs and she can she would be able to organize how much she likes photographs of herself three years precisely according to how much she weighs and she only likes the really skinny pictures and that and it doesn't it doesn't matter if it's you know is it's not flattering in other ways because that's all she's looking for do you know how many other people are like that and how many people will admit it you know so that's the kind of thing I just tried to get just a little bit further under the surface you

Channel: Politics and Prose

Views: 11,749

Keywords: P&PTV, Politics and Prose, Washington DC, Books, Lionel Shriver, Big Brother, Obesity, Novels, Eating Disorders

Id: lmQnH3ijJIw

Length: 53min 35sec (3215 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 16 2013