Lionel Shriver: This is what a Successful Expat Looks Like

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Like hammer to nail, Lionel Shriver’s novels brilliantly satirize current issues such as the media’s coverage of terrorism (The New Republic) and school shootings (We Need to Talk About Kevin). Her forthcoming book, Big Brother, takes the same line, making mincemeat out of America’s obesity epidemic while drawing inspiration from the tragic death of her overweight brother.

You’ve lived abroad since the mid-’80s. How long did it take you to feel at home?
After having been based in the UK the better part of the last 26 years, I obviously know my way around the country, and it feels familiar. But never completely comfortable. That said, I’m comfortable with being uncomfortable. I don’t bend over backwards to assimilate; I haven’t cultivated an English accent (which my friends back in NY would loathe). When I lived in Belfast, I made more of an effort to fit in, and the eagerness to please doubtless backfired. I was younger then, and didn’t fully realize that trying too hard to be accepted as a local when you’re manifestly not one simply makes you come across as insecure and pathetic. These days, I’m not bothered by my role as an overtly American expat and, often for the media, a rent-a-Yank when stories like a presidential election come along. I increasingly define “home” on a practical level: where I have a bicycle; where I know the closest shop to get cheap toilet roll.

Do you feel living abroad has made you a better writer? I would hardly claim that living abroad gives me a more astute perspective on the US. If I never went back, I’d not be able to set novels in America properly. I often have to ask my husband, say, “What’s American for ‘bin?’ Do Americans still say ‘trash can?’ Because they’re not cans anymore. They haven’t been made of metal for decades.” I won’t be too clear on the latest lingo. It’s a real problem. And not a boast, either. I have to be able to craft credible contemporary dialogue.

Do you find that the creative process of acclimating to the new land of a novel at all similar to your experience as an expat acclimating to a new country?
That’s not a bad analogy. Except instead of getting to know the lay of the land, you have to make it up. I don’t find the nearest shop with cheap toilet roll through local inquiry; I have to imagine the nearest shop with cheap toilet roll. To use a smaller-scale analogy, writing a book is a little like furnishing a house. You may begin with a concept that has its own inherent architecture. But you have to keep adding a chair here, or hanging a picture there, until it starts to feel less like a stark, bleak structure and more like – to build on our theme here – a home. That’s why the latter, editing-and-rewriting part of the process is so much cozier. Once your house is furnished you can move the couch around or repaint a bedroom, but it’s still a place you know and feel at ease in. Starting in on a first draft – with everything stark and arbitrary and blank – is much harder, like living in a new house piled with boxes where the electricity isn’t turned on.

Obesity is the theme of your next book, inspired by the tragic experience of your late brother. What is one thing you’d like to tell the world about obesity?
There’s a line at the very end of the novel that probably summarizes the book’s perspective best: “We are meant to be hungry.” That aphorism extends to a great deal more than food.

Do you think obesity is an unavoidable symptom of a market economy and thresulting consumer culture? Or does ethnicity/culture play a larger role?
It’s almost impossible to separate larger cultural trends (fast food, sedentary work lives, historically cheap and available foodstuffs) from individual decisions. I do think it’s biologically natural to eat more than you need if food is abundant. We’re made that way, to store energy for long winters. Unfortunately, the long winters in the West these days include big roast turkeys and mince pies. So to keep from getting fat, you have to subvert your body’s instincts. Not easy.

Do you think the media is too easy on obesity? The biggest problem is that the more we obsess about our diets, the more we focus our minds on eating. That’s counterproductive. Surely the most effective “diet” is to absorb yourself in something else altogether.

Lionel Shriver talks at the Bookworm Literary Festival March 8

This article originally appeared on page 57 in the March issue of the Beijinger.