Lionel Shriver

As an American coming of age at the fag end of the 1960s, I celebrated self-loathing. Everything about the United States was shameful: its shallow consumerism, its environmental rapacity, its worship of money, its racism, its political assassinations, its catastrophic involvement in Vietnam. Everything about the American past was shameful, too: slavery, the massacre of Native Americans, the arrogance of manifest destiny. No surprises. At the time, these views constituted a set menu. Yet amid all this wallowing in ignominy, did I feel, myself, ashamed? Nah. Sure, I claimed to. But the sensation of genuine disgrace is soul-destroying. Drenched in actual shame, you don’t want to leave the house — and I was eager to hit the pavement with placards.

Dear Remainer parliament. Although we’re the voters who spurned the petition for this very course of action, we the undersigned formally request that you please revoke Article 50 at your earliest convenience. For Philip, Oliver, Dominic, Amber, Greg, et al (forgive the familiar first names, but over the last few months we’ve come to feel we know you so terribly well), this appeal from your nemeses may come as a surprise. After all, it was to appease us knuckle-draggers that you invoked the Article in the first place. Apologies for seeming so fickle. But in what Charles Moore has aptly dubbed Europe’s contemporary ‘empire’, all roads lead not to Rome but to Brussels.

In my 2010 short story ‘Prepositions’, a woman has lost her husband not in 9/11 but on 9/11 — when coming to the aid of a family whose distress had nothing to do with the World Trade Center. Composed as a letter to a friend whose husband did indeed perish in the Twin Towers, the narrator expresses her dismay at being left to a lonely, private grief, while her friend’s loss is heralded in grand ceremonies in lower Manhattan every year. The point: some deaths count more than others. While all bereavements haunt on an individual level, publicly only a small, elite subsection of fatalities is exalted as especially terrible, unbearable and unjust.

One of the depressing aspects of writing a column attuned to social hypocrisy is so rarely running short of new material. Any pundit keen to highlight the grievous injustices committed haughtily in the name of justice these days is spoilt for choice. So: Augsburg University, Minneapolis, Minnesota. A student reads aloud a quote from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time: ‘You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.’ The last word causes a stir. When the white professor, Phillip Adamo, asks the class what they think of the student’s reciting of the quote verbatim, he repeats the word. The next day, the students kick Adamo out of his own classroom; since as ever the animals are running the zoo, he complies.

Over Christmas, I digitised slides from my twenties. In many an unidentified photograph, I didn’t recognise the scene. Where was I? Who are these total strangers? What were we finding so funny? Thus it’s credible that on being confronted with his personal page from a 1984 medical school yearbook, Democratic Virginian governor Ralph Northam wavered: presumably that’s him in the photograph; no, on second thoughts, it couldn’t be. The photo quality is poor, and the two jaunty figures holding cans of beer are disguised — one in blackface, the other in Ku Klux Klan robes. I’m more familiar with Virginia than many of the Americans nationwide clamouring for Northam to resign.

Over Christmas, I digitised slides from my twenties. In many an unidentified photograph, I didn’t recognise the scene. Where was I? Who are these total strangers? What were we finding so funny? Thus it’s credible that on being confronted with his personal page from a 1984 medical school yearbook, Democratic Virginian governor Ralph Northam wavered: presumably that’s him in the photograph; no, on second thoughts, it couldn’t be. The photo quality is poor, and the two jaunty figures holding cans of beer are disguised — one in blackface, the other in Ku Klux Klan robes. I’m more familiar with Virginia than many of the Americans nationwide clamouring for Northam to resign.

Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that would be cancelled in the instance of ‘sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author’? Even cautious, congenial writers are working in an era when a bland, self-evident physiological assertion like ‘women don’t have penises’ attracts a school of frenzied piranhas. So journalists would be fools to sign a document voided if, in a magazine’s ‘sole judgment’, they were the subject of ‘public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals’. These are the ‘morality clauses’ arising in standard publishing contracts in the wake of #MeToo.

We’re closing 2018 by republishing our ten most-read articles of the year. Here’s No. 5: Lionel Shriver on the publishing world's quest for diversity: I’d been suffering under the misguided illusion that the purpose of mainstream publishers like Penguin Random House was to sell and promote fine writing. A colleague’s forwarded email has set me straight. Sent to a literary agent, presumably this letter was also fired off to the agents of the entire Penguin Random House stable. The email cites the publisher’s ‘new company-wide goal’: for ‘both our new hires and the authors we acquire to reflect UK society by 2025.’ (Gotta love that shouty boldface.