Lionel Shriver

In public events, I’ve sometimes given an unexpectedly appreciative nod to the hard left. It’s laudable, I allow, to stick up for the disadvantaged. Young people naturally hope to revamp the creaky, hypocritical institutions they inherit, just as my generation did in the 1960s. Fairness – a more complex concept than it first appears – is inherently appealing. Thus the initial impulse to embrace identity politics is often benign. This concession is calculated. Being charitable carves out space for me to rip this odious ideology to shreds thereafter. Yet given that when younger I was a fervent liberal American Democrat, my token peace offering has always been sincere. I take it back.

I’m torn between headlining this column ‘Why I’m moving to Portugal’ and ‘Why I’m leaving the UK’. Exhausted, shadowed by tippling towers of cardboard, once more unable to put my hands on a black marker when I bought a whole box or to locate a tape gun when we have bloody four of them, in all having perversely disassembled a working household into a shambled heap, I am hard-pressed to answer either question. Why have I done this to myself? Remind me. If the UK is falling on hard times, isn’t it when you’re down on your luck that your mates should rally round? On the positive side, I have knocked together a thumbnail for friends.

This is my brother’s story and, like many telling stories, it’s small. Tim lives in Iowa, as our mother’s family did, a lightly populated state smack in the centre of the US, and breadbasket to the world. Its rolling hills, panoramic skies and cornfields stippling to the horizon exude what I can only call wholesomeness. This is a place that produces not simply words, ideas or transient technologies, but tangible commodities that keep the human race alive at scale. Historically, Iowans have been friendly, open and guileless; farmers have tended to look out for one another. However much coastal urbanites may disdain the rubes who raise the cattle feed for their sirloins, this classic flyover country should harbour the true moral heart of America, were such a thing to remain anywhere.

The Texas Supreme Court just upheld a state law banning so-called gender-affirming care for minors, to explosive consternation from predictable quarters. Progressive commentators portray this and similar laws passed by more than a dozen Republican-controlled state legislatures as ‘anti-LGBTQIA+’. In truth, the laws are aimed not at that whole bramble of capital letters, but solely at the ‘T’.

Were I to overcome a lifelong scepticism about the healing powers of talk therapy, I imagine languishing on a psychiatrist’s divan and whimpering something along these lines: ‘All this “woke” stuff – I’ve even come to hate the word. Resisting its idiocies is taking over my life. I worry that I’m not setting my own agenda. When you decry something as stupid, aren’t you still babbling about something stupid? It’s a big, wonderful world out there, and “wokery” is killjoy, reductive and mean. I feel trapped.’ Yet according to the recent essay collection Cynical Therapies, I’d elicit an icy response. ‘Look here, Karen,’ my hypothetical therapist charges with a scowl. ‘Your only claim to my sympathy is being female.

For British taxpayers perturbed by their £6 million daily bill for housing asylum seekers in hotels, New York City mayor Eric Adams has the solution: handbills. Exasperated by a sudden influx he characterises as a ‘disaster’, Adams plans to dispense police-tape yellow flyers both at the city’s 188 sites for housing migrants and at America’s overrun, purely notional southern border. The leaflets warn in English and Spanish: ‘Since April 2022, over 90,000 migrants have come to New York City. There is no guarantee we will be able to provide shelter and services to new arrivals. Housing in NYC is very expensive. The cost of food, transportation, and other necessities is the highest in the United States.

I made a poor excuse for a Presbyterian even as a kid. I resented religious indoctrination every precious school-free Sunday. Yet despite my apostatic nature, any number of biblical tenets with broad secular application have become touchstones. Of particular value during our post-Floydian festival of flagellation is Ezekiel 18: ‘The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.’ Ergo, while we can’t take credit for our forebears’ virtues and achievements, at least whatever horrors our ancestors got up to is not our fault.

I was in New York while the smoke from Canadian wildfires filtered over the city for three days last week, and I took a guilty pleasure in the aesthetic thrill. Midday, the light assumed the roseate hue of sunset. A cloudless sky appeared overcast, and the ghostly sun was so occluded one could look straight at it. Honestly, the atmosphere of anomaly was electrifying. New Yorkers advertised their sense of snow-day exceptionalism by driving even more atrociously than usual. Despite hysterical health warnings to batten ourselves in our homes with closed windows, I played three daily hours of tennis throughout the respiratory emergency – though it was nice to have a ready excuse when I botched another cross-court forehand.