The fight for free speech

She lit a bonfire of outrage in Australia in 2016. Now Lionel Shriver’s back with a warning.

American journalist and author Lionel Shriver. Picture: Roberto Ricciuti/Getty Images

Lionel Shriver is talking down the line from Brooklyn, New York, and explaining that “I am not an obedient person by nature. If someone tells me I can’t do something, the first thing I want to do is that”. The Orange Prize-winning novelist, who has also described herself as having “an obstreperous streak a mile wide”, is not exaggerating.

Remember her Brisbane Writers’ Festival keynote address three years ago? The festival organisers had expected the British-based American to address the anodyne topic “community and belonging’’, but Lionel being Lionel, presented instead a blistering polemic on fiction and identity politics.

She claimed the rise of such politics challenges “our right to write fiction at all’’ and warned that if authors bowed to the doctrine of cultural appropriation — the notion that it’s wrong to create characters from religious, racial, sexual or gender groups to which one doesn’t belong — “all that’s left is memoir’’. Shriver said she hoped “the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad’’ and in a theatrical flourish, calculated to amuse and provoke, she placed a sombrero on her head.

Well before she donned the hat, Sudanese-Australian writer Yassim Abdel-Magied made a “political exit’’, later accusing the keynote speaker of “mocking those who ask people to seek permission to use their stories’’. She said Shriver’s speech was a “poisoned package … delivered with condescension’’.

The address also ignited bonfires of outrage across social media and the charges levelled against Shriver — including from those who had not heard her speech — ranged from insensitivity to “scary racism’’. The furore was reported in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and by the BBC.

Meanwhile, the festival organisers were accused of abandoning the writer as they declared she “did not speak to her brief’’, as if she were a schoolgirl taking part in a public speaking competition. They also scrambled to grant her critics a right-of-reply session.

If Shriver was bruised by that episode, she doesn’t show it. Best known as the author of the novel-turned-film We Need to Talk About Kevin, she jokes that a speech she considered mild, ended up becoming “an international incident’’.

The writer and columnist is poised to return to Australia to give the high-profile John Bonython lecture on “creativity in an age of constraint”, and she argues the problems she identified in Brisbane, have “got much worse’’: “That’s one of the strange things about that speech — it was, however bizarrely, ahead of its time,’’ she tells Review. “Even the specific issue I examined in closer detail — this whole notion of cultural appropriation — had at that time barely brushed against fiction writing, and had mostly been a problem in music and especially in fashion.’’

Since she delivered her 2016 speech “white writers, in particular, are being told they either have to ask permission to use minority characters …. or you’re just not allowed to. That’s a loss for everyone.’’ She adds, with a chuckle: “I’m not sure whom you ask (for permission).’’

As one Irish journalist noted recently, Shriver is a headline writer’s dream. An entertaining provocateur on the page, her thoughts tumble forth in sentences that are as sharply incisive as they are elegant. In her lecture, presented by the Centre for Independent Studies think tank, she will warn how gotcha identity politics, political correctness and the “hypersensitivities” of the #MeToo movement could “lead to bad, obedient art’’.

She says: “It’s not just fiction writers; it’s across the arts … Anyone who is in the public eye is supposed to be watching their back. Now politicians are used to that but artists aren’t or they shouldn’t be. I don’t believe the imagination thrives if the first thing that occurs to you is, ‘How can I not get myself into trouble?’.

“You don’t want to read careful work. You want to read somebody who’s writing with flair, with nerve, with daring, someone who’s testing the limits, who’s a little bit transgressive, a little naughty.’’ By “naughty” she doesn’t necessarily mean sex scenes: “Everyone expects that; it’s a big bore.’’ In our woke times, she says, “the real risks are political’’.

In a provocative essay published in the UK’s Prospect magazine last year, she wrote about how call-out culture was killing fiction, citing examples such as universities “now content to assess the canon in the reductive terms of ‘intersectionality’ ”, and children’s and teen fiction publishers employing “ ‘sensitivity readers’ to comb through manuscripts for perceived slights to any group with the protected status once reserved for distinguished architecture’’.

She pointed to prominent review site Kirkus Reviews assigning “own voice reviewers with a matching ‘marginalised’ pedigree to assess young adult books that contain a diverse cast’’. In 2017, Kirkus controversially pulled a positive, “starred” review of US writer Laura Moriarty’s dystopian novel American Heart, which conjured a future in which American Muslims were sent to internment camps. The reason? Moriarty had used a “white saviour narrative’’ in which a young Caucasian girl helps a persecuted Muslim woman to escape.

Other YA novels have been delayed or withdrawn for similar thought-crimes or because a “sensitivity reader’’ objected to them. According to Shriver, the scourge of identity politics has turned the young adult genre into “a complete rat’s nest of hysterical super-sensitivity’’. Last year, a Minnesota school district dropped the classic, anti-racism novels To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its curriculum, arguing that some characters’ use of racial slurs including the n-word, could lead to students feeling “humiliated or marginalised”.

Previous John Bonython lecturers have included renowned public intellectuals Niall Ferguson, Frank Furedi and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Shriver’s Sydney lecture reflects a change in public profile for the petite 62-year-old, from writers festival darling to uncompromising free speech advocate — in London, her adopted home, she appears regularly on the BBC, Channel Four and Sky News to talk about issues such as political correctness and Brexit.

She has lived in the UK, including a long stint in Belfast, for three decades and, unlike most of her novel-writing peers, is a Brexiteer. She is also a columnist with America’s Harper’s magazine and the UK’s The Spectator, and she recently wrote in the former: “I doggedly out myself at London dinner parties as a Leave supporter … I’m surely pitied and deplored behind my back, for even face to face I’m regarded as an exotic if slightly repellent zoo specimen.’’

In her lecture, Shriver will argue “it’s time the creative professions pushed back’’ against the rising culture of constraint, though she has previously lamented “how few writers with any serious reputation are willing to put themselves on the line for free speech’’. A friend of hers who teaches at Columbia Journalism school in New York “tells me her students pretty much 100 per cent expect that their job as literary critics is to rate the author on a whole list of what are essentially identity politics concerns — looking at race and gender and cultural appropriation or, on the other hand, lack of diversity. That’s an appalling way to think about literature. It’s so killjoy.’’

A winner of the $30,000 BBC National Short Story Award, she has revealed that in 2016 her agent warned her against writing a short story for a literary magazine because it included a key African-American character. She persisted and submitted the story to the magazine, which had published her before — it was declined. (Titled Domestic Terrorism, it eventually appeared in her critically acclaimed short story collection, Property, published last year.)

Throughout her career, Shriver has explored worlds removed from her own: She is childless and in We Need to Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize and sold more than a million copies, she wrote about a high school shooter from the perspective of his ambivalent mother. In Big Brother, released in 2013, this small, slight woman drew on her brother’s obesity-related death in order to examine the dynamics of addiction, dieting, morbid obesity and family ties.

To write The Mandibles, published in 2014, she imagined herself into a dystopian future in which America suffers an economic collapse so dire Mexico builds a wall to keep out US refugees. She joked to one interviewer that President Trump “stole my ideas, though he obviously didn’t get the point of the fence’’.

She says the policing of cultural appropriation leaves many writers with an impossible dilemma: if they portray only white, straight characters, their work will be attacked for its lack of diversity but if they include characters from “protected’’ minority groups they may be called out as insensitive or disrespectful.

A long-time nonconformist, Shriver refuses to yield to the new dogmas: “There are a lot of people now who would tell me I just can’t have people of other races in my stories. This is at such odds with what the world looks like right now, it’s almost said I can’t be a realist writer.’’

Her new novel will be out next year and is titled The Motion of the Body Through Space. “It does have a couple of black characters in it,’’ she reveals. “One of them (an African-American) is an entirely lovely man, and the other one is a villain, so I’m pushing the envelope of what I’m supposed to do.’’

The villain, she says, is a second-generation Nigerian, so “it’s the Nigerian who is going to get me into trouble. I believe that it’s really important for artists in this era to be brave and to push back because there are a lot of people out there making up these rules and they don’t have any standing … The only thing that gives those rules teeth is obeying them. So it’s really important to ignore this stuff, or even better, make fun of it.”

The new novel is about “the cult of exercise. It will be perfect”, she says, with an expertly timed pause, “for Australia. You people are more nuts about exercise than anywhere I’ve ever been”. I point out that, paradoxically, Australia also has one of the world’s highest obesity rates. “They go hand in hand,’’ she quips.

Asked if The Motion of the Body Through Space is a satire, she says “no, it’s a serious story. It has a little section which, in a different world, would be satire but because we’re living in a world of satire that doesn’t know it’s satire, I think it’s just realistic.”

While she initially supported the #MeToo movement, she believes that it, too, is contributing to the climate of constraint. At first she backed the movement after learning of several sexual harassment cases “that were pretty appalling’’. But she felt it then “got out of control and started having a bandwagon-y feel to it. Everyone wanted a piece of it … As much as I am sympathetic with people who have been in any way abused or taken advantage of, especially actual rape, I don’t want to exalt the state of victimhood.”

She feels the case of Christine Blasey Ford did just that. Ford is the American academic who claimed US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh drunkenly assaulted her at a party while they were teenagers. Ford said that, decades on, she was still traumatised by the alleged incident, which Kavanaugh has strenuously denied. Says Shriver: “The whole notion of what seemed to me a rather small experience if you’ve got a sense of proportion, the idea it should still be dominating her (Ford’s) life, decades later, seemed absurd to me.’’

That comment won’t win her any friends from the progressive side of politics. Has her literary career suffered as a result of her outspokenness? “I find that question impossible to answer,’’ she says, musing that her libertarianism probably reduces her chances of being short-listed for literary prizes. She adds that, from time to time, she cops a review from “someone who very clearly has an axe to grind with me politically and therefore chooses to read the book with an eye to discovering missteps or sins’’.

Last year she was sacked as a judge of a short story competition, after she wrote a column in The Spectator attacking a move by publisher Penguin Random House to track the diversity of its authors and staff. Shriver, who says she is opposed to quotas but not to diversity, accused the publisher of being “drunk on virtue’’: “Penguin Random House no longer regards the company’s raison d’etre as the acquisition and dissemination of good books. Rather, the organisation aims to mirror the percentages of minorities in the UK population with statistical precision.’’

Veteran writer and filmmaker Hanif Kureishi weighed in, calling Penguin’s diversity targets “wise and brave” and claiming the publisher’s move “seems to have awoken the usual knuckle-dragging, semi-blind suspects with their endlessly repeated terrors and fears’’.

Shriver says the role of iconoclast is not one “I embraced at the beginning of my career. I just wanted to tell a good story. I did not consider myself especially outrageous … Most of what I believe is common sense.’’

As such, she finds it “disconcerting to be thrown in with conservatives’’. Born in North Carolina, she “grew up with a very proudly liberal Democratic family in the US, and my father was involved with the civil rights movement quite heavily. He marched in Selma with Martin Luther King. So to be called a racist all the time is a little weird.’’

She sounds surprisingly composed as she says: “I’ve got used to it (being called racist). I mean, who’s not a racist these days? The term has been thrown around so much that it doesn’t even mean anything anymore. That’s why we’ve moved on to white supremacist. We used up racist.’’

Once an ardent champion of free expression, she says the left “has abandoned freedom of speech’’, thus allowing the right to claim it, even though “this is a liberty that belongs to everyone’’.

When we speak, her husband, renowned jazz drummer Jeff Williams, is on tour in Europe and she is on her annual summer break in Brooklyn. “I’m a real layabout in the summer,’’ she confesses. “I get very little work done and I play tennis all the time.’’

Is there any topic she wouldn’t tackle in a novel? “I’d certainly think twice before I’d write anything that seemed remotely critical of the transgender movement,’’ she says. “That’s probably the most dangerous thing to write about right now, unless you’re completely on board.’’

Even so, in her Prospect essay, she wrote that “I dread the day that artificial contrivances (gender pronouns) like ze and zir become ideologically mandatory …. I plan to go to my grave having never employed the linguistic abortion ‘cisgender’.’’ This “flagrantly repulsive’’ term, she wrote, was a contortion that cast “being born a woman, and imagining that therefore one is a woman, as one more sexual kink’’.

She has been told by a contact who works for a literary journal that a plethora of novels about transgender characters are awaiting reviews. “So there are definitely conformist writers out there,’’ Shriver says. Needless to say, she isn’t one of them.

Lionel Shriver presents the John Bonython lecture in Sydney on September 3 and will speak on Creativity and Constraint in Melbourne on September 4. For details go to www.cis.org.au. She will also appear at the Bookoccino bookshop, Sydney, on September 1.