We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

wholesomeness is a property I have come to appreciate as surprisingly scarce.

What possessed us? We were so happy! Why, then, did we take the stake of all we had and place it all on this outrageous gamble of having a child?

I disappointed myself by finding our perfectly pleasant lunch with perfectly pleasant people inadequate.

the good life doesn’t knock on the door. Joy is a job.

the one respect in which I depart from my younger self is that I now regard those people who have little or no story to tell themselves as terribly fortunate.

However intrigued by a “turn of the page,” I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else’s story.

This is a dynamic particular to encounters with male drivers, who seem to grow all the more indignant the more completely they are in the wrong. I think the emotional reasoning, if you can call it that, is transitive: You make me feel bad; feeling bad makes me mad; ergo, you make me mad.

I blamed me, and he blamed me. I felt ganged up on.

I gulped a glass of sauvignon blanc; it tasted like pickle juice. This was wine without you.

I would let parenthood influence our behavior; you would have parenthood dictate our behavior. If that seems a subtle distinction, it is night and day.

Then, you were always captivated by self-sacrifice. However admirable, your eagerness to give your life over to another person may have been due in some measure to the fact that when your life was wholly in your lap you didn’t know what to do with it.

Blessed with the miracle of new life, she chooses to dwell instead on a forgone glass of wine and the veins in her legs.

What had most mortified me, what I had to flee, was that she sounded not only unfeeling and narcissistic but just like me.

(For that matter, thinking of one’s self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.)

expectations are dangerous when they are both high and unformed.

sometimes when you’re watching yourself too hard, scrutinizing your own feelings, they flee, they elude capture.

I’d never found solace in being just like everybody else.

In the particular dwells the tawdry. In the conceptual dwells the grand, the transcendent, the everlasting.

The silence still ringing for me, you’d bend over our slumbering angel who unbeknownst to you was just beginning to sleep off his Olympian exertions of the day. Though I’d never have wished on you my own pulsing headaches, I couldn’t bear the subtle distrust that was building between us when your experience of our son did not square with mine.

I think it must be nice if you meet your partner in your twenties, with long enough as a childless couple to, I don’t know, get a little bored even. Then in your thirties you’re ready for a change, and a baby is welcome.”

Nothing is interesting if you are not interested

the whole house was on Zoloft.

the gap between most people’s capacity to conjure beauty from scratch and to merely recognize it when they see it is the width of the Atlantic Ocean.

I like people only as much as I like them.

In a country that doesn’t discriminate between fame and infamy, the latter presents itself as plainly more achievable.

I missed you during the day, as I missed my old life when I was too busy to miss you during the day.

I was more apt to regard experience itself as my souvenir.

Our childless period must have had its shortfalls, but I recall charging in the same conversation that maybe we were “too happy,” a distinctly more agreeable excess than a surfeit of harrowing emptiness. Maybe I’m shallow, but you were enough for me.

To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacement amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay.

Your children’s answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.

I’d been much too busy attending to a flourishing business and a marvelous marriage to bother about what it all amounted to.

though she might experience “discomfort,” a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn’t yours.