We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

You would think, in a country that so famously has “no sense of history,” as Europeans claim, that I might cash in on America’s famous amnesia. No such luck.

There’s no better way to get people to cooperate in this country than by seeming a little unhinged.

I suppose that’s a common conceit, that you’ve already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

I would have voted for Gore, you for Bush. We’d have had heated enough exchanges before the election, but this—this—oh, it would have been marvelous. Loud, strident fist pounding and door slamming, me reciting choice snippets from the New York Times, you furiously underscoring op-eds in the Wall Street Journal—suppressing smiles the whole time. How I miss getting exercised over bagatelle.

I wake up with what he did every morning and I go to bed with it every night. It is my shabby substitute for a husband.

Only a country that feels invulnerable can afford political turmoil as entertainment.