Writing About "We Need To Talk About Kevin"

I'm late to the reading party, for certain. But I finished reading Lionel Shriver's "We Need To Talk About Kevin" last week. I first saw the trailer for the movie when it came out in late 2011. I was riveted, but my son was only six months old and I was still completely awash in post-natal hormones; I knew that it was not the time to watch it. I knew nothing about the plot other than that it was about a mother and son with a difficult relationship.

My timing was accidental this winter; I didn't intend to read a book about a school shooting so soon after the loss of 27 people through just such a murder. I saw the title on loan at the library and picked it up, thinking that I'd like to read the book before seeing the movie. Only when I was twenty pages in did Chris turn to me and say, "You know what that book is about, right?" Well, shit.

Shriver's writing is stunning. She creates an unapologetically intelligent and ambivalent character in Eva, and I feel like I took an advanced course in the English language through her remarkable vocabulary. (It took me maybe 40 pages to look at Shriver's bio, which is when I realized that I was reading a book written by a woman who happens to have a typically male name. I'm still reflecting on the skepticism I harbored while I thought I was reading a book about motherhood written by a man. I'm aware that that is more about me than the author.)

Though I was fully riveted by the book and the mostly difficult-to-like characters in it, when I was done, I found myself wondering why I liked it, why I read it, why it was written. Like the characters, I found myself with more questions than answers. I suppose this is the mark of a good work of fiction.

A wise friend said he found the book to be a keen and dark look at the debate between nature and nurture: "did he turn out evil because she never loved him, or did she never love him because he was evil?"

My personal experiences with motherhood have been dramatically different from the ones portrayed in the book, but I am constantly aware that there are as many unique kinds of mother-child relationships as there are mothers and children.

I've also been reading a ton of attachment theory in the last two years, and I found myself reading the Eva/Kevin relationship in that light as well. The parent-child relationship is very much a two way street, and one that is often successful only to the extent that the parent is able to gather enough support for their own emotional attachment healing.

The most poignant passage of the whole book for me was the last page or two, especially:

"As that infant squirmed on my breast, from which he shrank in such distaste, I spurned him in return -- he may have been a fifteenth of my size, but it seemed fair at the time."

Though I read this story as being a mixture of both nature and nurture, I am haunted by the question of how their relationship might have been -- and what kind of person Kevin would have grown up to be -- had Eva received any support at all (including from her own husband) for healing her own attachment wounding as she parented a difficult newborn baby.

I watched the movie last night, which is an incredible adaptation, and a very different experience than reading the book. While reading, I was able to vaguely and occasionally entertain the notion that certain children are born evil. But watching the movie, watching a live human child crying and a live human mother suffering without emotional support and in total isolation, I can't come to that conclusion. (And I think the above quote shows that Eva herself realizes that Kevin was just a baby, and she was just a flawed human being trying to parent.) In those moments, it's easy to see that it is not this individual mother that failed, this individual family. It's the entire society of parenting and family-building around it that creates the gaping holes where evil grows.