¶ Intro / Opening
Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. The United States is in a unique position because it is hoisted on the petard of its own rhetoric. We're a nation of immigrants, and therefore there's some kind of follow on from that which I don't believe is valid. That we therefore have no right to keep anybody out.
Lionel Schreiver, whose latest novel is about immigration, do you think that your fiction has been changed by your immersion in social and political issues.
I'm interested in the big issues of my day. If I'm going to participate in the world as opposed to be an artist and write these rarefied pretty sentences, you know, that's a choice, and I've made my choice.
From Bloomberg Weekend, this is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm Michelle Hussein. More than twenty years ago, Lionel Shreiver made her name as a novelist with a book called We Need to Talk About Kevin. It was a portrait of motherhood and a marriage alongside a school shooting, and that combination. That portrait won its author awards and accolades. Since then, Shriver has often drawn on contemporary issues in her fiction, but perhaps never more so than in her latest a
book called A Better Life. It's set in New York in that period of the Biden administration when there were large numbers of immigrants crossing the United States southern border, and that's where our conversation begins with the plot of her new book, but we also go back in time through America's story and her own. She's the daughter of a pastor descended from immigrants, who has chosen to be one herself. For much of her adult life. For decades, the UK was her home. Then she left for Portugal
for reasons that include immigration. As a companion to this episode, I do recommend the written version on Bloomberg dot Com because that's where you'll find my notes and added context on the topics we discuss. First, though, to the story
¶ Inspiration for A Better Life
of A Better Life.
Well, I first got the idea for this book watching then New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced on the news that the City of New York was planning to start a program whereby in order to deal with this hundreds of thousands of migrants coming into New York during the Biden administration, they would pay New Yorkers to put migrants in their spare bedrooms is. It turns out this program never happened, but it did in my book. So
I just thought, that's that's a brilliant setup. After all, what could go wrong?
Yeah, well, as I think you're hinting at, plenty does in the book. So there's the woman Gloria whose home it is Martin, who is the woman from Honduras who she takes in. And then there's Gloria's son Nico, who has his own complexities in his life. But is your main character really more soon.
¶ Extended adolescence
Than the midle? I mean, it's all seen through the eyes of this twenty six year old layabout. He has an engineering degree but has done absolutely nothing with it. He doesn't want to be anything, he doesn't want to do anything. He aspires to nothing. His life has a kind of purity to it, and ultimately, of course he doesn't want to be grown up?
Right And what are you thinking of real people? Is that how you work when it comes to your crafty?
I'm certainly thinking of real people people, you know, well, the many parents who are housing children in their twenties and sometimes into their thirties, who don't do anything and who don't support themselves and are really into a kind of extended adolescence. And there are reasons for that that are not exclusively Oh, they're just lazy or have no ambition. It's sometimes you know, the cost of housing here for example.
In the UK, and in the UK absolutely.
Oh yes, both the likes of London in New York, there are a lot of young adults who cannot afford to have their own homes, even to rent their own homes. It's not a mean portrait, but in this case it's it's a young man who simply boycotting adulthood. And what was interesting about writing from that perspective is how sympathetic I found myself. I mean, it's daunting to face responsibility for your wife. It's frightening. It comes with the threat
of failure. You know, it's a lot easier and cleaner to just decide you don't want anything, and that way you can't fail to get it.
But the key dynamic in the book is between Nico and other members of his family and the migrants who end up living in their house, not just the original one, but her brother and others. And I'm going to quote from a bit because I think that this is about three quarters of the way through the book, when there's a whole group who I have now arrived in a staying put in the house in Brooklyn, that is Nico's mother's home. Following the arrival of the collide Quintet, Nico
finally appreciated what it meant to feel emasculated. Sure, these skinheads would do literate. They had phones which they used to stream porn, but which were otherwise he sensed instruments for the giving and taking of orders. That is, their phones connected them to the material world in which something might happen or be made to happen, other than the delivery of a corn removal kit from Amazon. Out Here in the wild, wacky universe of three dimensions, the pandaeios
did whatever they wanted. They took what they wanted, including a nicely done up five bedroom house in Ditmas Park. It is a metaphor, isn't it for America? I think you've said that explicitly. It's about immigrants taking over America.
¶ A metaphor for America
Yes, uh, Biden let in at least ten million immigrants, and we're not sure it could be as much as twenty. Because you only keep track of the people who want to be kept track up and the United States is in a unique position because it is being hoist on the pitard of its own rhetoric. That is, we're a nation of immigrants, and therefore there's some kind of foul
on from that which I don't believe is valid. That we therefore have no right to keep anybody out, because that would be pulling up the drawbridge, as the expression has it.
I mean, that's obviously been part of America's message to the world. As I read the book, I was thinking about Reagan's farewell speech where he talks about the shining city on the Hill and how America is going to be a beacon, a magnet for all who must have freedom from people from the lost places who are hurtling through the darkness towards home. So it's been a sort it's been a kind of Rhetorica I'm talking about, and
it's helped make America rich. Right, it continues to be the most powerful, richest country in the world.
Yes, but don't you don't become rich necessarily. In the UK knows this as well, by wetting in a lot of people who start out poor, are not well educated, have very few skills, and are going to be net takers on your social welfare system.
Although economies need all kinds of jobs, care workers, low income workers.
Yes, both the Danes and the Dutch have both done extensive research on particular nationalities and how much on average they either contribute or cost, and there is a huge disparity. I mean, I would advocate a more discriminating immigration system in the best sense of the word, that is, be choosy. Let in people who are going to contribute more money than they take and who are very likely to assimilate, to either speak the language already or learn the language
and join the national project. And I would like to see both the US and the UK be selective about who they let in. I'm sometimes mistaken for somebody who's just anti immigration, but I'm not at all. I'm an immigrant. Yeah, first for many years, and now the Portugal.
We will talk in more detail about your experience in the UK. Lanel, I definitely want to come back to that, but I would say right now, the UK's immigration system is incredibly choosy. It gives visas to the people it wants. But let's just go back to the Okay, let's go back to the book. Right first of all, because.
I'm a sucker for talking about this subject matter, so I can be easily distracted into just talking.
The subject matter is at the heart of the book. And I'm struck by how upsetting and enraging the scenes that you have in the book are, because there is a takeover of the house and more. I'm not going to give it all away. And I have to tell you that the book featured in my dreams. I dreamt that my sons were inviting loads of their friends into the house without asking my and I had this image in my dream of this long line of boys their age walking in who hadn't invited, and I woke up
feeling quite shocked. And then I thought, this book has made it into my dreams or my nightmares. So the picture you paint is very evocative. But the situation in the US has completely changed. Now we're speaking early in
¶ Shriver's political journey
twenty twenty six, and the latest figures show a decline in international immigration to the US.
Yes, I should clarify I'm not a big Trump supporter. That's another point that a lot of people miss.
But you didn't vote for me the time.
I didn't, I didn't vote for anybody.
You didn't vote for anyone last time. But before that you've been done. I voted for Biden and before that Hillary Clinton.
Yeah, I have been a Democrat. I feel a little distanced from the party now and I could see myself switching to being an independent. I think that's probably more accurately reflects my political position. But you know, there were a lot of Americans who did not vote for either candidate in this last presidential election. It's just like, I can't stand either one of them.
But you approve of the end to it just happening at the southern border.
It was out of control. It has put enormous pressure on especially the social care systems of cities, and I really concerned myself with New York, which was inundated with more people than it could handle. New York has an odd and uniquely self destructive policy of promising a right to shelter to anyone who arrives, and you almost wonder why anyone pays rent there.
I mean, overall, in terms of welfare and social provision in the United States, it is the case as a whole that immigrants pay more in taxes than receive in benefits.
Maybe as a whole, but that's I guess that's what I'm talking about.
They experience locally that the.
People who were coming across the border illegally are overwhelmingly the kind of migrant that is going to cost the US taxpayer money over their lifetime.
And now that situation is over. So now when you look at the latest statistics where not only has there been a big decline in immigration, but the overall population of the US may start to decline this year. Is that a good thing or do you have concerns about what it means for economic growth and for the sustainability
¶ Declining populations
of systems into the future.
I think it's a good thing on a sociological level if you look at the history of the United States in spite of the fact that you know, we talk up the many waves of migrants that we have absorbed, and the United States is very proud of us, and I think would be migrants. Yes, not my parents, but my great grandparents on both sides came from Germany. What people seem underaware of is that after absorbing many millions of people, almost all of whom were from Europe, so
there was a certain civilizational continuity there. The US shut down immigration in nineteen twenty four, let practically nobody in and that lasted until nineteen sixty five. I think that period of letting nobody in, not kicking anyone out right, was crucial for knitting together a coherent, unified American population. That was the kind of successful melding, you know, the old a successful melting pot into which I was born, and so that when I was born, nobody was hyphenating
their identity. We were just Americans.
Yeah, And again that was part of the projection of America to the world. Come here and you can be Americans.
That was historically what you're and I'm just saying so we have taken in so many but.
The big difference is demographically. Demographically is that American women were having babies in that time. And that's the implication of the current statistics, because nowhere in the world have countries really been able to manage a population decline without immigration, because you need to replace your workers, You need people who are going to consume as well as be part of the labor market.
I think that's probably the strongest argument for a permissive kind of open border immigration policy, but I don't think it should be the only consideration. First off, the ideal solution to this problem is to somehow induce a cultural awakening whereby people have more children.
Uh, no ways achieved that.
I am skeptical about that, but that's the ideal.
But that's why I'm wondering if you have any concerns about that idea of immigration decline and therefore population decline, because it does have serious economic considerations into the future.
Yes, but there are serious social and political consequences to wedding many people in from very different cultures, and I think that there should be a middle ground there wet in some people, but preferably give some advantages to the more culturally compatible.
Across the southern border, largely Christian. I mean, they're coming from culture America's projected its power for so long, the Monroe doctrine, now the Donro doctrine, that this is our sphere of influence.
I think that the overwhelmingly Hispanic immigrants coming up through the border during the Biden administration, and it actually just historically for the last fifty years, I have a higher likelihood of ultimately assimilating, especially over multiple generations.
But you didn't like them, I mean you just said you didn't like them coming in those.
Like massive illegal immigration. I am all for legal immigration, okay, and the United States would actually do better to loosen up on the legal side. I think we should let more people in legally and make it easier and cheaper.
Okay. You've so often in your books there are observations about America which are so striking, you know, so moving, And I was thinking more about the mandibles A portrait of a family in an America of the future, where you have these scenes in that book that are about government excess and overreach that souldiers budging into people's homes,
¶ ICE tactics
wanton destruction. It made me wonder what you think of the tactics of ice now in early twenty twenty six.
I don't like the tactics. It doesn't mean that I think we shouldn't deport anybody. I don't think that the two shootings in Minneapolis look to me to be justifiable. I think that the whole look of the operation has been overly militarized. They don't look like police, they look
like the army. I think it's been too aggressive. On the other hand, this whole business of having sanctuary cities and even sanctuary states means that the authorities are not cooperating with the federal law enforcement, and since ICE is prioritizing going after criminal aliens of these sanctuary localities have made that much harder.
A lot of the people in ICE detention are not criminals.
Well, one of the reasons they are ending up arresting more what's known as the collateral damage of people who don't have criminal records, is because they can't just go to the jails when these people are being let out and put them into ICE custody. So I think that the sanctuary city policy is backfiring in those qualities' own terms, because if they wanted to protect people who didn't have criminal records from deportation, then they're doing the wrong thing.
There are other aspects of ICE tactics beyond the use of force. There's things like going into a Hyundai car plant and rounding up loads of South Koreans from a country which is investing hundreds of millions of dollars.
I mean, I don't defend the way these things are done.
And by the way the case you like the result of it. That that's the complexity I'm interested.
Well, I don't like the fact that they shot to Pope, but.
You like the fact that overall these are the tax sticks that have resulted in a massive decline in immigration.
The one thing that I do like is that these deportations, which by the way, are still fewer than Obama per year deported, and he didn't get any stick at tall.
These have just been very high profile. What I do like is they're getting a lot of press, and therefore it's basically sending out an advertisement to the rest of the world that no, immigration to the United States is not, after all a human right, and do not expect to arrive in the US, especially by illegal means, or even by overstaying your visa, and think that you can stay there forever without our permission. So it's sending a signal which is effective, it's working.
You were born in North Carolina. Yes, Why did you leave the US as a young woman back in the mid nineteen eighties.
Yeah, that would have been about right. That's right. I spent most of my adulthood outside of the country.
Fourty years maybe fourty years away. Yeah, what was the cause?
I just had an appetite for adventure. The United States seemed like a known quantity, which is probably ignorant on my part. It wasn't, but I just wanted to find
¶ From North Carolina to Northern Ireland
out about other places, and I also was motivated to learn about other places and set books in other places. So initially I was thinking I would lead a very parapatetic life and I would change countries every time I wrote a new book. This was a tall order and it was a complete misreading of my own character. Much
more of a homebody than that. And also even in terms of international travel, I discovered that I was far more interested in staying in one place for a long time and really learning about it and knowing people, making friends. I stayed in Belfast long enough to make enemies. That's when you've really arrived Belfast. I did wonder about I was in nine a dozen years, so Northern Ireland in
the nineteen eighties was in the midst of the troubles. Yes, although you know it was a lot safer than people thought. You know, it was not a brave choice.
But will you attracted to it because it seemed risky a contrast to growing up as the daughter of a minister.
And I think it was the risk exactly that interested me. But I had a story that I wanted to sit there. I had a character that I wanted to use, who belonged in that context, but eventually I became engaged by the politics. My twenties were not particularly political. I wanted to be a novelist, but I was interested in stories in language, and it was only when I arrived in Belfast that I started getting much much more political. That period of my life was a real PhD in conflict studies.
Because you have then often drawn on current themes for your books. Right, we need to talk about Kevin, your most famous book, there's a school shooting at the heart of it. These were the years after the Columbine High School massacre, so I can see that thread running through your books. They're not divorced in any way from issues and from current affairs, but the early influences in your life that sitting in church listening to your father preach.
Does some of your skill with language come from that
¶ Rebelling against church
seeing how your father used words?
Yes? Probably. I mean I couldn't stand going to church as a kid, and I rebelled against it, and I'm still not a practicing Christian of any kind. However, my father was a fine orator, and I think that helped me. I also grew up in a household, where as you're advice to do with children. They used their full, complex, educated vocabulary. So I grew up learning fun, long words right, and that was a huge favor to me. I've always been grateful for having become very fluent in the English
language as a child. I've been crushed to discover that this ability to learn English as a child does not transfer to being able to learn any other language. It's not the same skill. I've been so disappointed.
So you rebelled against church, you will say, rebelled against femininity. Would that be right? When you decided to change your name two Lionel from Margaret.
Yeah, I think that was part of it. I was not a girly girl. I grew up between two brothers, and I've always been ambivalent about being female. I'm used to it, but I don't know. If I had a choice to start with, I'd probably choose to be male. That may be simplistic, you know, the men have their own problems. The thrust of my approach to feminism as
¶ Transgender debate
opposed to femininity is that I'm interested in minimizing the importance of sex. I feel that I have more in common with men than I have differences, and I like the company of men. I accept that there are differences between the sexes, But when I was younger, the thrust of feminism was really more interested in erasing the hard line between the sexes and recognizing our commonality. And I'm still in that place.
It's interesting to hear you talk about that in the knowledge that your next book is around transgender issues.
That's one of my biggest problems with the transgender movement is the emphasis on the importance of sex and that being so determinative of identity, and I think that's a false version of identity. I don't derive a lot of the meaning of my life and who I think I am from my sex. It's just not that important to me. It's one of the reasons that I haven't been a big advocate for feminism. Not that I think there's anything
wrong with it, but it's not what interests me. And just because I was born female in a certain era doesn't mean that that's what I wanted, that I'm obliged somehow to put all my energies into that.
But did your engagement in seeing transgender issues play out make you feel more female in that? That's kind of where the battle lines were drawn that for those who have objected to the growth of the transgender movement. It was like, no, we are female. We're going to stand on that hill. I think you're coming to it from a slightly different direction.
Yes, which is I am coming from a different direction. So it's not that I'm defending my sex from people who want to invade and know you can't have it. I'm saying, there, what's to have? You know, what's so great about being female? What's so great about being either sex? That's not what I understand to be an identity. When I was growing up having an identity, it didn't have to do with race, It didn't have to do with sex. It had to do with what bands did you listen to,
What books did you fall in love with? What movies knock your socks off? What did you want to do? What were you good at, what were your interests? What did you have eight you know, whom did you love? That's in the mix. But the trans thing doesn't even have to do with sex, you know, having sex. It's all about really stereotypes of what it means to be male and female. And those are the same stereotypes that I rejected when I was, you know, fifteen.
Can I share one observation where my heritage plays into how I see your issues. I definitely in the in the eighties and the UK, Yeah, no one would have asked me where my parents were from. That was just it just wasn't part of the conversation. But now that people do comment on that and I might talk about it a bit, or it's just more recognized as part of me. I appreciate that it's not the be all and end all. It's not like a more important aspect
of my identity than something else. But it's kind of nice that it's recognized as absolutely nothing wrong with, Like, no one's skimming over it.
What is your backroom?
My parents came to the UK from Pakistan Muslim, Pakistani Muslim, Okay, yeah. But recently through who do you Think You Are? I found out that I have American revolutionaries in my ancestry.
Oh that's fascinating.
And actually reading your book its title A Better Life, the ancestor I thought of was not my father moving to the UK as a doctor, but the great grandfather for generations back who decided to leave Massachusetts for India because that's where the opportunity was. Back in eighteen fifteen, rather than the cold winters of Massachusetts.
Well, that sounds like a fascinating history.
But there's a long sweep right of the kinds of shifts that you're talking about, and they are linked to empire and the global economy and nations having interests all around the world, powerful nations.
Well, I mean it sounds to me is if your family has a unique and compelling history.
Not unique, I'm sure, Well, maybe not.
Perfectly unique, but particular, and there's nothing wrong with finding that story rich and identifying with it. But you also have a considerable career and I would be surprised if that's the only thing that you you know, that that's what you reduce yourself to.
It's maybe, yeah, the UK, the country that you lived in for nearly forty years before leaving, I'm curious about why you left. What was the cause? You live in Portugal?
Now, yes, I mean there was a host of positive reasons. We have friends that preceded us there, good friends. My husband is a jazz drummer and he's played with Portuguese musicians for years, so that we had a kind of ready made alternative social life, and we were both reaching an age that if we were going to ever make a major geographical change, we'd better do it soon, because otherwise that would pass us by. We'd probably just age in place, or even worse, in my view, just withdrawn
¶ Why Shriver left the UK
back to the United States. That kind of a future I found a little disappointing. And on the negative side, I felt things are not going very well in this country and I didn't have to be a part of that deterioration. And there were little things, I mean, the new tax system that they were bringing in for self employed people.
But also immigration.
No, that was not a major factor.
Really. I've heard you suggest.
The profile that misquoted me altogether.
Well tell me in your own words, because i've heard you. I've heard you say things like that the neighborhood you were living in London became very changed. It became very Nigerian.
It was mostly yes, mostly North African, and it had been a white working class area. Uh and the original population had completely disappeared.
And that was part of your thinking. Wasn't it that you felt you weren't functionally living in England anymore?
Well, that is correct, I didn't. London is no longer an English city, but that was not that was not the driving reason that I wept the gun.
I mean you have again. I've heard you say several times on podcasts that the experience of Muslim immigrants, in particular to the to the UK and Europe has been catastrophic.
I am worried that the that we're dealing with this certain civilizational incompatibility, and I think that's especially the case when we're dealing with mass immigration. And the experience of Muslims in the United States has been very different because the quantity has been small, and American Muslims are overwhelmingly well integrated with the rest of the country. They're usually
¶ Muslim immigration
well educated, they earn a lot of money, they're prosperous, and they fit in well with U a society. And I think that's one of my concerns about mass immigration as opposed to immigration, is that when you establish whole communities of people from elsewhere, then there's no need to fit in with the larger population.
But what you call mass immigration, and I think specifically your issue has been largely with Muslim immigration, right, That's what I'd say, No, in the in the UK. In the in the UK, that's obviously one of the big issues. And what are the problems that you see more broadly because you can. These are very broad things you're saying about assimilation. But the home sectory in this country is a Muslim. The Mayor of London is a Muslim. The youngest Nobel laureate in the world is a Muslim who
lives here. So you're generalizing, aren't you.
Of course I'm generalizing. We're having a conversation.
We are, but I mean generalize.
There is certainly, you know, there's been a a lot of integration at the top politically and and and socially, but on the ground, you know, there are there is a discomfort. I'm okay going to make generalizations and it doesn't apply to everyone, but I'd happily make generalizations about Americans. So discomfort with freedom of speech, right, pressure, pressure for censorship, pressure for the larger society to recognize what our de
facto blasphemy was. Practices like female genital mutilation coming out of North End and East Africa.
That's something that comes that that that that's something that comes is not rooted in Islam.
It's no, it is, but it does. It comes to communities of different not necessarily, not necessarily necessary. We're generalized, Yeah, we are.
I guess I feel like i've I've read your books for so many years. There are such deep and beautiful portraits of individuals, of relationships of characters within them. And then I read your non Fit and I hear you on podcasts, and you're very willing to extrapolate massively from social problems that definitely exist that perhaps might be better tackled without the big generalization, without making people feel you're seeing a mass rather than individuals.
Well, when you write a column, I mean you're Devil's advocating because you understand this better than your pretending as a journalist, and you're an opinion journalist. You have to make generalizations, you have to make a point. That's what
¶ Novels versus columns
I do. I have a column and the Spectator, And if you're going to make a broad point, you inevitably make generalizations that don't necessarily apply to everyone. And if you restrict yourself to making assertions that apply to absolutely everybody, you basically don't write a column.
Right, I get that, But I still think there's something about evidence, isn't there?
And I always try to use evidence when I'm backing up a position, and in fact I do in a novel as well, and a better life is set, I would say, profoundly in a time and place, and all of the events in the novel that are not to do with my particular little story are real life events, and therefore that's evidence. I mean that it's and that's what happens in nonfiction as well. You assemble a set of facts and try to persuade the reader that your general view here is valid.
Do you think that your fiction has been changed by your immersion in social and political issues. I'm trying to think of another novelist who writes as much nonfiction as in as many regular columns as you do, at the same time as they're writing numerous novels, and I'm wondering what the crossover is between the two.
I think there's considerable crossover. I'm interested in the world, you know, I'm interested in the big issues of my day. And I'm getting older and life is short. And if I'm going to participate in the world as opposed to stay back and be an artist and write these rarefied you know, pretty sentences, you know, that's a choice, and I've made my choice. I'm going to be part of the world. I have made Some would say a sacrifice in exposing cheerfully exposing what I think in nonfiction, and
therefore I have sacrificed any sense of mystery. Right. I am horribly accessible and you don't have to spend a lot of time wondering what I'm like and what I think, really, because you just have to open the newspaper.
Or listen to podcasts, or when you're in the UK, you are frequently on news programs, for example.
And the other sacrifice is that you know everyone doesn't agree with my positions. You don't, and therefore I alienate, I potentially alienate part of my audience, and I guess I accept that that's what happens when you take positions on things. Other people are going to disagree with you, which is fine, It's it's a it's a large world totally, and that's try to have speech.
In it, thankfully. But in fairness, I would like to clarify that it's not that I'm disagreeing with you. I'm curious about your evidence and and I think that you do often make very broad assertions that leave do leave things out of it, and again that's your prerogative. You'll concentrate on an indiviry and social lils are important. Don't get me wrong, I think a lot of the issues you highlight are really and deserve to have a you know,
to be properly tackled through conversation and action. I'm just wondering if that process is a bit harder when there are lots of generalizations.
I feel that you're really talking about my columns and not about the novels.
Okay, well, actually I did want to talk about the novels night because I was reading We Need to Talk about Heaven Again, and it made me think about the depth of the way you write that. You could easily think about this book as being about a school shooting, but actually it's about a female protagonist about her attitude to motherhood and marriage, and there's so many really deep characterizations and in a Better Life, I think you're not
going quite as deep into the characters. Are you writing books perhaps faster than you did in the past.
No, I don't think I'm writing them faster. I think they're a little shorter. Part of that is I'm editing more. I think that the that readers in general, insofar as
¶ Writing for shorter attention spans
there are any of them left, uh prefer shorter books now because of the you know, the famous crap attention span, and there's a there's a sacrifice there. There are things you can accomplish with a much longer book that that you can't with a shorter book. I mean there's there's only and when you have a certain number of characters, there's only so deep you're going to get.
You've also come back from having a major illness. You've had a serious autoimmune disorder that affected you a lot in the last few years. And how has that changed your routine, what you feel able to do, how you want to spend your day.
Well, nowadays, it hasn't changed anything.
You're back.
I have back surgery and it kicked off a g'ambre syndrome, which is an automoimmune disease that means your body is attacking its own neurological system, and in a weird way. This was perfectly designed to fell me, in particular because I'm a fitness nut and the effect of dissolving your neurological system is to dissolve your musculature. So within weeks, my biceps had drooped down into bingo wings. All my
¶ Shriver's recovery from illness
muscles just disappeared, and I could not stand anymore. I could only lift a cup of coffee by using both hands. I couldn't open my own hair clip, so I was reduced almost to an infant, and little by little, once I was given a medication to stop the process, I recovered my strength, but it was tedious as hell.
So You've had to really work hard at getting your body back to where it was. And has it changed you having such a shock to the system, realizing how frail we are when something like that hits us.
It was humbling. It made me incredibly grateful to particularly my husband and my younger brother who helped me through it. It certainly gave me a renewed appreciation for the importance of marriage and family who really redeemed themselves and did more for me that then I would ever have expected them to do before this happened. So I came out
with a sense of gratitude. I certainly was reminded that I was mortal, and I would like to say that I've carried that gratitude into, you know, my every waking hour. I'm so glad to be here. I'm so glad that I can now, you know, I can do calisthenex, I can jump up and down. I can walk down the street, and I would love to be able to tell you that I hold that with me all the time, but
they don't. I'm a normal person. And you know, once you can go back to walking around and jumping up and down, you take it for granted, like work anybody else.
Yeah, we forget pretty quickly. Yeah, we move on. That's probably part of necessary humanity. Also putting things behind us.
Yes, well, that was one of the things I learned that you never learn.
Lionel Shreve, good luck with the next book. Thank you so much.
It's been a pleasure to talk to you.
And that's where we left it. In the written version at Bloomberg dot com forward slash Michelle, you'll find some of what I use to research and prepare for this conversation, including data his historical context and Lionel Schreiver's comments Elsewhere and so to the team. The producers are Jessica Beck
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