‘When I started, the heavens didn’t part’: Lionel Shriver on We Need to Talk About Kevin

The novelist's career was in the doldrums when she began writing about a difficult boy and his ambiguous relationship with his mother

I began We Need to Talk About Kevin without ceremony on an ordinary morning. I'd yet to read all the hundreds of articles about school shootings that I'd photocopied in American libraries over the summer, so still more research would amount to procrastination. I tapped out the initial paragraph - still word-for-word as I first wrote it - with zero anticipation that this novel would finally turn the tide of my flagging career.

If anything, I felt pessimistic and forlorn. None of my previous novels, however well reviewed, had erased my mark of Cain in publishing as a money loser. Nevertheless, I liked this new premise. And giving up altogether after having had only my previous manuscript roundly rejected would have struck me as babyish.