We Need to Talk about Kevin

“We Need to Talk about Kevin” is an intense, dark drama about a successful woman, Eva Khatchadourian, who reflects on her time as a mother to her sociopathic son, Kevin Khatchadourian. He would become a household name, known in 2000s fictional literature as the 16-year-old boy who committed a school massacre.

Twenty years after publication, I read this book for the first time and considered the ongoing relevance of unnecessary violence. Ram raids, shootings, genocide. All humans are capable of great terror. In the 90s, Shiver was following the reports of school massacres in America, including the Columbine Shooting.

Shiver noted, “The people I ended up feeling most sorry for weren’t so much the friends and family of the victims but the parents of the killers.” The author showed empathy towards the parents who were blamed for pushing their kids towards being violent children.

The book is a series of letters written by Eva to her estranged husband, Franklin. She questions whether she was right in how she raised her son. Did Eva do all that she could to raise her son into a functional human? Did Kevin turn into a sociopath or was he born that way?

Unreliable narrators are usually hypermasculine characters who are mentally unstable, such as Tyler Durden (“Fight Club”), Leonard Shelby (“Memento”), the Joker, and Nick Dunne (“Gone Girl”)

Eva is considered unreliable for the reasons the public would undermine her – an unattractive woman, baby brained, postnatal depression, unsympathetic mother. It was refreshing to read an everyday person, a mother, who was dealing with a realistic problem. Not a person with a selfish god complex, but concerns involving other people.

Shiver writes from her own truth as a woman with no children, nor a desire to have any, and pushes toward the idea of what it would be like to have a child out of pressure. She plays out the fantasy of having unwanted children and imagines the worst case scenario. This book is a feminist phenomenon set in the real world with real feminine struggles.

Book: Lionel Shiver, We Need to Talk about Kevin, 2003, Winner of the 2005 Orange Prize.

Artwork: Jackson Pollock
Black and White Number 20, 1951.