The Mom Book That Makes You Feel Like a Monster

A Mother Writing Letters to the Husband Who Won’t Answer

Here’s the setup, and I’ll keep the worst of it vague because you deserve to hit certain pages cold. Eva Khatchadourian writes a series of letters to her husband Franklin, recounting the life of their son Kevin from before his birth up through the day he did something so catastrophic it’s changed the shape of her entire life, her town, and how strangers look at her in the grocery store. You know from the first pages that something terrible happened at Kevin’s high school. Shriver doesn’t hide that. What she hides, and doles out in agonizing installments, is the how and the why and, more dangerously, the who’s-to-blame.

Eva didn’t want to be a mother. She says so, in the letters, with a bluntness that still feels transgressive twenty years later. She ran a successful travel guide company, she loved her marriage, she loved her freedom, and she had Kevin mostly because Franklin wanted a child and because some clock somewhere told her she should want one too. And then Kevin arrives and from infancy he seems to actively despise her. He won’t nurse for her. He screams for hours in a way that stops the instant Franklin walks in the room. As a toddler he refuses to be toilet trained well past the age where that’s normal, seemingly out of pure spite. Franklin, meanwhile, sees none of it. He sees a normal, maybe slightly difficult, all-American boy who loves his dad.

That gap, between what Eva sees and what Franklin refuses to see, is the engine of the whole book. Is Kevin actually a budding sociopath that only his mother can perceive because mothers know? Or is Eva an unreliable narrator retroactively reading menace into perfectly ordinary childhood behavior because she needs a story that absolves her of not loving her son enough? Shriver never fully answers this, and that’s either the smartest choice in the book or a bit of a cop-out depending on the day I ask myself.

The Book That’s Smarter Than It Is Fun

Look, I need to be honest about something: this book is a slog in places, and I say that as someone who thinks it’s genuinely great. Shriver’s prose is dense, clause-stacked, the kind of sentence that doubles back on itself twice before landing. Eva is erudite and self-aware to a degree that sometimes reads more like Shriver performing intelligence than an actual grieving mother writing actual letters. There were stretches in the middle third, somewhere in Kevin’s grade school years, where I found myself skimming the philosophical asides about American culture and wanting to just get back to the marriage falling apart in real time.

But then it earns every bit of that density in its best scenes, and there are scenes here I have not been able to shake in over a decade of reading and rereading it. The birthday party where Kevin destroys his sister’s room in a way so surgical and cold it reads like a crime scene report. The scene with the swim class and the wetsuit, which I will not describe further because if you haven’t hit it yet you need to hit it fresh. And Celia, Kevin’s little sister, who exists almost entirely to be tender and unguarded in a house that runs on suspicion, which makes what eventually happens to her one of the most devastating single images I’ve read in contemporary fiction. I put the book down after that chapter and just sat there. Not crying exactly. Just stunned, the way you get after a car accident you saw coming and couldn’t stop.

The tangent I have to go on: this book gets lobbed into “mommy horror” conversations next to things like The Fifth Child, but it’s doing something different and harder. It’s not asking “what if your child were a monster.” It’s asking “what if you never loved your child the way you were supposed to, and now something monstrous has happened, and you can’t tell anymore whether you caused it, failed to prevent it, or are just pattern-matching your own guilt onto a kid who was always going to end up here no matter what you did.” That question does not resolve. It’s not supposed to. And I’ll admit my own taste might be off here, because I know people who found the ambiguity maddening rather than rich, who wanted Shriver to just tell them whose fault it was, and some days I want that too.

The ending, when Eva finally visits Kevin and they have the conversation that’s been coming the entire book, undid me completely the first time I read it, alone in an apartment I’d just moved into, boxes still stacked against the wall. The second time, a few years later, it hit differently: quieter, sadder, less like a gut punch and more like an old bruise being pressed. That’s usually the sign of a book that’s actually doing something rather than just shocking you once and being done.

Motherhood is supposed to be instinct. This book is about what happens to a woman when the instinct never comes.

About Lionel Shriver

Lionel Shriver was born Margaret Ann Shriver in North Carolina and legally changed her name to Lionel at fifteen, which tells you basically everything about her relationship to convention. She’s spent her career being the writer who says the thing polite literary culture doesn’t want said out loud, whether that’s about motherhood, immigration, obesity, or the publishing industry’s obsession with identity. She’s cranky in interviews in a way I find weirdly reassuring, like she’d rather be right than liked. Kevin was rejected by multiple publishers before it found a home and went on to win the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction), which is the kind of vindication that makes for a good origin story and also makes you wonder how many other books like this get killed in the query pile.

If This Wrecked You, Read These Next

• Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng, for another book that interrogates what “good motherhood” even means underneath the performance of it
• The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing, the spiritual older cousin to this book, shorter and colder
• A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara, if you want another book that will absolutely flatten you and take its time doing it
• Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty, for a lighter (much lighter) look at motherhood, judgment, and the lies we tell to survive both

You can grab a copy here: We Need to Talk About Kevin on Amazon.

For your book club

1. Do you believe Eva’s version of events, or do you think she’s an unreliable narrator shaping the story to protect herself?
2. Franklin refuses to see anything wrong with Kevin throughout the book. Is that willful blindness, genuine love, or something else?
3. How much of Kevin’s development do you think is nature versus how Eva treated him from birth?
4. What did Celia represent in the family, and why do you think Shriver made her the way she is?
5. Did the final conversation between Eva and Kevin change how you felt about either of them?