Book Club Guide

We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver · 2003 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Nature versus nurture — was Kevin always this person?
The mother who cannot love her child — and the question of whether she caused what followed
Culpability, guilt and the impossible accounting of parenthood

About this book

Eva Khatchadourian writes letters to her estranged husband Franklin in the aftermath of their son Kevin's school massacre. Told entirely from Eva's perspective — and therefore unreliable in the most interesting ways — Shriver's novel asks whether some people are born evil, whether Eva failed Kevin, or whether she is simply unable to love him because she always knew what he was.

Published in 2003, We Need to Talk About Kevin won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Shriver said she wrote it to examine maternal ambivalence — the possibility that a mother might not love her child — which she found almost entirely absent from fiction.

Discussion questions

Eva writes to Franklin from a position where she is clearly traumatised and possibly self-deluding. How does Shriver use this unreliable perspective — and how much of what Eva believes about Kevin do you trust?
The novel asks whether Kevin was born evil or made that way. Does it have a position — or does it deliberately leave this unresolved?
Eva's ambivalence about having Kevin is central. How does Shriver develop this — does the novel judge Eva for not loving her son, or is it asking something harder about the mythology of maternal love?
The epistolary form — letters to Franklin — creates dramatic irony throughout. What does Shriver achieve through this structure — and what is Franklin's silence doing?
We Need to Talk About Kevin was initially rejected by many publishers. What in it do you think made publishers nervous — and why has it become required reading in so many courses?