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Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

- Lionel Shriver
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Author:
Lionel Shriver
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Autobiography
Often
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Awful film adaptations follow novelists for the rest of their lives. An atrocious movie of 'We Need to Talk About Kevin' could have stigmatised the book, aggrieved the novel's fans, and blighted my reputation forever.

At the keyboard, unrelenting anguish about hurting other people's feelings inhibits spontaneity and constipates creativity.

In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?

When we conceive of happiness as a static state, effectively a place toward which we are aimed but at which most of us will never feel we've quite arrived, then the vision becomes exclusionary.

My agent had warned that, while a fine film would do my profile a world of good, a bad one wouldn't help me at all, and I suspected she was soft-pedalling the latter possibility. The effect of a truly execrable adaptation is worse than neutral. The stink rubs off.

There was a point in the latter 1990s at which, suddenly, every sitcom and drama in sight had to have a gay or lesbian character or couple. That was good news as a voucher of the success of the gay rights movement, but it still grew a bit tiresome: 'Look at us! Our show is so hip, one of the characters is homosexual!'

As any traveller knows, heading elsewhere is one thing, getting back quite another.

A pre-nup is an insurance policy or, in brokerage terms, a short hedge - meant to mitigate a high-risk investment. It safeguards the love-struck from their own poor judgment of character.

Authors are free to ignore their editors' advice. I often avail myself of this veto power - sometimes out of a pigheadedness for which I'll pay the price.

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Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.

Novelists are too often assumed to write veiled autobiography.