We Still Need To Talk About Kevin: Analyzing Lionel Shriver's Armenian Representation Nineteen Years Too Late

An article that my father asked me not to write and therefore should be taken with a grain of salt

Let us exhume the corpse of Kevin Khatchadourian, the titular serial killer of Lionel Shriver’s critically acclaimed novel We Need To Talk About Kevin. The book, and its 2011 film adaptation, received significant critical acclaim at their release, but few critics seemed to notice the -ian ending to Kevin’s name – a rare example of representation for the Armenian diaspora. In fact, in nearly twenty years, almost no one has commented on Shriver’s use of an Armenian character to facilitate a story about psychopathic mass murder. 

The film adaptation, written and directed by Lynne Ramsey, would do little to spark any conversation regarding the portrayal of an Armenian protagonist. It all but erases the Armenian heritage of its protagonist —played, lest we forget, by White Woman Extraordinaire Tilda Swinton in a brown wig. The casting of non-Armenian actors in these edited roles is, therefore, barely an offense – after all, The Promise (2016) proves that a film centered on Armenian tragedy can cast exactly one Armenian actor in a major role and still be considered acceptable representation. Hollywood’s conveniently faulty memory for major character details is, for once, not to blame for why We Need To Talk About Kevin fails to serve the culture it uses to characterize Kevin and Eva. That issue lies with the original novel and its fraught understanding of Armenian culture.

The book centers around Kevin’s mother Eva and her antagonistic relationship with her son in the wake of his arrest for committing a school massacre. Kevin’s character is fueled by resentment: against his peers, against his mother, and against his half-Armenian heritage – the same heritage that Eva holds so dearly.  The detail is not a minor one – Eva staunchly clings to her heritage throughout the novel, while her son rebels and rejects her cooking Armenian food, singing Armenian songs, and discussing the Armenian genocide. Shriver describes a dissonance between Eva’s natural distaste for motherhood and the more traditional aspects of her heritage in a memory from the weeks before Kevin’s birth, as Eva and her husband Frank struggle to choose a name for their first child:

“I'm sorry to pull rank. But Anglo-Saxons are hardly an endangered species. My forebears were systematically exterminated, and no one ever even talks about it, Franklin!"

"A million and a half people!" you chimed in, gesticulating wildly.  "Do you realize it was what the Young Turks did to the Armenians in 1915 that gave Hitler the idea for the Holocaust?"

I glared.

“Eva, your brother's got two kids. There are a million Armenians in the U.S. alone. Nobody's about to disappear."

"But you care about your last name just because it's yours. I care about mine—well, it seems more important."¹

Shriver has linked her protagonist’s central internal conflict – her strained relationship with motherhood – to the post-diasporan fear of assimilation, or worse, extinction. In moments like these, as well as conversations with Eva’s more conservative mother, ethnicity and parenthood become inexorably linked: the traditions of her heritage dictate that she should love being a mother, and yet Eva struggles with her son. The influence of a distinctly non-American ethnic background is a crucial detail to her character, her references are accurate, and yet in reading the novel, something feels distinctly disconcerting about Eva and Kevin’s Armenianness. 

Even a cursory investigation reveals that the issue at hand is the author herself. Lionel Shriver was born in North Carolina to a Presbyterian family, attended Barnard College, and moved to London some thirty years ago. Since the publication of We Need To Talk About Kevin, she has also established herself as a sort of journalistic activist – advocating, ironically enough, against immigration into the United Kingdom. Shriver prides herself as a contrarian: her most notable remarks all feature a damning distaste for “woke” culture and the pursuit of diversity, as well as the staunch belief that she should be allowed to write about whichever minorities she pleases, with whatever degree of respect suits her.²

And write she does, with what feels like reckless abandon toward said minorities. Shriver has a habit of naming vague experiences as her research for these characters – growing up in the American South and therefore having "a pretty good ear" for "black dialects" justifies her prejudicial portrayal of the Black characters in her widely-denounced novel The Mandibles, in which a Black woman with dementia serves as both "arm candy of color” and a literal white man’s burden.³ Regarding the requisite context and research on Armenian culture for Kevin, she cites her childhood in the United States once again, in a speech given at the Brisbane Writers Festival in 2016:

“I knew something about Armenian heritage, because my best friend in the States was Armenian, and I also thought there was something dark and aggrieved in the culture of the Armenian diaspora that was atmospherically germane to that book. Besides, I despaired, everyone in the US has an ethnic background of some sort, and she had to be something!”⁴

That justification, she says, was directed toward the Armenian-American author of a letter Shriver received after the publication of her seventh novel. The speech itself is one massive justification for all of Shriver’s various representational failings, a rallying denial that she might ever be in the wrong, and a general condemnation of cultural sensitivity in any form. She rails against a growing cultural trend toward “prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice” that limit fiction writers and “prospectively makes [their] work impossible.”⁵ Certainly, an author being asked to research a minority culture instead of vaguely alluding to single-story accounts and delivering an unprompted fifteen-minute rant against diversity as a whole would, naturally, make their work impossible.

While an author’s politics debatably affect their work, it is impossible to ignore Shriver’s remarks in relation to Eva’s Armenianness. In this context, passing remarks about Kevin’s “smoky Armenian” appearance become distinctly pointed.⁶ Blaming the “sluggish, grudge-bearing blood of [Eva’s] Ottoman heritage” for Kevin’s physical darkness is downright insulting from the mouth of a white woman whose only cultural claim is oscillating between American and Britlish citizenship when it suits her purposes.⁷ The “dark and aggrieved” nature of Armenian generational trauma is entirely cheapened by Eva’s own admission that she brings up the genocide too often – Shriver’s tone is dismissive when she has absolutely no right to be, having no emotional connection to the issue herself. 

Even these transgressions could be excused as the cultural blindspots of a shallow depth of research, had Shriver not felt the need to further justify her position. In The Atlantic, she’s asked if Eva’s Armenianness is merely an excuse for her to play the victim, to separate herself from the rest of American society through her minority status:

“It is an affectation in so far as much as grasping after one's roots is an affectation. It's too big a country and too fractured a country to find an identity. Being American doesn't cut it. It's not specific enough. You're still lost. You need a sub-identity. That's everywhere. Maybe it's being Jewish. Being Armenian, because it's a small expatriate community, has a gratifying specificity to it...When writing Eva, that's where I was in some ways rooted in my own earlier history as an ex-pat, and I would have been guilty of the same things as Eva is.”⁸

Shriver’s intent seems to be a comparison of the trauma, forced exile, and cultural adjustment of the Armenian diaspora to her lengthy struggles as a white American woman immigrating to England. She takes it upon herself in Kevin to describe the “gruesome…disease-riddled” concentration camps of the Genocide – one assumes that converting from the dollar to the pound was a similar ordeal to survive.⁹

Furthermore, she bases her defense on the idea that the Armenian diaspora is grasping after our culture, as if it is the only sense of identity by which we can set ourselves apart and not an inextricable part of ourselves. The idea that Eva “had to be something,” and therefore that her Armenianness is but a passing detail, is impossible – she spends far too much time linking Eva’s personal conflict to ethnic trauma. Either Shriver means to undermine her own point, or she’s implying that all war-torn or impoverished countries with dark histories are more or less the same. Neither option is flattering, to Eva or to Armenians as a whole.

Shriver’s comments imply that the entire Armenian diaspora is made up of morbid attention-seekers, rather than individuals with a complex relationship to a singular cultural history. Her commentary shows a purposeful ignorance toward Armenian culture and history, as well as the arrogant, privileged belief that she could possibly comprehend an entire diaspora’s generational trauma. Shriver’s distaste for political correctness bleeds into her writing, turning what might have been an otherwise harmless representation of an American minority into a racist mockery of the Armenian diaspora. 

Lionel Shriver has built her identity as a writer on the idea that her experience as an American ex-pat in Britain makes her worldly enough to ostensibly understand any ethnic background, any generational trauma, and any culture. Put bluntly, she has no claim to any culture, let alone the rich history of the Armenian people. She has absolutely no right to use this mangled version of Armenian culture to give her story and its characters resonance if she cannot do the work to understand exactly what that entails.

Shriver, of course, takes delight in batting away criticism, treating even the most salient of observations as the foolish complaints of a social justice-obsessed cultural wave. She’s shown little interest in learning from the minority groups she claims to represent – why would she start now? To attempt to review a decade-old movie and its nearly twenty-year-old source material would be futile, but the primary aim of a review is to determine if and why a piece of media is “good” by the critic’s standards. Calling this conversation a review would imply that the quality of We Need To Talk About Kevin is remotely important to the topic at hand. 

It does not matter if Lionel Shriver’s prose is good, or if the film adaptation of her most celebrated novel is well-produced, because Lionel Shriver has proven, time and time again, that she is a racist. Her rhetoric and her work contain indelible marks of her xenophobia, and in the case of We Need To Talk About Kevin, those marks stand as an insult to the Armenian diaspora.

What Shriver fails to realize, between embarking on yet another anti-diversity rant, is that the Armenian have seen far worse than the ravings of an ignorant white woman. She may rail against political correctness all she wishes, but her work has already begun to fade into obscurity, lost in the face of better works by authors with more nuanced stories to tell. After all, if Lionel Shriver is so irritated by an easily offended audience, she might try not to seem so defensive the moment her own work is mildly criticized.

1. Shriver, Lionel. We Need to Talk about Kevin. Serpent's Tail, 2005. Page 59

2. Rnz. “Lionel Shriver on Lockdown, Brexit and Her Latest Book.” RNZ, RNZ, 27 May 2020, https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/afternoons/audio/2018748211/lionel-shriver-on-lockdown-brexit-and-her-latest-book.

3.  Kalfus, Ken. “The Bankruptcy of Liberal America: 'the Mandibles,' by Lionel Shriver.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 20 June 2016,

4. Grady, Constance. “Author Lionel Shriver Dons a Sombrero to Lament the Rise of Identity Politics in Fiction.” Vox, Vox, 14 Sept. 2016,  https://www.vox.com/2016/9/14/12904942/lionel-shriver-identity-politics-sombrero

5. Shriver, Lionel. We Need to Talk about Kevin. Serpent's Tail, 2005. Page 262.

6.  Shriver, Lionel. We Need to Talk about Kevin. Serpent's Tail, 2005. Page 110.

7. “Lionel Shriver's Full Speech: 'I Hope the Concept of Cultural Appropriation Is a Passing Fad'.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 13 Sept. 2016,

8. Rosenberg, Alyssa. “'We Need to Talk about Kevin' Author Wonders Why Anyone Has Kids.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 26 Jan. 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/01/we-need-to-talk-about-kevin-author-wonders-why-anyone-has-kids/252002/.

9. Shriver, Lionel. We Need to Talk about Kevin. Serpent's Tail, 2005. Page 58.