Is Kamala Harris Secretly Relieved? Lionel Shriver on the repudiation of wokeness, the volatility of a Trump presidency, and the newly relaxed Kamala Harris.

The Unspeakable Podcast

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.8 • 784 Ratings

🗓️ 12 November 2024

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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For this first post-election episode, Meghan welcomes back author Lionel Shriver, who is arguably America’s (and the U.K.’s) most controversial woman of letters. They talk about the over/under on the end of democracy, whether J.D. Vance is following a Trump-mandated script, how trans issues replaced abortion rights as a priority for many female voters, and whether Kamala Harris is secretly relieved that she doesn’t have to be President of the United States. They also discuss why writers must oppose Israel to remain in good standing in the literary world and how they feel about the current pronatalism movement with respect to their own reproductive choices.

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GUEST BIO

Lionel Shriver is a columnist for The Spectator and the author, most recently, of Mania, a novel. Her fiction includes The Mandibles, Property, So Much For That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin. Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, and the London Times, and she currently writes a regular column for The Spectator in the UK. A longtime American expat in the U.K, she now lives in Portugal.

Hundreds Of Authors Pledge To Boycott Israeli Institutions: https://bit.ly/40EBf2r

Lionel Shriver contributed an essay to Meghan’s 2015 anthology “Selfish, Shallow and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers On The Decision Not To Have Kids”: https://amzn.to/40MHC3F

Lionel’s previous interviews on The Unspeakable: https://bit.ly/3O66FHu and https://bit.ly/3YOgNcC

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Transcript

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0:00.0	We've been held fed so much propaganda about, you know, it being the end of the world,
0:08.0	that I've been battling that. I don't accept that kind of hyperbole. I don't think he's a Nazi.
0:17.0	I didn't like January 6th. I didn't like the fact that he didn't accept the results of the 2020 election.
0:24.5	I mean, like most thinking people, I think. And in fact, he burdened both Republican voters and his own team, especially his own vice president with having to go along with that, you know, election denial
0:39.9	story. I am convinced that J.D. Vance doesn't believe that the election was stolen last time.
0:48.2	But that was a condition of his coming on the ticket.
0:55.6	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast.
0:57.8	I'm your host, Megan Down.
1:00.0	I am speaking to you now on the afternoon of November 7th.
1:04.3	We've spent the last 36 hours or so processing the outcome of the U.S. election. Depending on what bubble you like to spend
1:13.4	your time in, you are either shocked by the outcome or utterly unsurprised. This is not a political
1:19.8	podcast per se. As you know, I cover a wide range of subjects. And I hear from listeners all the
1:26.5	time that they especially enjoy my interviews
1:29.0	with authors. So it seems only right that my first post-election interview should be with Lionel
1:35.6	Shriver. Linald is the author of, I think, close to 20 books at this point, including something
1:41.8	like 17 novels. She's most famous for the best-selling
1:46.2	novel. We need to talk about Kevin. Lionel is a columnist at The Spectator, where she writes about
1:51.7	politics, culture, and social issues. She's been on the podcast before, and she is uniquely
1:57.5	insightful and forthright about just about everything. So I'm looking forward to
2:03.3	talking with her not only about this election, but about the state of the literary world.
2:10.5	Lionel has very original and often controversial thoughts about just about everything you can
2:16.5	think of. So I'm delighted to welcome her back.
	...

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