I began We Need to Talk About Kevin without ceremony on an ordinary morning. I’d yet to read all the hundreds of articles about school shootings that I’d photocopied in American libraries over the summer, so still more research would amount to procrastination. I tapped out the initial paragraph – still word-for-word as I first wrote it – with zero anticipation that this novel would finally turn the tide of my flagging career.
If anything, I felt pessimistic and forlorn. None of my previous novels, however well reviewed, had erased my mark of Cain in publishing as a money loser. Nevertheless, I liked this new premise. And giving up altogether after having had only my previous manuscript roundly rejected would have struck me as babyish.
“Yes,” my partner remarked after reading over my shoulder. “That’s just right.” He wouldn’t read another word until the book was finished.
We had just moved from Belfast to London, where we were living precariously in a short-term furnished let in Bow. I was intimidated and unnerved by the vastly greater financial burden of living in the capital. The flat was small and ex-council. My computer rested on a desk covered in poster paint intended for a six-year-old.
Needing the money and intrigued by a different kind of challenge, I soon shifted to Brussels to work three months full time for the Wall Street Journal Europe’s editorial page. Weekends and evenings, I worked on the book. When I returned to London, we shifted to nicer digs in Borough, where I soon grew exasperated; I had hundreds of pages, and my nefarious kid was still only four years old! (That’s why the narrative jumps from the age of four to 14: I didn’t want to write War and Peace.) Nine months after I’d begun in Bow, I wrote the last line, and I surprised myself: I cried.
At no point during this novel’s composition did I feel any confidence that I was writing a life-changing manuscript. To the contrary, I’d no idea if it would ever see print. In its own terms the book seemed to be working, but all my other novels had seemed to be working, too. I hadn’t lost faith in myself, but I had lost faith in the outside world meeting my efforts with anything better than indifference. I didn’t even feel proper self-pity, because plenty far more dreadful things happen to people than failure to publish a book. To wit, I completed my final edit in New York in concert with 9/11, after which surely no one would care to read about something as paltry as a difficult boy and his ambiguous relationship with his mother.
The point being: when I started “Kevin”, the heavens didn’t part. No archangel appeared by my desk proclaiming that this child of my hand would be blessed by God. It was one more book. Though once stuck in I had a good time, I was often dismal about my project’s prospects. To colleagues and aspirants I would only advise, then: you’ve no idea when you’re writing a bestseller.