'The Dumbest Period I Have Ever Lived Through' | Lionel Shriver
26 March 2026
With Lionel Shriver
Global
Novelist Lionel Shriver joins the podcast to discuss her new novel and the cultural moment she calls the 'dumbest period' she has lived through. The conversation covers arrested development, climate apocalypticism as a reason to avoid adult life, and medical transition as an endless project rather than genuine resolution of distress. Shriver's cultural critique sits alongside the clinical findings of the Cass Review, which questioned whether identity-based medical pathways serve young people's long-term wellbeing and called for a return to exploratory psychotherapy.
Lionel Shriver is a British-American novelist whose work has long engaged with subjects that polite society would prefer to avoid. Her latest book, A Better Life, takes its starting point from a real policy proposal — New York City Mayor Eric Adams's suggestion that residents be paid to house migrants — and uses it to examine the collision between progressive ideals and lived consequence. She joins the podcast to discuss both the novel and the wider cultural climate that shaped it. The conversation moves from immigration into territory that will be familiar to anyone who has followed the gender medicine debate. Shriver argues that contemporary Western culture has developed a powerful aversion to the ordinary demands of adult life — commitment, family, biological reality — and that this aversion has found institutional expression in several places at once. Climate-change catastrophism, she suggests, functions partly as permission to remain in an extended adolescence: if the future is already ruined, there is no need to build one. Medical gender transition fits the same pattern, offering what she describes as an endless self-improvement project, a permanent becoming that substitutes for the settled identity that comes from navigating ordinary life. That framing echoes a central concern of the Cass Review, published in April 2024 after four years of independent inquiry into NHS gender services for children and young people. Dr Hilary Cass found that the evidence base for paediatric medical transition was remarkably weak, and that many young people presenting to gender clinics had complex co-occurring mental health needs that were not being adequately explored before a medical pathway was initiated. Her recommendation — that exploratory, psychotherapy-led care should replace the affirmative-only model — maps closely onto the critique Shriver develops through fiction: that transition, in some cases, may be a flight from distress rather than a resolution of it. Shriver is equally sharp on the cultural machinery that made honest inquiry so difficult for so long. She identifies a form of illiberalism on the contemporary left that treats disagreement as violence and dissent as bigotry, producing the environment in which NHS clinicians, researchers and journalists felt unable to raise concerns without professional consequences. Multiple UK inquiries, including the Cass Review itself, have documented this atmosphere and its effect on clinical practice and public debate. Fiction, Shriver argues, offers a way through the impasse. A novel can inhabit multiple positions simultaneously, allow characters to be wrong and to suffer for it, and reach readers who would dismiss the same argument made in a report or a think-piece. The hosts explore how storytelling might complement the growing body of clinical and legal evidence in shifting public understanding. The episode ends with a shared sense that the cultural tide is beginning to turn. In the UK that shift is already visible in policy: the NHS England service specification that followed Cass, the closure of the Tavistock's Gender Identity Development Service, and the Supreme Court's April 2025 ruling that the legal definition of woman refers to biological sex. Shriver's broader cultural critique helps to explain how those specific institutional failures became possible in the first place.
