So Much For That, a story of one family's struggle with the American healthcare system, was judged preachy. Her recent novels have had mixed reviews. but he's also, sadly, a good test case for the claim that one can be 'healthy at every size'.' Within hours of her filing that article in 2009, she learned that her brother had died of cardiac arrest in New York, following a sudden respiratory crisis.īut this novel is also something of a mid-career test for Shriver. He was once 5ft 7in tall, but his vertebrae have compressed and, at 5ft 3in, I now look him straight in the eye. She wrote of her older brother: 'He's topping 330lb: 24 stone. By the time she realised that she could have staged an intervention, it was too late.

Shriver says she did not have the chance to 'save' her brother. But just before the end, it has an astonishing, jaw-dropping moment when the novelist pulls away the curtains and lets you see right into something that looks dangerously like her own life. It's a shockingly frank and bold move, one that has already divided early readers.įor Shriver, 55, this book surely represents some kind of wish-fulfilment in novel form. But with her latest one, is this self-examination through fiction taken a step too far? Without any knowledge of Shriver's own life, Big Brother is an entertaining, gripping, intelligent story. But a bit too close to the bone? Shriver's own 'big brother', Greg, died of obesity-related causes four years ago at the age of 55.Įver since Shriver won the Orange prize for We Need to Talk About Kevin in 2005, her name has been synonymous with brutal honesty in fiction and mesmerising eccentricity in real life. In the UK, health problems associated with being overweight cost the NHS £5bn a year. Her latest novel, Big Brother, out next month, is about a sister trying to rescue a man who is eating himself to death. M ost novelists go to great lengths to convince readers that their work is not autobiographical.

Big brother book lionel shriver