She confesses that even small annoyances make her feel more alive. She could have claimed her legal expenses but chose to pay her legal fees herself by selling her house and her business instead. She struggles to get by after the costs of the civil trial.
Her small duplex gets paint bombed, her groceries get vandalised but she still pays for them anyway. It is difficult for her to venture into public yet she wants to feel the ramifications of her life. Since Thursday, she has become adept at playing the martyr. For though Eva’s words in her letters sound convinced of Kevin’s bad seed, her actions betray a guilty conscience. It is the question that dominates the narrative and the thoughts of the reader how much of Kevin is innate and how much of the blame, if any, is Eva’s. Her story is also an argument for her conviction that something was not right with Kevin from the beginning and, though she did not predict his mass murder even as she drove in panic to the school that Thursday, in hindsight his path to violence may have been as hard to avoid as it was to detect. In a series of letters to her former husband she reveals her internal ambivalence towards motherhood, her struggle to care for the difficult child and her fear and suspicion of Kevin as an adolescent. One year and eight months after her son murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher, Eva Katchadourian is finally ready to share her thoughts on the events that led up to the day she can only refer to as that Thursday.
The skill of the writing and relevance of its themes make it a great example of contemporary literature, while the taboo subject matter and escalating tension of the plot give it the quality of the best pop-fiction thrillers. We Need to Talk About Kevin is an absolutely superb novel, worthy of the highest acclaim and richly deserving of the impressive sales and many honours, including the 2005 Women’s Prize for Fiction, that have come its way.
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