The declaration of a mistrial in the filicide case of Lindsay Clancy coincides, for me uncomfortably, with a new UK reissue of my 2003 breakout novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. The book concerns a mother whose son becomes a high-school mass murderer. She agonizes over whether something has always been wrong with him or something is wrong with him because something is wrong with her. Prior to publication, I’d imagined that the commercial hook would be the frequency with which self-pitying adolescents were taking their misery out on their classmates and teachers, since when I wrote the novel school shootings had yet to be fictionalized.

Instead, what hit a cultural nerve was “maternal ambivalence.” The text dares to explore parenthood in de-romanticized terms. It gives mothers permission to admit that they sometimes find caring for small children dull, that the unqualified devotion to offspring we expect from mothers is not necessarily innate or automatic, and that even normally loving parents sometimes dislike their own children. At publication, opening a more honest conversation about the reality of bringing up baby seemed like a good thing. Now I’m not so sure. Given what passes for feminism these days, I feel guilty.

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Let’s give no credence to fanciful internet claims that the husband did it just because the husband always did it. The grisly facts of the Clancy case are not in dispute. Having sent her husband on an errand to get him out of the house in January 2023, Lindsay took her three children, aged five, three........

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