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    Baby, You're the Greatest: A Short Story
    Baby, You're the Greatest: A Short Story
    Baby, You're the Greatest: A Short Story
    Audiobook52 minutes

    Baby, You're the Greatest: A Short Story

    Written by Lionel Shriver

    Narrated by Andrew Baguley

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From the internationally bestselling and irrepressibly provocative author of the novels We Need to Talk About Kevin, So Much for That, and The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047, comes a searing story of a self-described “terrible man.”

    Dan Lancaster loves his wife, Genevieve, and what Genevieve wants she gets. She wants a baby, and, despite Dan’s reservations, she gets one—Broderick, a name chosen by Dan for its grown-upness—but, tragically, their son may never grow up. Afflicted by a progressively debilitating disorder, he is deaf, blind, subject to seizures, and unable to breathe without the aid of a ventilator. The medical authorities of Britain’s National Health Service, judging the case hopeless, recommend  that the newborn be removed from life support, but Genevieve won’t hear of it, and the battle over the fate of Baby Broderick begins. It’s waged in courtrooms and—courtesy of a ceaselessly plugged-in, hypervigilant media—in the court of public opinion, which is decidedly on the side of the mother and father deciding if and when anyone pulls the plug. But what Dan’s crusading wife doesn’t know—what he’s hiding from her and from everyone—is that he agrees with the NHS doctors; he wants to see their son put out of his misery. To confess this, however, would be to risk losing, even infuriating, their legions of supporters (not to mention the money suddenly pouring in from crowdfunding sites for the child’s treatment). It might also reveal Dan’s gnawing suspicion that his wife is acting as much out of maternal instinct as from a compulsive competitiveness: She’s driven to win, no matter the cost to their child and, indeed, to their marriage.

    Based in part on a true story that enthralled and divided Britain and gave rise to a debate over who has the right to decide whether a child lives or dies—the state or the parents—Baby, You’re the Greatest is the author at her Shriveresque best: plunging headlong into controversy and not only evoking the zeitgeist but putting “her hands around its throat” (The Washington Post). In strokes both satiric and moving, savagely funny yet humane, Shriver asks who we can trust to care for the most fragile among us, particularly when a mother and father don’t agree about the course of that care or, more fundamentally, agree about what life is, and how love is expressed and honored. What can any of us do when thoughtful discussion, any bid for compromise, is drowned out by a public whose reflex for outrage keeps our conflict-rich, headline-hungry, social-media-addled culture as robust as poor Baby Broderick is not and may never be?

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherEverand Originals
    Release dateMar 31, 2020
    ISBN9781094404974
    Author

    Lionel Shriver

    Although Lionel Shriver has published many novels, a collection of essays, and a column in the Spectator since 2017, and her journalism has been featured in publications including the Guardian, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, she in no way wishes for the inclusion of this information to imply that she is more “intelligent” or “accomplished” than anyone else. The outdated meritocracy of intellectual achievement has made her a bestselling author multiple times and accorded her awards, including the Orange Prize, but she accepts that all of these accidental accolades are basically meaningless. She lives in Portugal and Brooklyn, New York.

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    Reviews for Baby, You're the Greatest

    3.5/5

    157 ratings9 reviews

    What did you think?

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    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 2/5
      Not at all what I expected and not for me
    • 4/5
      An easy book to consume whilst on your bus ride home or cleaning the kitchen and with enough well placed wet and worldly introspection to make you chuckle and think.
    • 5/5
      It gave a private look into the reality behind the struggle to make the right decisions. It made me question how I thought of things. And gave me stomach butterflies just thinking about what I would likely do if this was my life.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      Very thought provoking on the nature and viability of life, love and parenthood.
      Trigger warning for anyone with an extremely disabled child.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      I guess it was okay. Nothing notable from the story.
    • 3/5
      Good take away, in my option the most important being people often donate to causes for secretly selfish reasons.
      But still, it was pretty sad, and ended ubruptly.
    • 3/5
      Considering the possible impact this short story could have it was very disappointing. Nothing memorable or shocking at all (in my opinion of course)

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      What ?!? That’s the end?? I loved the writing very much but....
    • 3/5
      Starts off with an overwhelmingly pessimistic character. I could really get into the weight of the negativity.