The following is a condensed and edited interview with Lionel Shriver, author.

You’ve written fiction based on a school mass murderer (We Need to Talk About Kevin), the broken health-care system (So Much for That), obesity (Big Brother), and now the aftermath of a U.S. default (The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047). Why did you hinge a plot on fiscal disaster?
I think since 2008, ordinary people are much better educated about economics, by necessity. It created a tectonic underconfidence about everything to do with money, down to solvency of the banks that were taking your money, the money itself. Then we moved rapidly from the subprime crisis to the sovereign debt crisis. I’m very interested in debt on a moral level. We have become very sympathetic with debtors. I’m not saying I’m not. But I think we’re undersympathetic with creditors, and we’re underappreciative of the degree with which we are all creditors. On the simplest level, you give [the bank] your money in good faith, and you have reason to expect it back.

Were you affected?
I lost money. I’ve made most of it back since then. But don’t take any investment advice from me! The sudden success of my seventh novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin, unquestionably changed my life. It was published in 2003. It didn’t hit the New York Times best-seller list until something like 2011. That’s when the film came out. But in the U.K., it happened much faster. I think it still, as a story, inspires a lot of other writers today, because it was a little engine that could. A publisher with no publicity budget.

The most exciting thing for me was getting a large readership—ultimately what any writer wants. But a larger readership comes with more responsibility, and if you’re not careful, that becomes paralyzing. It was helpful that I didn’t have my first big success until I was in my mid-40s, so I was a grown-up already, like it or not, and was used to churning out books.

So were you just living on the …
Sad little advances. And I had moved on to starting to do a little journalism and I kept my expenses down. And that’s been the other big transformation in my life since that book. Certainly I’m not wildly affluent, but in my terms, I am much better off, which took a little while to adapt to, because I think I conceived of myself as a poor person. And that can be a difficult leap to make, having to abandon all that warming self-pity. And it has political implications, because your self-interest changes. I mean, it’s not as if I’ve changed my political party allegiance in the United States. I’m still a Democrat. But soak-the-rich policies potentially hit me, since the definition of rich in the tax code starts pretty low down. You don’t have to do much to get up to the 50 percent line. And then it’s like, “Where’s my money, and what are you doing with it?”

That would have fed into your new book because you suddenly had …
It certainly informs this book. One of the things most fascinating to me about this experience of becoming more—people who are well off never are comfortable with the words that mean well off, even affluent. “Rich” is a word that poor people use. Rich people don’t ever use it.

Because they hear the echo of the adjective “filthy” before it?
This is what fascinates me. I mean, obviously, when I was skint, like anybody who’s on the edge of fiscal oblivion, I worried about money to a degree—on the level of being able to cover my rent or scraping together enough to do a research trip. Now I own my house.

You bought a place?
Oh, yes. Because what I wanted more than anything was a certain kind of security.

Did you buy property in London, too?
Both. I live nine months in the U.K. and three in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. And that’s been the only decent investment we’ve made. But the amount of fiscal anxiety I feel now that I have more money is the same or greater—I would say greater—than when I had no money. That worry that I have taken care of—I can certainly afford my grocery bill, and if I want to take a trip, I can definitely afford that—all that worry has just simply been converted. And so now I worry about worldwide fiscal collapse.

In the book, the different characters give you leave to say things that some would call politically incorrect. There’s a section where Florence, the good daughter, who works at a homeless shelter, looks at the families complaining, and it’s a funny feeling reading it. You want to hear it. But also …
It’s a two-part internal reflection. One is of a very traditional liberal view. So it interprets all their complaining in terms of, “Of course, you have your dietary preferences. We all do. Just because you’re hard up doesn’t mean that if you’re gluten-intolerant that we’re supposed to ignore that.”

And then it switches to a much more conservative viewpoint, which is: “You have three meals a day here free and a roof over your head, where I’m covering all of my expenses, and you can take a better shower than I can in my place, because the water’s become so expensive. And, you know, put a sock in it.” Right? And I knew—because that’s a section that my editor wanted to get rid of.

It was too touchy?
Exactly. Too hot to handle. “Don’t say that. You’re not supposed to say that.” But side by side those two views combine to more reality.

And it also seems as if it’s also some degree your conflict now.
Yes. I flicker between those two viewpoints all the time. And I’m in constant conflict, and it creates a kind of hum.

Reading it, I’d almost say, “Oh, she’s a libertarian?” Except libertarians are anti-abortion.
They shouldn’t be. It’s completely inconsistent. It’s ludicrous. It doesn’t mean libertarians are. It just means Rand Paul is. I did a piece for the New York Times called “I Am Not a Kook.” Yes, I am a self-identified libertarian, but you can’t say that in this country without qualifying it up a storm, because people don’t understand the principles. I back most of the positions that issue from those principles naturally, though I think qualified libertarianism is important, because there are certain problems you can’t solve as individuals. Like the environment. That’s one area where libertarianism has prevailed more than it should have.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve invested in?
I don’t do crazy stuff. I just don’t get good advice. And as soon as I got any capital in my life, the interest rate went to zero. The timing is uncanny. That makes me very sympathetic with other people who have saved up their money and now can’t make any more. Anybody who is either recently retired or looking at retirement soon: It’s just a catastrophe. And nobody cares about you. On one hand, you’ve got everyone saying, “Well, you know, zero interest rates are here to stay. It’s going to be years and years before you make any money.” And on the other, “Well, you know, in order to retire comfortably, you need at least $2 million a head.” How does that compute? How are you going to get the $2 million?

The idea in The Mandibles seems to be at some basic level, we need to go back and find some other M.O. entirely, that we’ve become too tied up in investments and money. When they go to Nevada [in the novel it becomes a walled-off independent country with no government within the states], it’s a kind of tabula rasa.
Yeah. The president uses the term “reset” when he defaults on the national debt. But the ultimate reset in some ways is the United States of Nevada, right? It’s back to first principles. You earn your keep, you take care of each other voluntarily, and not because the law says you have to. You’re on your own. Now, you can say that’s a kind of barbarism, but there’s something appealing about that.

Right, it’s appealing. I wouldn’t say a barbarism so much as I would say, is it a fantasy?
It may be. The whole feel of the second section, and especially the whole feel of the United States of Nevada, has a fairy-tale—

— which is why it’s such a relief.
Yes. We’ve earned it. It is like dying and going to heaven, right? It’s meant to be playful, speculative. It’s fiction. We can do whatever we want. And in that way, it’s almost a reaction against the super-realism of the first section, which could be tomorrow.

What did you think of Brexit?
I supported the U.K.’s leaving the EU. I live there. I know what it’s like to live under the umbrella of the EU, and that’s the nice metaphor. They micromanage everyone’s lives. The bureaucracy is no joke, and it comes down to, you go to your local Oxfam to get a secondhand lamp, and it turns out they don’t sell them anymore because the requirements for getting them checked out and using some qualified electrician becomes so onerous that they can’t carry electrical things anymore. And that’s just a tiny example. It’s everything. It’s an autocratic institution of the sort that the United States would never sign up for in a million years. Obama got it in the neck from a lot of people in the U.K. for telling Britons what to do, but also for touting an organization that the United States would never come near as a member.

Really?
Oh, never. Are you kidding? Because you sacrifice your sovereignty. Their law overrides your legislature. So it would override Congress. We would put up with that? Give me a break. We won’t even join the International Criminal Court, or a lot of other things. So, no, we’d never have anything to do with it. And I don’t think that the EU is really a peacekeeping organization, especially. It’s actually creating as much strife as anything. And if you look at the conflicts of the last 20, 30 years, they have been sorted by NATO or the United States, not by the EU. Who sorted Kosovo? What did they do about Ukraine? Nothing. They don’t have a military, and they can’t make decisions. They’ve become too big. I think it was a really good idea with a much smaller number of people and just a trading platform. Fine, great. We’d love to be a part of that.

But not 28 countries, most of which have free movement of peoples, and which have completely different economies built on completely different scales. So it’s one thing to say that the U.K. and France, engineers can go there, doctors can go here. But that’s when there’s an interchange. Now the immigration is largely one-way. You’ve got countries like Romania emptying out, and it’s not good for either country. The receiving country can’t handle the social-services burden. And then Romania loses all its skilled workforce and all the young people and the people who are ambitious. I really resented the fact that Britons were portrayed as a bunch of racists and xenophobes, and that’s the only reason that they voted to leave the EU. I don’t think Americans understand what the EU has morphed into. They have a very old-fashioned kind of postwar fuzzy view of the institution.

Do you think everyone in London was for remaining because of the money?
I think a lot of it is the money. They’re just terrified of disruption in the market. It’s the people who are benefiting from the status quo that want to keep things the way they are. That’s pretty obvious.

Right, and London is doing pretty well as a city.
Yes. And if you own a house in London, then you’re very attached to the idea that it’s worth millions of pounds, and it’s actually a little dump.

Did you read that great John Lanchester book, Capital?
Oh, I love that book. Did you see the miniseries? I’m sure they’re going to broadcast it in the U.S., because it’s right up the American street. You’d love it. They did a really good job.

I wanted to ask you about the role fear of China plays in The Mandibles. The reason [all Americans in the book] have to give their gold back is because China could invade. Were you reading this fear in the tea leaves of the culture?
There are a couple points in the book that hit on American fear of China, because it is also suspected they were the ones that knocked out the internet for three weeks.

Right, in the previous recession [a smaller collapse in the book when the internet is hacked foreshadows the bigger crisis].
But it’s never been proved. So Florence is convinced, and she’s clearly echoing the entire country’s conviction, that China has to be the agent. So the reader doesn’t know whether that’s true or not. I didn’t want to play too much to American fear of China, but I certainly wanted to acknowledge it.

It’s the country that owns all our debt.
Of course. Although the majority of American debt is still held by Americans, a wholesale default would have an international dimension. I planted a line: Someone says that one of the reasons the U.S. did not simply default on foreign-held bonds but on all bonds, and therefore punish their own people even more than the foreigners who were holding American debt, is to forestall any kind of military retaliation. In other words, it was, “Look, we’re doing this to ourselves, too.” To reduce the possibility that it would actually result in military confrontation with China. And obviously, even there, they had to placate China by sacrificing our gold reserves. I thought that was a good story.

I did, too.
Considering that FDR did do this gold nationalization back in 1933, I thought there was precedent. This is one of the things that I discovered in my research. Why don’t all Americans who have any education whatsoever know this? FDR demanded that all American citizens hand in their gold. The fines and prison sentences were gobsmacking if you didn’t do it. And Americans didn’t balk, they gave it over. And as a matter of fact, there’s still legislation on the books that the president can do this again. It’s one of the reasons that Lowell [a Mandible son-in-law who’s an economics professor at Georgetown] ridicules investing in gold, is that any investor should know that at any time, the way the law was written, passed in 1975 in the Nixon administration, it gives the president the right to commandeer all gold held in private hands.

Who is Lowell based on?
He’s kind of a Paul Krugman, though I think of him as better-looking. Krugman’s really big on debt, and he doesn’t think there’s any problem with debt and piling on more and more of it, and he’s really big on deficit spending. So I took his positions and gave them to Lowell.

Are you going to want this said in public?
I don’t know. If it would get him to read it. I’ve heard he likes dystopian fiction.

What’s the worst advice you’ve ever gotten?
There is a point around—it was probably around my fifth or sixth book. In any event, I was doing badly in my career, and my parents thought that I should stop writing books and become a teacher. This horrible life swims before my eyes. There’s nothing wrong with teaching. I had some great teachers. I don’t want to slag off on teachers in general. I just don’t want to do it. My nightmare vision of my future always was ending up at some small college teaching creative writing. And there are plenty of writers who end up being reduced to it, but it’s just not what I wanted for myself. Honestly, I think I’d rather work in a factory.

Well, it’s impressive that you kept on. That seems to be one of the few options left to writers who can’t—
It’s standard. And I just didn’t want to end up in the standard cul-de-sac of what people in my position do when they can’t get enough books into print, they can’t get paid enough, and naturally you just go to a university, and you sign on, and you teach workshops to a bunch of people who also won’t ever make a living writing.

You know who else felt that way: Susan Sontag? She thought it was just the end of the end.
Because what’s humiliating about it is not only the fruitlessness of it, but the cliché.