Her father, Donald,[1] was a Presbyterian minister who became an academic and president of the Union Theological Seminary in New York;[2] her mother was a homemaker.

In an interview with Bomb magazine, Shriver listed the various subjects of her novels up to the publication of We Need to Talk About Kevin: "anthropology and first love, rock-and-roll drumming and immigration, the Northern Irish Troubles, demography and epidemiology, inheritance, tennis and spousal competition, [and] terrorism and cults of personality".

[8] The novel is a study of maternal ambivalence, and the role it might have played in the title character's decision to murder nine people at his high school.

[16] The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047, published in May 2016, is set in a near-future in which the United States is unable to repay its national debt and Mexico has built a wall on its northern border to keep out US citizens trying to escape with their savings.

[10][23] Shriver currently writes for The Spectator,[3] and occasionally contributes to the "Comment" page of The Times, standing in while regular columnist Matthew Parris is away.

For example, Shriver has argued against migration into the UK; in 2021 she wrote an article which stated "For westerners to passively accept and even abet incursions by foreigners so massive that the native-born are effectively surrendering their territory without a shot fired is biologically perverse.

[25] In September 2022, Shriver released an open letter in which she endorsed Republican Ron DeSantis for the 2024 U.S. Presidential election.

In the letter, she criticized both Biden and Donald Trump as poor leaders, and praised DeSantis for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, banning critical race theory in schools, opposing transgender women from competing in women's sports, and passing the Florida Parental Rights in Education Act; while noting that she disagrees with him on abortion.

[25] In May 2010, Shriver criticized the American health system in an interview while at the Sydney Writers' Festival in Australia, in which she said she was "exasperated with the way that medical matters were run in my country" and considers that she is taking "my life in my hands.

[39] Shriver expressed her opposition to woke and identity politics in a 2021 interview with the Evening Standard, stating that "I don't like discrimination of any kind" but adding "there is nothing malign, initially at least, in the impulse to pursue a fairer society.

"[40] In August 2023 Shriver gave an interview with the Evening Standard in which she claimed "You don't have free speech in the UK anymore".

[43] On June 7, 2016, Shriver appeared on the BBC Radio 4 programme My Teenage Diary, during which she read extracts from her journals from the late 1960s and early 1970s and discussed her upbringing and adolescence.