Why did being one of the only Lebanese kids in Tennessee set Jad Abumrad onto the path of audio journalism? How did the sound of a toilet flushing almost ruin the pilot episode of Serial? What caused Josh Thomas to black out and rant to half a million people about Grindr? 

Find the answer to these questions and more in season two of the Sydney Opera House podcast It's A Long Story. A podcast that explores the stories behind the big ideas of some of our most influential and acclaimed guests. 

Lionel Shriver is the author of 12 books. Perhaps most famously "We Need To Talk About Kevin", for which he won the Orange Prize. Born Margaret Ann in May 1957, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, as a teenager, she announced to her family that she would change her name to Lionel. A year later, she announced she would no longer be attending church with them. It has been said she writes mostly about characters who are hard to love. A series of what-if scenarios play out on her pages, troubling, confronting, often uncomfortable. "It makes me happy", she has said, "if I'm being successfully frightening." Dividing her time between New York and London, she's fiercely anti-authoritarian, a self-described Libertarian, pro-Brexit, anti-death, and it seems she doesn't have much time for the watercress and wasabi set who now populate our fast gentrifying inner-city suburbs.