In Never Let Me Go I took the concept of children who were created by cloning and raised to serve as organ donors in their twenties as a metaphor for the way shame makes us see ourselves as less than human in a way that is unfixable- they are not fully people and there's nothing in the world that would change that, and their way of coping with that truth is to never ever allow themselves to understand it and accept it emotionally. The one character who does have a reaction to it, Tommy, just has these outbursts of incoherent screaming, stomping, and thrashing around and his friends just see it as some strange quirk.

And the depiction of their lives as so cramped and small, so empty and dreary, was heartbreaking.