When Veronica Roth graduated from Northwestern in 2010, at age 21, she had just sold her first book, which she’d written over a period of 40 days earlier that year. The whirlwind process, which Roth recorded on her blog—composing the first draft, finding an agent, revising, expanding, revising again, submitting it to publishers, and getting a book deal—had taken less than five months. In an entry from April, two weeks after HarperCollins picked up not just one book from Roth but a full trilogy, and two months before her college graduation, she wrote, “What if everything goes well?”
It didn’t hurt that Roth was in the right genre at the right time. When she was writing Divergent, the Twilight saga had just ended and the third book of the Hunger Games trilogy was seven months away (though both of those movie-franchise money trains were chugging along). Publishers were unlikely to ignore a young author with a YA dystopian trilogy in her pocket.
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You can choose to become a member of any faction, regardless of your aptitude, but the majority of people stay in the faction that raised them. Tris was brought up in Abnegation. All her clothes are gray; she looks in the mirror only once every three months. Members of Abnegation walk softly, put others’ needs before their own, and eschew personal possessions. Tris chafes at this lifestyle, and worries her aptitude results will prove that she can’t hack the simple life.
Tris doesn’t get her fearlessness from Roth, who admits that, as a teenager, “I wanted to be like Tris. I think that was the kind of attitude I projected. She’s kind of tough, not particularly nice, doesn’t let people walk on her. I think I really wanted to be like that but really I had this incredibly soft underbelly.” When I ask what would be in her fear landscape, she replies: “Like, everything.”
The Ferris wheel scene is the beginning of Tris and Four’s romance, it’s a turning point for her role within Dauntless, and it’s when she begins to learn that using her divergent, non-Dauntless qualities—such as strategic thinking—can be a good thing. Its multipurpose nature is typical of the trilogy, where action in the story is often mirrored by intense introspection. (Four, for instance, leads Tris through his fear landscape before he even kisses her for the first time.) Leaving Abnegation for Dauntless was an enormous show of independence on Tris’s part, and the rest of the book has her wrestling with why she made that choice, whether it was the right one, and where exactly she belongs, if anywhere.
A lot of 25-year-olds don’t know what to do with themselves, but it’s not usually because they’ve already had a lifetime’s worth of success. Roth isn’t afraid of the downtime. “I’ve never had any hobbies because I just wanted to [write] all the time. And now it’s a problem because it’s what I do all the time for work and I don’t have any hobbies. Maybe I’ll get hobbies.”
By Veronica Roth (Katherine Tegen Books)
