Q: Delirium takes place in an alternate present. Did you feel that setting the novel in what could be our world was more important than setting it in a less recognizable time and place?
A: I definitely wanted the world in which Delirium takes place to be as recognizable as possible. I believed it would be scarier and feel more immediate to readers; also, in the aftermath of financial or social disruption, societies can very quickly transform into pretty restrictive and restricted places. And we are certainly dealing with a lot of financial and social disruption nowadays!
Q: While the United States as it’s portrayed in Delirium has degenerated into a dystopia, what’s happening in the rest of the world? Is it still the same or have any other countries adopted the cure?
A: I think most of them have not, no; and while some of them are okay, I imagine that many other countries—for reasons economic and environmental—are suffering from major sociopolitical difficulties and are significantly unstable. The US would have pointed to these countries as evidence of places in which the disease, amor deliria nervosa, runs rampant and has rendered the social and political climate corrupt. That would have no doubt been part of the reason they decided to enclose the US within a border fence.
Q: Before Lena meets Alex, she wants to be cured. Because of the cure, Lena lost her mother and, in a way, her sister. Why would she want to have the procedure if it has already caused her pain and taken away the people she loved?
A: Well, actually, Lena attributes the death of her mother not to the cure, but to its failure—she believes that her mother was ultimately tormented and enslaved by her emotions. And although Lena regrets the dissolution of the close bond she shared with her sister, she sees this not as a loss but as a part of the natural progression of life: People grow up and grow apart. That is the cycle; that is the natural order. And, of course, what the cure promises is the reduction of pain associated with these two “losses”—Lena has a chance to be rid of her grief and her sadness. That is a very, very strong motivation for her.
Q: Lena’s best friend, Hana, is a free spirit, and rebels by listening to forbidden music and going to parties with boys. However, she ultimately accepts that she will be cured and chooses not to resist her fate like Lena does. Why?
A: Hana, like many people, is a free spirit and a rebel only up until the point when she is required to sacrifice freedoms and comforts she has enjoyed most of her life. Many people, for example, possess ideals of tolerance or generosity that, when tested, they are unable to maintain. And Hana actually has a life in this society, in a way that Lena doesn’t. She has a family. She has a future. Lena really has nothing, and so she of course has less to lose.
Q: Birds are a recurring motif in Delirium. What do they signify to you?
A: Birds have always been a symbol of freedom and the possibility of escape. I think I’ve been fixated with birds as symbolic creatures since I first watched The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy sings about happy bluebirds being able to soar away beyond the rainbow, and expresses a wish to do so herself. And Delirium is thematically very concerned with ideas of constraint and stability versus freedom and choice.
Q: Several chapters of Delirium begin with a fragment of text from The Book of Shhh, while others start with a poem, quotation, or other piece that’s part of the culture. Was it difficult to invent songs and a body of literature for this society?
A: No. It was fun! I originally didn’t intend to include the epigraphs; they were a tool of my own, a way of entering more fully into the psychological and social landscape of the book. But then I realized that they would also allow the reader to get a broader and fuller sense of the world. It’s always a struggle when you write to balance story with world-building; the quotes and fragments from The Book of Shhh enabled me to give short glimpses of the broader world (its propaganda and politics and intellectual culture) without cluttering up the text.
Q: There are only a finite number of approved books that people may read in Lena’s world. Suppose your reading was similarly restricted. What are the five books that you could not live without?
A: Wow. That’s so terrifying to even consider. Probably: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Matilda by Roald Dahl, and Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling.
Q: Lena’s six-year-old cousin Grace doesn’t speak, yet she understands far more than she lets on, and by remaining silent she’s already engaging in a sort of resistance. What do you think is in Grace’s future? Will she become another Lena in eleven years?