If most 23-year-olds received a phone call that they’d landed a six-figure three-book deal for their first novel, they’d celebrate. Maybe pop some prosecco, or go on a massive shopping spree, or book flights to the first European city they could find. Veronica Roth didn’t do any of those things. She had a panic attack.
Veronica Roth is best known for being the author of Divergent – a dystopian book series which was worshipped by teenagers in the 2010s, then adapted into three films starring Theo James and Kate Winslet. Although she sold over 35 million books, she suffered from terrible anxiety. Today, everyone who’s ready Divergent has a different opinion in it. The final book’s ending was controversial among fans, and the promised fourth film never materialised. A decade after the last Divergent book, the 36-year-old author has learned to prioritise happiness. She’s moved towards maturer fantasy fiction that criticises political regimes and reimagines Polish folklore.
Veronica Roth grew up in the suburbs surrounding Chicago. When she was about eleven, she began writing fantasy stories inspired by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings films. Roth didn’t set out to write the sort of poetical prose that would win literary prizes. Science fiction and fantasy were always her calling.
“Genre fiction offers you the opportunity to explore something through exaggeration that you otherwise might have a hard time looking at,” Roth explains. “Realities that are challenging or difficult or uncomfortable for us are given a layer of distance by science fiction and fantasy so that we can thoughtfully examine them without it becoming too real.”
While studying at Northwestern University in Chicago, she dipped her feet into the creative writing programme. The course encouraged her to take her writing seriously, and try pitching novels to agents. Roth began the process with low confidence and even lower expectations. “Defensive pessimism is, like, my life strategy. I really did it with the spirit that it probably wouldn’t work, but that’s fine. And I did get lots of rejections on the first manuscript I sent to agents. But the second one was Divergent.”
Divergent is the first book of a dystopian young adult series. People in a post-apocalyptic version of Chicago are split into five factions, each structured around a different personality trait. So, teenagers who are told they’re brave then have to pass a series of traumatic trials so they can join Dauntless, the bravery faction, and get jobs that require bravery, such as security staff or training bratty teenagers. If you think that sounds like a silly way to structure a society, that’s kind of the point. The sixteen-year-old heroine, Tris, and her hunky brooding boyfriend Four spend three books and six short stories trying to topple the regime.
2011 was the golden age of young adult dystopia fiction. The Hunger Games, The Maze Runner, Uglies and Shatter Me were dominating bookshop windows. Roth penned the first Divergent book aged 21, during the winter holidays in her last year of college. She wanted to capture the adolescent angst that comes from letting go of your childhood and finding your own place in society. The hyperbolic political system in Divergent is the perfect playground for exploring these conflicting emotions about coming-of-age.
“There’s a feeling when you’re younger that there’s a big system around you, and it’s outside of your control. So, when I was younger, I gravitated toward dystopian fiction because of that emotional reality. Like, what can I do inside of this unjust system? How do I conduct myself? What kind of power do I have? These are the questions that dystopia poses.”
Roth jokes that she’s drawn towards futuristic cities instead of magic kingdoms because of a far less intellectual reason. “I am a very neat and tidy kind of person, and fantasy always feels like the rooms are packed full of objects, right? It’s just not comfortable for me to be around!” Her house is definitely distinct from a muddy medieval castle. The wooden floors are so clean that they gleam in the sunlight. The snake plant has been stripped of brown leaves.
When Roth was told that the publishing house Harper Collins wanted to sign a three-book deal with her, she was too stunned to properly celebrate. “I went out to dinner, but I mostly was in shock. I had my agent repeat it to me multiple times. And then I did also have a panic attack. I had an undiagnosed anxiety disorder at the time. It was big news. It overwhelmed my system a little bit. A couple of days later, I felt happier about it. Poor 23-year-old Veronica was just too young for that kind of thing.”
When Divergent reached shelves in May 2011, it was an instant bestseller. Roth sold the film rights before she’d even graduated. The three movies starred Shailene Woodley and Theo James as Tris and Four. Kate Winslet, Zoë Kravitz, Ansel Elgort and Suki Waterhouse had supporting roles. The franchise made $765 million (£646 million) at the box office. After the first film came out in 2014, the Divergent book and its sequels Insurgent and Allegiant spent another 96 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Roth has now decided that feeling overwhelmed was a small price to pay for so much success. “Yeah, it was really stressful, but that’s alright. I was really fortunate. Divergent freed me. I hadn’t gotten as far as trying to get a job. That’s how young I was when the Divergent books became successful. So it launched me forward a decade in terms of what I could do with my life and gave me a lot of financial freedom and stability. I’m really grateful to the books for that, and to the movies especially. It’s hard to complain about them, right? I don’t care how they change stuff! They made it so that I could be a full-time writer, which was my dream.”
Roth used to get socially anxious at events with hundreds of fans. She didn’t mind public speaking in front of people who cared about Divergent, she worried about the one-on-one interactions when she signed fans’ books. “You never know what you’re going to get. A lot of Divergent readers are in that awkward phase of teenager-dom where they will just tell you what they think. They’ll be like, ‘I’m only here because my friend is here. I hated your book.’”
The third book Allegiant was divisive, to put it mildly. Some readers were so enraged by Tris’s ending that they sent Roth death threats. “I've thought a lot about it since then, because it's so controversial,” she admits. “I don't feel as certain of it as I used to. I'm older now, and I see how young Tris is. And it's harder than it used to be to read. But we all are making the best choices we can in the moment.”
In 2017, Roth released a short story called We Can Be Mended that gave a snapshot of different characters’ lives five years after the events of Allegiant. Two characters struck up a romantic relationship, and some readers denounced it as being blasphemous to the original books. “We Can Be Mended is obviously not a tremendously popular interpretation of my own work. I think it’s the most controversial thing in the Divergent series. I still like it. But if you don't want to believe it's canon, that's fine. I'm not here to control it.”
Roth has come to realise that she can’t let readers’ reactions dictate the direction her writing takes. “Trying to please everyone is a way to get a very bland book. I have to think about what makes a story work for me as the writer. If you make the choice that feels wrong, or dishonest, or cowardly to you, then you actually can’t always continue... I tried to explore other endings to Allegiant while I was writing it, just because I was afraid of it. And I get stuck. I was like, ‘you’re just avoiding the thing that feels right to you.’”
Lionsgate studios planned to split Allegiant into two films, in the style of how the final Harry Potter, The Hunger Games and Twilight books were each stretched into two instalments. After the first Allegiant film underperformed at the box office, the second never materialised.
Eight years after the final film was in cinemas, Roth’s day-to-day life is surprisingly ordinary. If you passed her in the supermarket, you’d never suspect she orchestrated a multimillion media franchise at the age of 21. She wakes up early. She drinks tea while she works. She walks her dog. She eats lunch. She tries to wrap up her admin tasks before dinner. “If left to my own devices, I would be more of a hermit than I am. But I have a husband and he likes people.” Her hobbies including reading, watching films, and weightlifting. “I’m pretty boring,” she jokes.
Divergent’s financial success enabled Roth to write fulltime. She says she’s only able to write in “short bursts”, but she must do rather a lot of “short bursts”, because she’s churned out four novels, two novellas, and two short stories and a science fiction anthology book in seven years. The Carve the Mark duology tells the story of star-crossed lovers – literally, because it’s set in space. She contributed the short stories Hearken, Ark and Void to dystopian anthology collections. In 2019, she wrote a set of science fiction short stories called The End and Other Beginnings: Stories from the Future.
Roth’s next two novels - Chosen Ones and Poster Girl - both look at young women entangled in a dystopian society, and how they cope once it collapses. 2020’s Chosen Ones follows a group who are famous for saving a dystopian America when they were teenagers, but have to deal with the psychological aftermath in their late 20s. 2022’s Poster Girl is about a young woman who the literal poster girl for a tyrannical dystopian government. After the political system comes crashing down, the heroine is imprisoned for a decade until she’s offered the chance to redeem herself. Both books received warmer reviews from critics than Allegiant did.
Roth’s writing style has evolved since the days of Divergent. “I had a rough plan for the Divergent books, but it wasn’t as detailed as it probably should have been. I used to think it would limit my creativity.” She now plans out her stories in detail, and uses the outlines like a “guidebook” to discover the story as she writes. She doesn’t struggle with anxiety in the same way, and no longer feels nervous at book signings.
Roth’s 2023 novella Arch-Conspirator is a science fiction retelling of the Greek tragedy Antigone. Afterwards, Roth’s editors encouraged her to revamp some more Greek myths. She started writing a dystopian version of the Oedipus story, but her focus kept drifting towards a very different idea.
Battling monsters in The Witcher video games sparked Roth’s interest in Slavic mythology. “I’m an American, but my parents are both European. One’s Polish, one’s German. I had never really thought that I could claim that heritage, because it’s like, ‘well, it doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to your mother.’ Later in life, I’ve given myself a little more permission to be interested in it and let it be mine.”
Roth explores Polish folklore in her new novella When Among Crows. The story is set in modern Chicago, except there are supernatural beings lurking around. A monster hunter and a zmora (a type of Slavic demon) must team up to find the witch Baba Jaga. Roth chose to set When Among Crows in her hometown Chicago because the city has the largest Polish population outside of Poland. It made sense to her that when Polish people immigrated to Chicago, they brought their monsters with them.
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Chicago is Roth’s longest-lasting muse. She and her family still live in the area. The Divergent series, Chosen Ones and When Among Crows all take place in alternate versions of Chicago. When she writes about her city through the eyes of different characters, she gets to rediscover it like a tourist. Tomorrow, she visits the Rookery Building, a 19th century high-rise with unique architecture. She had no idea the building existed in Chicago until she began her background research for a sequel to When Among Crows.
Researching Slavic folklore was challenging. Because the topic is rarely taught outside of central Europe, most of the academic articles about it are in Polish. Roth hopes that her work will encourage people to learn more about Slavic mythology. “We have a lot of interest in Greek mythology. That’s the big one that everyone knows. But Slavic folklore is dark and weird.
“Through folklore, you can experience how people understood the world. When you look at Slavic folklore, you’re like, ‘Wow, life must have been brutal for you guys.’ Slavic folklore says that unfair things will happen in your life and get even worse. Most monsters are just people who have suffered some kind of tragedy. The Slavic mindset throughout their folklore is that suffering begets more suffering. But that’s fascinating, and perfect for fiction.”
Roth is toying with the idea of incorporating other underappreciated mythologies into sequels to When Among Crows. But for the first time in years, Roth is also considering returning to the world of Divergent. “I decided that it was time to correct some of the associations that I have with Divergent. It’s not Divergent’s fault, but because I was so anxious at the time it was coming out, I feel that anxiety when I revisit the series. And that’s a shame, because it’s such a big part of my life. So I was like, ‘Okay, well I’m going to try and have fun with it again.’ And it was a joy.”
Roth wrote an experimental short story for her Substack about what would have happened if Tris chose a different faction at the start of Divergent. She likes the idea of exploring more concepts like that for pure enjoyment. Her pixie cut has been bleached blonde – the same hairstyle that Tris has in the Insurgent and Allegiant films.
She used to tell every reader who asked that she’d belong in Dauntless – the faction for the brave. “I think I used to say Dauntless because I needed it, not because I had the aptitude for it. When I was writing the Divergent books, and I was struggling with anxiety, I just wanted to cultivate that bravery in myself.
“Now I’m a lot happier, I can choose more honestly. I would choose Erudite.” [The faction that values wisdom and intellectual exploration.] “It’s so important to be a curious person.”
