Requiem for a dream: Lauren Oliver

The first book in the trilogy, Delirium, starts with Lena falling in love with an outsider called Alex. In book two, Pandemonium, everything changes and she meets Julian. In Requiem, Lena must choose between the two. Who would you choose – Julian or Alex?

I’m not going to say, no way. It’s funny, people have interpreted the end of Requiem differently, and there is a lot of ambiguity there. And that was always my intention. I had the last paragraph written even before I started the second book. A big theme in this book is the fact that you can’t just choose something and that’s it, you’ll be happy forever. You have to constantly undergo this process of choosing over and over again. Alex is the person who first showed Lena what love was and Julian’s the person with whom she served that mentor role, she was the strong one that knew about love; he also made it safe for her to love again. So I think both of those people serve really important roles in her life. It’s funny when some of my fans got really irate that Lena had met Julian, I said: “the truth is, when you lose people in your life, your heart does recover and you do find love again and that’s a beautiful thing.”

The trilogy is action-packed, with the main characters all facing a huge amount of pain and adversity in their struggle against society. How much of the story did you have planned out before you started writing Delirium?

I had the general movement of the books planned out and I knew in a large part what was going to happen and I knew how it was going to end, but in terms of a lot of details and finer plot points I was completely surprised. I always intended to kill off the characters in the last book for example, but when it came to writing that scene, I couldn’t do it. I definitely do take time to structure a novel before I start otherwise I will just write 800 pages of descriptions of trees and character development. But, it often changes because there are some organic and intuitive things that happen when you’re writing, that tell you where you need to go.

Over the course of all three books Lena grows from a confused girl to a strong woman. Did you enjoy developing her character?

I am so interested in character evolution, my first book Before I Fall features a character that really goes through an evolution over the course of the book and I really wanted to do that with Lena too. I wanted to see her grow and change and find strength and have that strength complicated. Real people are always complex and real characters are far more interesting to write than flat ones.

Was it a challenge crafting an entirely new world, with its own rules, religion and politics?

I definitely enjoyed it, but it was also really difficult. I had to think about a lot of political and social structures that I had really never had to do as a writer, because Before I Fall was not just based on the real world, but based on a high school very similar to my own, so I had very little conceptual work to be done in that sense. It was a challenge, but that was one of the reasons I wanted to write the series in the first place, to challenge myself. I kept a separate notepad where I just had world-building details and kept notes about the religious and social customs, so that really helped.

Why do you think there has been such a surge in popularity for dystopian novels recently?

Dystopias are about trying to picture the world in a radically different way, picturing the world after people have spent a lot of time screwing it up and I think that resonates a lot with how people feel; especially in the US where there has been economic downturn and political and environmental chaos for a long time. I think people really relate to the idea of a society in chaos or in crisis and then similarly get comfort from the fact that dystopian novels show societies in crisis but where people still hope.

The US television network Fox is developing the series into a TV show - are you excited?

I’m so excited, I’m thrilled. I have a really close relationship with the producers, which means I get to give comments on the script and speak to the actors, which is great. But there are still limits, and TV is not my area of expertise, so I trust the experts and I’m really excited to be able experience it like a fan.

Requiem by Lauren Oliver is published by Hodder & Stoughton.