Killing Kate
Bumping off Kate Winslet was the least of Veronica Roth’s problems, as she reveals how the success of her young adult novels has come with a price
‘At just 28, she worries she may have peaked too soon’
Why did you kill off my mum?’ probably isn’t the first question you want to hear on the movie set of your debut novel, but when the mother in question is Kate Winslet and her then ten-year-old son Joe is telling you off, then you’d better have a decent response.
Author Veronica Roth had written Divergent while a 23-year-old student at Chicago’s Northwestern University and, having seen it become a bestseller, found herself on the set of the movie adaptation being confronted by an irate Winslet son, demanding to know why his mother’s villainous character, Jeanine Matthews, had been bumped off. ‘I said, “Well, if I’d known it was going to be your mum when I was writing it, I probably wouldn’t have done,” ’ Roth admits.
The film went on to gross almost $300 million and spawned two sequels, Insurgent and Allegiant (Joe’s mum met her end in the former), based on Roth’s youngadult trilogy, which to date has sold more than 35million copies worldwide. Despite such success, Roth began to dread random criticism. ‘My therapist recommended that I read all my worst reviews. One said, “Your books are like Taco Bell [an American fast-food chain] – they taste good at the time but make you feel sick later.” After reading that, what else is there to be afraid of?’
Roth, though, has taken her lifelong battle with anxiety and turned it into bestselling fiction. Her
Divergent series, set in a futuristic Chicago, features teenage heroine Beatrice ‘Tris’ Prior (played in the films by Shailene Woodley), who undergoes a series of daring initiation rites to conquer her deepest fears. ‘I think I channelled my own anxiety when writing the novels, though it wasn’t intentional,’ she says. ‘Tris goes into her fears and faces them, basically a form of exposure therapy – an effective treatment for anxiety and one that I only underwent after writing the first book.’
Roth’s high-octane and emotionally charged novels have been compared to the Hunger Games trilogy and feature dystopian worlds and all-action heroines. Her latest offering, Carve The Mark, the first of a two-book series, is set in space and tells the story of two brothers who are kidnapped by a dictator from an enemy country. One brother, Akos, is determined to get his sibling out alive but has to work with the sister of the dictator, who has an unusual gift – the ability to cause untold physical pain to others. As with Roth’s previous novels, fear and dread permeate the book, driven by the way teenagers today grow up in a world with the threat of global terrorism.
Roth says: ‘If you’re on any kind of social media, you get updates on an hourly basis on worldwide events. The consequence of that is that there’s this profound anxiety for kids who really aren’t old enough to do much about it.’
The roots of Roth’s own anxiety can be partly traced back to a somewhat disjointed childhood. She grew up in Barrington, a wellto-do suburb of Chicago, and was just five when her parents divorced, after which she barely saw her father. Her mother Barbara, a painter, raised Roth and her two older siblings alone, and it’s perhaps no coincidence that broken families and strong female figures populate Roth’s fiction.
‘From a very young age I saw [my mum] as a whole human being rather than just a mother. She had to work and raise us by herself and so I always saw her as a really powerful figure with her own life.’
Roth was 23 when she achieved worldwide success with Divergent. She is now married to fellow Northwestern graduate and photographer Nelson Fitch. At only 28, she worries that she may have peaked too soon.
‘There’s always a little troll in your head telling you, “You can never do better than this,” but you just have to carry on and realise that you can’t please everyone with what you write.’
Even Kate Winslet’s young son would have to appreciate that.
Carve The Mark by Veronica Roth is published by Harper Collins and is priced at €10.99