Read Delirium: The Complete Collection Online
Authors: Lauren Oliver
Tags: #Dystopian, #Fiction, #Juvenile Fiction, #Retail, #Romance
Somehow I find the strength to drag myself to the fence on my hands and knees, dry-heaving, vomiting dust. I hear shouting behind me, but it all sounds distant, like under-water noise. I limp to the fence and haul myself upward, inch by inch. I’m going as fast as I can but it feels like I’m crawling, barely making progress. Alex must be behind me because I hear him shouting, “Go, Lena! Go!” I focus on his voice: It’s the only thing that keeps me going up. Somehow—miraculously—I reach the top of the fence, and then I step over the loops of barbed wire like Alex taught me, and then I tip over the other side and let myself drop twenty feet to the ground, hitting the grass hard, half-unconscious now and incapable of feeling any more pain. Just a few more feet and I’ll be sucked into the Wilds; I’ll be beyond its impenetrable shield of interlocking trees and growth and shade. I wait for Alex to hit next.
But he doesn’t.
That’s when I do the thing I swore I wouldn’t do. Suddenly all my strength is back, fueled by panic. I scramble to my feet as the fence begins to hum again.
And I look back.
Alex is still standing on the other side of the fence, beyond a flickering wall of smoke and fire. He hasn’t moved a single inch since we both jumped off the bike, hasn’t tried to.
Strangely, in that moment I think back to what I answered all those months ago, at my first evaluation, when I was asked about
Romeo and Juliet
and could only think to say
beautiful
. I’d wanted to explain; I’d wanted to say something about sacrifice.
Alex’s T-shirt is red, and for a second I think it’s a trick of the light, but then I realize he’s drenched, soaked in blood: blood seeping across his chest, like the stain seeping up the sky, bringing another day to the world. Behind him is that insect army of men, all of them running toward him at once, guns drawn. The guards are coming too, reaching for him from both sides as though they are going to tear him apart, straight down the middle. The helicopter has him fixed in its spotlight. He is standing white and still and frozen in its beam, and I don’t think I have ever, in my life, seen anything more beautiful than him.
He is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years.
And then he opens his mouth and his mouth forms one last word.
The word is:
Run
.
After that the insect men fall on him. He is taken up by all their snapping, ravaging arms and mouths like an animal being set upon by vultures, enfolded in all their darkness.
I run for I don’t know how long. Hours, maybe, or days.
Alex told me to run. And so I run.
You have to understand. I am no one special. I am just a single girl. I am five feet two inches tall and I am in-between in every way.
But I have a secret. You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist. And there are many of us out there, more than you think. People who refuse to stop believing. People who refuse to come to earth. People who love in a world without walls, people who love into hate, into refusal, against hope, and without fear.
I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.
An Exclusive Q & A with Lauren Oliver
Q: What inspired you to write
Delirium
? Did you always conceive of it as the first book in a trilogy?
A: The idea for
Delirium
came from an essay I read by Gabriel García Márquez, in which he wrote that all great books were about love or death. The next day I was thinking about that quote—particularly about how and in what form a modern love story could be told—while I was on the treadmill at the gym. I was simultaneously watching a news story about a flu outbreak that had everyone freaking out about the possibility of a pandemic, and I was marveling that people so easily go into panics about reports of these diseases. At some point the two trains of thought—love and disease—just combined in my head.
In terms of conceiving it as a trilogy, I had always hoped I would be able to extend the story—from the beginning, I kept the working manuscript in a folder on my computer called “The Love Trilogy.” So I had a sense of where the story would go and how it would evolve—and luckily HarperCollins let me run with it!
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?
A: I can’t tell you that! You’ll just have to read on. But she is definitely a very strong character. Sometimes, in periods of oppression and mass insanity, the most decisive form of resistance is simply the decision not to engage.
Q: Lena repeatedly says that she’s just a regular girl, not anyone special. How important was it to characterize her in that way? Did Lena’s character change at all from when you first had the idea for this story, or did you always know who she was going to be?
A: It was very important to me that Lena feel like an “every girl” and self-identify that way. I wanted to illustrate through her character that there really is no such thing as someone who isn’t special, because we are completely and totally defined by our choices. Lena makes extraordinary choices and acts with extraordinary integrity and bravery, and so she becomes extraordinary.
Q: Redemption, transformation, and sacrifice are all major themes in your writing. Is writing about them a conscious choice? Why are those themes important to you?
A: That’s a great question. I do seem to gravitate toward those three themes again and again. It’s not necessarily conscious, but I definitely know that I’m uninterested in writing stories that don’t allow me to explore those themes. I think I look constantly to transform, and to find beauty and peace by giving to others. I’ve gone through very dark periods of my life; I guess I write partially to indicate a way out of the murk, a way toward the light, even when I can’t perceive it for myself.
Q: Here is your chance to ask yourself any question that you would like to answer. You’ve done many interviews. What haven’t people asked you that you would like readers to know?
A: Oh man. You know, I think it’s important for people to know that I love writing and it’s necessary to me, but it’s also hard, and it remains hard even if you really work at it—especially when you do, actually. But anything worth doing in life is worth working for, I think.
To my wonderfully patient and attentive editor, Rosemary Brosnan, who is part mentor, part taskmaster, part therapist, and all friend.
To Elyse Marshall, publicist extraordinaire, for the immensity of her support.
To the best agent in the world, Stephen Barbara, for putting up with me (I don’t know how you do it).
To everyone at Foundry Literary + Media, in particular Hannah Gordon and Stephanie Abou.
To Deirdre Fulton, for letting me stay for an entire summer while researching this book.
To Arabica Coffee House in Portland, Maine, for the deliciousness of your coffee and toast and the proliferation of your electrical outlets.
To Allison Jones, for her enthusiasm, advocacy, and general loveliness, and for single-handedly hand-selling
Before I Fall
to the entirety of Williamsburg, Virginia.
To my aunt Sandy, for years of constant love and support.
To all of my lovely blogger friends and fans, for making what I do worthwhile.
To my family, as always, for loving me.
And to my friends, of course, for being like family.
Cover photograph © 2011 by Michael Frost
Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons
Art direction by Cara E. Petrus
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A GEOGRAPHICAL NOTE ABOUT THE DESCRIPTION OF PORTLAND, MAINE:
Although many of the larger geographical areas indicated in this book do, in fact, exist (such as Tukey’s Bridge, the Cove, Munjoy Hill, and the neighborhood of Deering Highlands), as I had the pleasure to discover while staying there to research this book, most (if not all) of the streets, landmarks, beaches, and universities are of my own invention. To the residents of Portland: Please excuse the fictional liberties I have taken with your wonderful city, and I’ll see you soon.
The lines from “i carry your heart with me(i carry it in”.
Copyright 1952, © 1980, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from
Complete Poems: 1904–1962
by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage. Used by permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation.
DELIRIUM
. Copyright © 2011 by Laura Schechter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Oliver, Lauren.
Delirium/Lauren Oliver.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Lena looks forward to receiving the government-mandated cure that prevents the delirium of love and leads to a safe, predictable, and happy life, until ninety-five days before her eighteenth birthday and her treatment, when she falls in love.
EPub Edition © JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780062114037
Version 02282014
ISBN 978-0-06-211243-9
[1. Love—Fiction. 2. Government, Resistance to—Fiction. 3. Family life—Maine—Fiction. 4. Orphans—Fiction. 5. Maine —Fiction. 6. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.O475Del 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010017839
CIP
AC
11 12 13 14 15
LP/BV
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Special Edition August 2011