Author's Message

When I began writing Wither, it was a bit like waking up in a dark place with no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there. I knew nothing of my surroundings. If I could have found a window, I wouldn’t have known what would be on the other side of it.

All I knew, really, that there was a girl. I didn’t know her name. I only knew that she was scared of where she was headed. The first glimpse of Rhine’s world comes when she staggers out of a van surrounded by other terrified girls, and she sees the sky, and the man who will soon become her husband. I kept writing mostly to find out what was going to happen to her. I knew from the start that hers wouldn’t be an easy story.

To say that I wrote Wither as a message or a warning would be untrue. While it may certainly serve as one, at its core, Wither belongs to its narrator, Rhine. It’s not a love story; it’s not a statement about society, but simply the story of a girl who is trying to get back to the life she once had. Trying to get home.

However, her world is a perilous place. It’s a world in which everything is slowly dying—plants, animals, human beings. It’s not a world most of us can relate to. We’re used to seasons: things die in the wintertime, but we know they’ll return in the spring. Our own lives have expiration dates, but we don’t know what they are; if we don’t have time, we at least have the illusion of it. All of these things went though my mind as I wrote this story. What if I knew exactly when I would die? What would be important to me? And how would I deal with being taken from the only life I ever knew in order to serve someone else’s idea of what life should be?

These are heavy questions, and ones that have stayed with me as I work on the conclusion to this story. This is a story that will be published and read in a world where flowers bloom in the springtime and the birth of a new child is filled with hope and expectation. A world where elaborate, long-term plans have a shot at coming to fruition, and we can afford to squander our time. We live in a world that any character in Wither would refer to as the past.

- Lauren DeStefano