Exclusive: With The Sixth Faction, Veronica Roth Returns to the Divergent Series

When Roth was drafting Divergent as a senior at Northwestern University, she was “obsessed with it,” she tells me: She pushed aside school assignments and deadlines in favor of a story she “couldn’t stop working on no matter what I tried.” The payoff seemed obvious to anyone on the outside looking in: Landing in the 2010s, when dystopian sagas such as The Hunger Games were at a peak, Divergent became a sensation. The resulting series of books—including Insurgent, Allegiant, and Four: A Divergent Collection—dropped one after the other between 2011 and 2014, ultimately selling more than 40 million copies worldwide and spawning a major film franchise that helped ignite the careers of actors Shailene Woodley and Theo James. Allegiant alone earned the highest number of first-day sales in HarperCollins history at the time of its publication. Roth suddenly found herself among a rare echelon of authors: those who could confidently proclaim themselves household names.

But behind the scenes, the visibility was suffocating her. She was thankful, yes; any author would be thankful to have earned such a devoted readership, not to mention the sales figures that readership begets. But the unwavering attention—and the accompanying criticism—found her teetering on the edge of constant panic. “I was so stressed,” Roth says now. “I had an undiagnosed anxiety disorder. I was not medicated. I was terrified of what was happening to me at that time. Even though I was grateful for it, I knew it was exciting. I was like, ‘I can’t handle this. I’m too young for this.’”

“‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to play your early work with pride, showcasing the growth you’ve done, without feeling this shame about the things you made when you were young?”

Her coping mechanism, in the years that followed, was to internalize the criticism—that her books were too cheesy or too unrealistic; that they had inconsistent worldbuilding or unsatisfactory endings—and then grow embarrassed of the Divergent series altogether. “It sounds ungrateful when you say that you have negative feelings about this series that was so transformative, but with popularity comes negativity, and I retained all of that negativity,” Roth says. “And in order to survive it, I started agreeing with it, which is something that a lot of women, especially, can relate to: like, ‘I will be safe from being mocked if I join in the joke.’”

Roth continued to write and publish novels well after capping off the Divergent saga—including a number of acclaimed ones, such as 2020’s Chosen Ones, 2022’s Poster Girl, and the recent novellas When Among Crows and To Clutch a Razor. (“In the private space of my mind, I’m very critical of Divergent,” Roth says. “So in that sense, when I write, I’m just trying to learn from the lessons it taught me.”) But it often felt to her as though the legacy of Divergent loomed over the rest of her career, no matter what she published. At dinner parties and gatherings, Roth says acquaintances would ask which of her works they might have heard of, and she’d give them the honest answer. But if they then asked if they should read Divergent first out of her assorted works, Roth would immediately tell them “no.”

The deluxe limited edition cover of The Sixth Faction by Veronica Roth.

As she explains it now, “I think it felt like the easiest path forward: I just won’t acknowledge [the Divergent series] and then people will pay attention to what I’m doing now. But that was kind of a cruel position to take with myself, because this is a work that I should be proud of and I should be happy to talk about it, and maybe I’d feel better if I could. And so, I started opening myself up to talking about it more and not pretending it wasn’t there.”

The turning point arrived in 2023, when Roth took part in what could well be considered a millennial pilgrimage: She attended Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour. Roth doesn’t consider herself a Swiftie—as she’s quick to clarify, she enjoys Swift’s music, but don’t quiz her on the deep cuts—but something about the air of nostalgia in the stadium and Swift’s wholehearted embrace of her entire discography made Roth wistful. “I got sad,” Roth says, “because I was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to play your early work with pride, showcasing the growth you’ve done, without feeling this shame about the things you made when you were young?’”

Shortly after attending the show, Roth went on a family vacation, during which she decided to listen to the audiobook version of Four. She hadn’t read any of her Divergent books in years, but something about an audiobook felt accessible. Listening, “I was like, ‘…This is kind of good,’” Roth says, laughing. “It’s not perfect. And of course when you read your younger work, you’re going to cringe so hard, but I was like, ‘Okay, but many things were well-executed in this book.’ And I started to feel protective of this younger version of me.”

She continues, “It made me feel like, ‘I would love to find a way to experience joy associated with this series again. I think it would heal me in a deeper way, and I would like to give myself permission to appreciate the work I did when I was 24 years old.’ The way that I know to recapture joy is to make something new.”

“In many ways, [The Sixth Faction] is the culmination of all the work I’ve done, not just on myself, but on my writing.”

Roth started with an experiment: She brainstormed all the elements of Divergent she would like to “fix,” the criticisms she actually agreed with, such as the original series’ “unstable” worldbuilding. “Mentally, it was helpful for me to be like, ‘You can do it better now,’” she says. “‘You’ve grown so much, and you should appreciate that. So what would you do now?’” Then she wrote a single alternate-universe chapter, which she ended up publishing in her newsletter, about Beatrice being factionless rather than a member of Dauntless. Roth found it so “easy” to write from Beatrice’s perspective again, and she had “so much fun” with the task that she wondered, could she spin a whole novel out of this? Was the best way for her to face Divergent to make something new out of it?

In writing The Sixth Faction, she found she could enjoy the story again—and she could ignore the external and internal voices that had, for years, made it difficult to enjoy. “Because I got critiqued so much from people outside of the YA space, calling [Divergent] silly or whatever, the temptation was to be like, ‘[The book is] smart now,’” Roth says. But, she argues, “you can’t write from a position of defensiveness. It will not be fun, and it will not be a good book.”

She continues, “What works about Divergent is some of the cheesiness. You need it to be fun and sexy and romantic; that’s part of what people love about it. So don’t be so critical that you suck the life out of it.”

Appearing at BookCon today to an audience of devoted Divergent fans, Roth celebrated the release of the novel’s 15-year-anniversary edition (which is out April 21 and includes a sneak peek at The Sixth Faction), as well as the upcoming publications of both Seek the Traitor’s Son (out May 12) and The Sixth Faction itself. She’s currently editing the sequels to both Seek and Faction—the latter of which is set to publish on Feb. 2, 2027—and though she has no plans to continue her alternate-universe Divergent beyond the duology, she’s learned to never say never.