I Must Betray You
I Must Betray You
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Ruta Sepetys on I Must Betray You
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
An ashtray turned upside down in BucharestThe book’s origin is a single physical gesture at a café table in Bucharest during Sepetys’s tour for an earlier novel. A woman sitting with her reached to the center of the table, lifted the ashtray, and checked its underside. When she caught Sepetys watching, she explained she had been looking for a recording device: old habit, she said. The Securitate, Romania’s secret police, had been everywhere. That moment of reflexive, years-after-the-fact caution opened a conversation Sepetys wasn’t ready for.
Can you imagine this world in which your nutrition is controlled, a woman’s body belongs to the state, your electricity and water is rationed, and everything you do is watched? It sounded so dystopian, but it was real.
The obligation became personal on a second visit to Romania. A young Romanian man asked Sepetys directly whether she would ever tell his country’s story. She had already written about Soviet-era terror in the Baltic states, but this felt like a different kind of request: a community naming something it needed and handing that need to her.
They had suffered so much, and nobody was talking about it.
The more Sepetys researched, the more she understood that Romania’s version of communism had engineered something the other regimes she had studied had not: the systematic destruction of trust between ordinary people. Citizens in other Soviet-bloc countries had found at least fragments of solidarity in shared suffering. Romania’s Securitate had closed that off deliberately, which meant the population faced its terror largely alone.
Mistrust was a form of terror during the communist regime.
Once she understood the mechanism of that mistrust, the shape of her protagonist came into focus. Cristian, the seventeen-year-old at the center of the novel, is himself coerced into informing on his own family. Sepetys wanted his position to carry the full contradiction of life under a surveillance state: someone capable of love trapped inside a system that weaponized love.
I wanted to create a main character who could serve as a juxtaposing force—a teenager who embraced the power of love up against a dictator who embraced the love of power.
That framing meant Cristian could never be simply a victim. He is also, at moments, an instrument of the regime, and Sepetys built the novel around that unresolvable tension.
How she wrote it
Seventy-five interviews and a mantra about making it humanFive years of research preceded the writing. Sepetys conducted somewhere between 75 and 100 interviews with Romanians who had lived through the Ceaușescu years, a number that includes the man who executed Ceaușescu himself and Irina Margareta Nistor, who secretly dubbed more than 3,000 Western films into Romanian at personal risk. One interview, with Nicoleta Giurcanu, who was fourteen years old when she was arrested during the revolution and tortured, stopped the work entirely for a time.
I was wrecked after that interview. She was crying, I was crying, and in my bald ignorance I felt like how can I not know this story?
Knowing what happened and knowing how to put it on the page are separate problems, and Sepetys has a specific method for crossing that distance. Her early drafts function as holding tanks for everything she has learned: raw, over-explained, written as if the reader needs every fact she collected. The revision process is then a sustained campaign to replace those explanations with character.
My first drafts are full of info dumps, and that’s just a guide telling myself I want to incorporate this information here. Then I challenge myself to go back and ask how can I make this part of the character development. How can I make the history human? If I don’t, the reader is not going to walk with that character for 300 pages holding their hand and feeling their fear. My mantra is, make it human.
The practical technique for that transformation is scene-building. Rather than letting a historical fact sit as a statement, Sepetys constructs a physical situation around it so the reader arrives at the fact through experience. The example she returned to repeatedly in interviews involves contraband radio broadcasts, one of the real channels through which Romanians under Ceaușescu encountered the outside world.
If I have a piece of research that I think is important, before I describe it, I create a scene around it. In this case, I’m going to bring the reader into that tiny kitchen where the entire family is crowded around a radio with an illegal antenna. They know that there’s probably a surveillance device in their apartment. Through that radio comes the voice of freedom, a crackly broadcast that makes them feel less lonely.
The prose style of the book is noticeably sparser than Sepetys’s earlier novels, and that choice came directly from testimony. Witness after witness told her that under Ceaușescu, even private thought felt monitored: interiority itself was not safe. She responded to that information with a formal decision.
I wanted to put the reader into Cristian’s head and heart, so you could be looking through his eyes, kind of like GoPro POV. [paraphrased from audio]
Her witnesses also drew the line on how the book could end. Romania’s revolution did not produce trials, a truth commission, or a public reckoning with who had informed on whom. Many perpetrators were never named. When Sepetys considered wrapping the novel’s conclusion more neatly than history had, the people she had interviewed stopped her.
You cannot tie this up in a bow.
That instruction became the epilogue. The open ending may frustrate readers who want resolution; Sepetys acknowledged that openly, then noted that the frustration is nothing compared to what the people who lived it carry.
The personal thread
A refugee family’s shadow over RomaniaSepetys grew up with communism as a family story. Her father fled Lithuania as a four-year-old refugee and spent nine years in displaced-persons camps before reaching the United States. That background shaped her first novel and gave her a framework she thought she understood. Romania required her to rebuild that framework from nothing: its system of terror operated on mechanisms she had not encountered in the Baltic research.
In Romania, the regime and the Securitate instilled a sense of mistrust and fear. Romanians weren’t quite sure whom they could trust, even in their closest circles. That element of mistrust robbed the citizens of any sort of solidarity.
One discovery during research produced a reaction she described as physical. She found documented evidence that the United States and the United Kingdom had worked with Ceaușescu’s government, and in some cases actively supported it. The finding put her country’s own record inside the story she was telling, which changed what the book was about.
I literally lost my breath when I discovered that during research. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Courage, complicity, and the cost of forgettingThe students who drove Romania’s 1989 revolution were largely teenagers, and Sepetys wanted that fact to land with its full weight. Most accounts of the revolution focus on the Ceaușescus’ flight and execution; she wanted readers to go back one day earlier, to December 21st, and to understand who was actually in those streets.
It was the young people on December 21st who took to the streets completely unarmed, and in some cases were attacking tanks with their bare hands. The courage, it’s just, it blows my mind. [paraphrased from audio]
Sepetys does not want the book to feel like a history lesson about somewhere else. Cristian is coerced into informing on his family, and the coercion is completely ordinary: a threat, a vulnerability, the slow normalization of compliance. She wants readers to apply that situation to themselves before they judge him.
I hope readers will ask themselves how they would respond if their entire life were an existence of enforced obedience—being listened to, being tracked. If there were microphones in their light fixtures, their bathrooms. If they were recruited to be informers against those they love the most. Would they?
From the 75 to 100 interviews she conducted, a single moment kept surfacing unbidden: a 1985 radio broadcast in which Ronald Reagan told people living under Soviet occupation that they were not forgotten. The repetition across so many separate conversations turned it into a lesson she took away from the whole project.
When they heard that broadcast saying, you may feel alone but you’re not alone, it gave them the courage to go on.
Her conclusion from that pattern was simple and direct: never underestimate the power of telling someone that you hear them. It is also, she has said, the reason she writes about hidden histories at all.
The argument running beneath every page of the book is about what erasure costs the people who experienced events that the rest of the world declined to notice. Sepetys returned to this in several interviews, but the formulation she gave the Romanian at Heart interviewer is the clearest statement of it.
When history remains hidden in the shadows, those who experienced the history often feel misunderstood, or worse, they feel forgotten by the world. Acknowledging someone’s personal history and challenges affirms human dignity.