Shatter Me
Shatter Me
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Tahereh Mafi on Shatter Me
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A voice in her head, and a fish documentaryBefore Mafi had a plot, a setting, or even a title, she had a sound: a girl speaking from inside a cell. That voice arrived without invitation, and Mafi followed it rather than planning around it.
I heard Juliette’s voice in my head one day, and all I really knew about her was that she was alone, afraid, and locked up for something she didn’t mean to do. She led the story and told me where to go; I uncovered her secrets as I wrote the book.
The emotional reality behind Juliette’s captivity came from Mafi’s own adolescence, spent moving between Connecticut and California as a visibly Muslim Iranian-American girl. On the First Draft podcast she described her younger self as “an extremely angry, unhappy child,” and named the specific, wordless trap that childhood can be.
you can’t get a job, you can’t drive, you can barely leave your house. You can’t run away, they’ll return you to your parents.
The dystopian world surrounding Juliette grew from a documentary Mafi could not shake. It concerned male fish that had developed female eggs after estrogen, flushed unfiltered from human waste into waterways, altered them at a biological level. The image of ordinary creatures changed by forces they never chose gave her the question the whole book is built on.
I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I couldn’t stop wondering about how these perfectly normal fish were suddenly mutated by something we’d unconsciously pumped into their natural habitat... The world of SHATTER ME became a place for me to ask questions about what we’re doing to our planet and – worse case scenario, of course – where we might end up.
Mafi had finished four manuscripts before Shatter Me, none of which sold. This was the book where she stopped trying to write correctly and started writing freely, and she credits that shift for everything that followed.
This was the first manuscript wherein I’d ever truly allowed myself to let go. To allow my mind to dictate the story; to be unencumbered by what I was conditioned to believe was the ‘correct’ way to write a book.
She did not write it expecting it to sell. She followed the voice, and that turned out to be the only way it could have been written.
How she wrote it
Strikethroughs as a psychological mapMafi wrote the book without an outline, letting Juliette’s psychology determine the structure scene by scene. When interviewers asked how she had planned the story, her answer was consistently the same.
It’s completely character-driven. It’s Juliette’s story. She walked into my head one day and I had no idea why; her world came together as I wrote.
The strikethroughs, Shatter Me’s most immediately visible formal feature, were not a device Mafi decided on before writing. They developed from the specific psychological bind of a girl who has been in solitary confinement so long that she can no longer trust her own thoughts. Mafi explained not just what the strikethroughs are but what they track across the full arc of the trilogy.
The strike-throughs are meant to express the turmoil and chaos in Juliette’s mind. She’s been isolated for so long and has nothing but a small notebook to write in; her thoughts are caught between the written and the spoken and she can’t really differentiate between the two, especially not in the beginning. She’s afraid to speak; afraid to admit things to herself; afraid to trust her own judgment. As the story progresses – and Juliette’s character grows stronger – the strike-throughs lessen, and her true voice takes shape.
Mafi returned to this point in a later interview, naming the prose style’s function across the whole trilogy rather than just the first book. She was defending a choice that some readers found distracting, and her answer reframed it as the story’s spine.
The prose, I think, is the best visual representation of the change Juliette experiences over the course of the trilogy.
Mafi was twenty or twenty-one when she wrote the first book and in her mid-twenties by the time she finished the trilogy. At the 2015 LA Times Festival of Books she described what it felt like to age alongside a character she had invented when she was barely an adult herself.
it was almost like I was teaching her how to grow up and teaching myself how to grow up, and so I feel close to her, but there’s a little bit of me in her. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Twenty-three years compressed into one girlMafi published Shatter Me at twenty-three, having spent her teens as an outsider who moved repeatedly and taught herself the publishing industry from the internet without ever attending a conference or calling herself a writer. When she reflected on what the book actually contained, she described it as a kind of accumulation.
I think Shatter Me became exactly what it was supposed to be: the amalgamation of 23 years worth of questions and experiences in my head.
At the 2016 LA Times Festival of Books, Mafi described the psychological terrain of the first book in a way that connected Juliette’s prison to her own interior history. The description made clear that the three-book arc was never really about power or dystopia first. It was a portrait of a mind breaking free.
Shatter Me was this sort of... an exploration of a young girl’s really emotionally crippled mind. And she had to break out of the prison of her, this psychological burden she was carrying around... the books were really dark and they were really bleak... until the very end of the series when she finally became this really empowered young woman who I could be really proud of. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Pain that matters, and a self that survivesMafi has described Juliette’s lethal touch, the condition that makes every human being a potential threat to her, as a deliberate amplification of a feeling most readers already carry. The superpower is not the point. The alienation it represents is.
The isolation and alienation Juliette experiences is something that many teens (and adults) are able to relate to. We all feel a bit cast-off and misunderstood, sometimes; like there might be something about us that sets us apart from our peers. Juliette’s affliction takes that idea to an extreme.
When Mafi describes what the trilogy is actually about, she bypasses the dystopian scaffolding entirely. The Reestablishment, the authoritarian regime that controls the world of Shatter Me, functions as pressure. What she is watching is how a person responds to that pressure across three books.
The entire series revolves around the evolution of a timid girl on her path to becoming a strong, independent young woman... Her metamorphosis over the course of the three books teaches her to love herself with or without the validation of others. It is, at its core, a story about a girl trying to find herself in a world trying to tell her who to be.
Mafi has consistently pushed back against the idea that young adult fiction should soften its darkness. Her defense of the genre names what darkness is actually for in her work.
What I love most about young adult in particular is that we can write about darkness. We do, in fact, write about darkness, but always with the hope of reaching light, reaching hope.
In a Good Morning America interview tied to her Shatter Me spinoff, Mafi named the conviction that runs beneath every book she has written. It is the most compressed version of what she wants readers to carry out of Juliette’s story.
I think with every book I write I’m trying to tell young people that their pain matters. [paraphrased from audio]