Unwind
Unwind
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Neal Shusterman on Unwind
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Two articles and a question about permissionThe book began not with a story idea but with a political grievance. Shusterman had watched the abortion debate calcify into something that no longer resembled a search for answers, and that calcification was what he wanted to write about, even before he knew how.
I was angered by the abortion debate (even more so now) and how it’s become less about the actual issue, and more about how the two sides are so furious and angry with each other that the solutions end up being worse than the question.
The fictional mechanism arrived from an unexpected direction: a news report about British teenagers. The report was not about abortion at all, but Shusterman heard in it the same logic of social permission that he recognized from the debate, and that connection became the premise.
Then I read this article about teens that were out of control in England, and in their frustration, people were saying they ought to pass a law that allows us to get rid of teens that nobody wants. And I thought, ‘What if a society sanctioned that? Would people do it because an authority figure gave them permission?’
The second piece of source material came from medicine, not politics. An article about advances in transplant technology gave him the loophole his fictional society needed, and once he had both articles in mind simultaneously, the world of the book snapped into place.
I saw an article about transplant technology, and the idea that 100% of a person could be eventually used in transplant. That posed the question: If 100% of you is alive, are you still alive somehow? I realized that society could use that as a moral and ethical loophole to justify the disposing of troublesome teens.
The two articles, read separately, were each innocuous. Fused into a single premise, they produced a world disturbing enough to carry the argument he could not make directly.
How he wrote it
A timestamp removed, a scene almost skippedThe first structural decision Shusterman made was an omission. Setting the story in a specific future year would let readers treat it as speculation rather than warning, so he left the date out entirely.
I never put a year on Unwind, because I wanted it to feel like today ‘plus one.’ If I gave it some date in the future, it would feel too science-fictiony and remove us from our current social situation.
His psychology and drama training from UC Irvine shaped how he worked at the sentence level. He has described needing to see a scene before he can write it, and that visual discipline is what held him back from the book’s most demanding chapter until he committed fully.
The truth is, I can’t write it if I can’t see it. The story needs to have a connection to reality.
Roland’s unwinding, the chapter readers most frequently cite, was nearly absent from the manuscript. Shusterman had decided not to write it; his son Jarrod, reading drafts as they developed, argued the reader had to be in the room. Once committed, Shusterman set a constraint that made the scene land harder than graphic violence would have.
I set some ground rules for myself. ABSOLUTELY NO BLOOD AND GORE. I even replaced blood with this ‘anti-freeze’-looking green fluid, so even if readers were imagining it, they wouldn’t be seeing blood. It would be disturbingly clinical, and everyone in the process would be genuinely kind.
Having decided on clinical horror rather than gore, he then worked at the level of sentence rhythm to build the chapter’s effect. The final word, and its disappearance, was engineered as carefully as the scene’s medical sterility.
I wanted to choreograph the entire chapter like a dance, right down to the rhythm of the language and the shifts between dialogue, thought and description, leading down to the last thought that remained: ‘I.’ Until ‘I’ was no more and there were only ellipses where the ‘I’ had been.
Shusterman had no expectation, when he wrote it, that this chapter would come to define the entire book in readers’ memories.
On what’s at stake
The snowball no one decided to start rollingShusterman’s concern in the book runs wider than the abortion debate that sparked it. In a video interview about the book, he described the deeper subject as a social process most people only recognize after it has already run its course.
In a video interview, Shusterman described the book as being about what happens when society as a whole decides to abdicate its moral and ethical responsibility in favor of what is convenient, and how that snowballs until you look at the world around you and say, ‘My God, how did we get here?’ [paraphrased from audio]
When asked during a Goodreads interview whether writing the series made him angry at the dystopian society he had built, Shusterman shifted the target. His frustration, he said, was always aimed somewhere closer.
My anger was more about OUR society, not the society in Unwind — because that society is just an allegory and an exaggeration of our own.
He has described the two-sided framing of the abortion debate as the problem itself, not a symptom of it. That argument sits underneath every political conflict the book depicts, and he has made it bluntly.
Unwind was a unique look at the ‘issue behind the issue’ of abortion, and the long-term effect of extreme political division.
What he wants us to sit with
Neither side wins, and that’s the pointReaders from opposing positions in the abortion debate have each finished the book convinced it supports their side. Shusterman does not regard this as a failure of the argument. He regards it as the argument.
The book is accepted on all sides of the social and political spectrum, which is part of the point. It’s nonpolitical. It dismisses the idea of taking sides on complex issues and tries to approach the very idea of complex issues in a more productive way.
When a reader wrote to tell him the book had changed their view on abortion, Shusterman welcomed it, but corrected the direction of the shift. The move he wanted was not from one political position to another.
I hope it changed your views! Not from one side to another, but in a way that takes it away from an us vs. them mentality.
He has since condensed the book’s purpose into a line that doubles as a warning about how dystopian fiction gets misread. The sentence first appeared in Shelf Awareness on the book’s fifteenth anniversary.
Unwind was intended to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual.
The framing of that line reflects how seriously he takes the gap between a story that unsettles readers into reflection and one that, read carelessly, could be taken as a blueprint for exactly the abdication of judgment the book is meant to challenge.