Author Info

Lauren Kate

Lauren Kate grew up in Dallas. She went to school in Atlanta. She started her writing career in New York. She has a master's degree in fiction from the University of California, Davis and is the author of Fallen and The Betrayal of Natalie Hargrove. She lives in Laurel Canyon with her husband and is now at work on the sequel to Fallen.

Here's what Lauren says on:

- reasons for placing the story in a reform school rather than the regular high school:

There's a line in Bob Dylan's song Not Dark Yet: "I've been down at the bottom of a world full of lies." I think that's where Luce finds herself at the beginning of the novel. She's at the end of what she sees as a long line of failures, uncertain about who or what to believe. Her character is a) stunned to end up at reform school, and b) certain that she cannot sink any lower. Melodramatic? Sure! But she's headed down a one-way street towards a more complicated understanding of her life. It takes something drastic (like reform school) to get her to a place where she stops expecting her life to look exactly as she'd planned, and opens herself up to a host of interesting opportunities. (Then again, on the same album, Dylan also sings: "When you think that you lost everything/you find out you can always lose a little more." I guess that's where the sequel comes in!)

-research she did to write Fallen:

I was a Jewish kid with a Catholic father growing up in Texas. So yes, theology has always fascinated me. When I was in grad school, I took a course with an incredible professor who taught the bible as purely a work of literature. When I started writing Fallen, she pointed me towards a lot of angelology. Stacks and stacks of books now cover the dining room table where I'm writing the second book, Torment. Angels do show up in the bible, but their appearances are fleeting and often non-descript. It's kind of strange that what springs to mind when most people think of angels today—the fluffy wings, the baby faces, the pure intentions. Almost all purely cultural inventions. So in Fallen, I try to play around the idea of what an angel is "supposed" to be like.

-Daniel's name:

Well, the book of Daniel is the first book in the bible where an angel plays an independent role—that is, an angel not acting as merely a replacement for God. This seemed fitting for a guy as fiercely independent as Daniel.

-what stands out about her description of classic theme - the battle between good and evil:

Here the lines between good and evil are blurred. I usually like to do the opposite of what I think people expect me to do, and maybe I'm acting out that impulse in this book. I'm interested in to questioning old notions of angels and demons, heaven and hell. I want readers to fall for the "evil" characters in these books as much as they fall for the "good" ones. Luce herself is so wide open—she's perfect to be put in the middle of this age old battle between good and evil, to have to determine whether each side truly is what she's grown up thinking it is.

-why readers always fall for stories about forbidden love:

I have friends who groan about my hopeless romantic advice on relationships. I'm probably the least likely person ever to say, "he's just not that into you." To me, forbidden love is exactly the kind of thing worth striving for. Not because it always works out, but because it's worth the effort. Falling for someone off-limits or hard to get is a kind of emotional endurance training. Whether you get the guy or not, in the end, you're left with this polished, stronger, sharper you. Feminists, feel free to balk at this defense—but we've all been there at least once!

-on the way her typical day looks like:

Writers have so many inane quirks, don't they? I have to position my computer so I'm sitting with my back against a wall. So that nothing can... I don't know...sneak up on me. I like noise that's just south of distracting—traffic, rain, music in another language. On average, I have about ten open books and three kinds of drinks on the dining room table where I write. I have a notebook where I jot down things I think are brilliant and must remember to include in a later chapter—and then I promptly forget to include them. When I'm working on a deadline, I write about eight to ten pages a day or until I'm completely brain dead and can hardly speak. Then I try to go out into the world and shock myself back into being a social creature. I don't think any of it would be possible if I weren't married to a guy who made me laugh so much.