It was a special place to live in, and to continue to live in whenever I reread parts of Vox. Being Jean for a while let me experience a range of states and emotions—some familiar, some foreign to me. When I wrote her scenes, I was a mother, a wife, a woman with regrets, a woman with the power to cure a serious language disorder, a lover. And speaking of that last part—it really wasn’t horrible climbing into bed with Lorenzo.

Do you think Jean views herself as a feminist?

I think of Jean as a humanist, an egalitarian, a person intelligent enough to view all human beings as created equal. But here lies the rub—Jean takes this for granted. I doubt she ever entertained the idea that not everyone shares her viewpoint. To the extent feminism is a call for equality, then, yes, we can view Jean as a feminist.

Jean’s teenage son very easily embraces the Pure Movement. Why is his role in the book so important?

Steven shows us how malleable people can be, for better or for worse. As a teenager, his thinking (and his rethinking) seemed completely natural—he’s a kid, soon to be an adult, navigating a complicated system, a collection of new ideas still very much in flux, and trying to make sense of them.

Many of Vox’s most chilling moments involve Sonia, Jean’s six-year-old daughter, and the question of whether she’ll acquire language.

There’s a looming threat in Vox that we taste but never quite swallow. At six, Sonia is of an age when time is crucial—we could refer to this period as a use-it-or-lose-it stage. And I mean that very literally. Critical periods exist for various types of learning. The theory is that children’s brains are more plastic in early youth, but the circuitry changes as they reach puberty.

When I began studying linguistics, I read about Genie, a “wild child” rescued from abusive parents in 1970. Almost fourteen years of social isolation left Genie beyond hope of acquiring language. I’ve never forgotten her story, and my own fear and anger about poor Genie stayed in my mind from the first word of Vox to the last.

What do you want readers to take away from Vox?

A lot of readers are probably going to think of Vox as a feminist story. In many ways, it is. But I hope people also see this as a tale about oppression, about the horrors that can occur when a faction—any faction—with a specific agenda becomes so powerful that it’s unstoppable.