“Conform” began as an off-handed comment debut author Ariel Sullivan made to her husband during a “dark point” in her life, she tells TODAY.com. Sullivan was struggling with postpartum depression and the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While contact tracing with her husband, she had a vision of a surveillance state future: “Sooner or later, we’ll all have these chips in our hand, and we’ll just be able to scan and it’ll know if we’re sick or if we have problems. Then they’ll be able to tell us where we can and can’t go based on it,” she remembers imagining.

She also recalls waking up that morning at 2:30 a.m. to feed her son. By then, Sullivan says the idea had “exploded in her subconscious.”

Ariel Sullivan. Courtesy Meg Miller Photography

Instead of going back to sleep, she spen

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