If you thought your reaction to pollen was bad, imagine being allergic to literally everything.

That's the premise of Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon. The novel tells the story of 17-year-old Madeline, who is allergic to the outside world. Because of her health, Madeline has been stuck inside her house for her entire life.

Talk about cabin fever.

"If you’re really trying to protect your child, I do think the best way to help your kid and protect them against the world is to let them be in it," says Yoon. "Everyone needs learn how to be alone, how to cope with disappointment, how to defend themselves."

Everything starts to change for Madeline when she gets a new neighbor, Olly — who's cute and intriguing enough to make Madeline yearn for more than what's inside her home. Heartwarming and inventive, Everything, Everything explores just how far we are willing to go to find love.

Yoon's quest to expand the world doesn't stop with her protagonist's. She's also a member of We Need Diverse Books, an organization devoted to increasing diversity and the representation of diversity in literature.

Mashable caught up with Yoon to discuss Everything, Everything and why diverse books are so crucial.

Image: Random House Children's Publishing

Q&A with Nicola Yoon

Mashable: Everything, Everything plays around with form as it tells the story of a girl who is allergic to the world. What can you say about the book's different formats?

Yoon: Because Madeline is stuck in her house, she tries to draw the world by hand as a way of getting closer to it. I write from 4 a.m. to 6 a.m., Monday through Friday. And I write by hand, and I was writing and writing.

Then there’s this fish.

I can’t draw, so I woke my husband at 4:30 a.m. or something, and I was like “Honey, I need this fish.” So he got up and got coffee, and he gave me a kiss and he just drew me the fish.

Image: David Yoon, Everything, Everything

And that started it all. From there, it wasn’t too hard to integrate illustrations. Once I decided that this was her way of being close to the world, it was easy to find moments to put in a drawing because there are things that she’s always wanted to experience.

In terms of different formats, there [is] drawing, there are IMs and emails, handwritten letters, lots of stuff. And all the text.

So what can readers expect from this journey in the book?

The story is really about love and its loss, and the things that you’d do for it. It’s really a meditation about all different kinds of love: parental, friendship and romantic. You can expect a lot of love talk.

What inspired you to write this story?

I actually started writing it when my daughter was four months old and I was a total nervous mom. You treat kids as so fragile in the beginning. I started just thinking about, what if there was a girl who always knew the level of protection that moms give to newborns? I just started imagining what that would do to her, and her relationship with her mom, and how her life would change if other people started coming into it.

So how does one view the world if they're set apart from it? How do you think that distorts your perspective?

Madeline reads a lot, so she sees the world sort of second hand. She sees everyone else’s interpretation. And she draws a lot as a way to understand the world. She is also really into architecture. She tries to interpret the world in all these different ways because she isn’t actually in it.

Image: David Yoon, Everything, Everything

The book is YA — but given the themes of love and isolation, what do you hope older readers will take away from it?

For older readers, something that I was trying to work out is: love is awesome, but its loss can be devastating. This is a thing that I discovered when I married my husband. When I first met him, I thought “Now that I've found the one, I am terrified that I am going to lose him." And then we had our daughter, and that feeling comes back. Your heart is walking around outside of your body. I can’t control if something bad happens. Love is a fantastic thing. But is it worth the risk to have love, to be in love? I think about that a lot.

Shifting gears a little bit, I know that you're associated with the We Need Diverse Books campaign. How did you get involved?

It started as a hashtag just over a little a year ago. The campaign was calling for people to say why they need diverse books.

My husband is of Korean descent, so we have a mixed-race daughter. And I thought, we need diverse books because of children. They need books that they can see themselves in. So we decided to take a picture of me and my husband, and we had this poster with a little circle cut out that we had our daughter sticking her face in. And that picture went viral. It was everywhere, it was insane.

Image: Nicola Yoon, We Need Diverse Books

So that’s how I got involved. Then someone reached out and asked if I could do some of their social media stuff. And I was happy join.

The way we talk about diversity is always changing and evolving. There will never be an end goal for tackling diversity — nobody will ever say, “Okay, world! All perspectives are spoken for. The world is diverse now. We can all go home.” There’s always work to be done.

Wouldn’t that be awesome! The whole goal of the organization is to write ourselves out of existence. The whole goal would be to never need another organization that says "we need diverse books." That would be the best thing.

So what’s next for the campaign?

We just ran a campaign that raised quite a bit of money, so we are sponsoring internships. Part of the issue with diversification is that there’s just not enough representation at all levels in publishing. It would be good if we had more diverse agents and editors and executives at publishing houses. Toward that end, we are doing internships and sponsoring specific scholarships that will lead into the publishing world.

We’re doing behind-the-scenes stuff too, as well as supporting writers of marginalized groups and people that are representing marginalized groups as main characters in books.

So has the We Need Diverse Books campaign affected your writing? How is Everything, Everything situated in that diversity conversation?

For me, just personally, outside of We Need Diverse Books, when I decided that Madeline was biracial, it was completely personal. I wanted my daughter to be able to see someone who looks like her when she read this book. I didn’t really have that until much later in life, and that was really important to me.

A lot of people who are involved in the We Need Diverse Books campaign and the people who support the campaign feel the same. They want people who are gay or black or brown or from any marginalized group, so they can see themselves in the story. It’s all sort of personal.

I always think, “If Harry Potter had been black, that would have been so cool!” If he had been gay, that would have been fantastic. Does the story really change that much in a significant way? Think of how many people would have seen that. That would have been awesome.

I remember the response when J.K. Rowling revealed that Dumbledore was gay. The conversation was so divided. Some people loved the news, and others thought "why do we need to know?"

I love J.K. Rowling, and I love that she said that. Because then everybody gets to step back and look at their own reaction to the news. It’s just another facet of Dumbledore. He’s still awesome! He’s still Dumbledore!