Many of Piercy's novels explore American society's oppression of the individual. In The High Cost of Living (1978), three characters, like Vida, are ostracized; each yearns for acceptance, an end to a lifetime of alienation. Fugitives appear again in Piercy's most recent The Longings of Women (1994), while Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) juxtaposes the flawed present (of Vida's world) against the Utopian future she imagines.

The Vietnam War and its alteration of dissident's lives is thematic in Vida.

Similarly, Gone to Soldiers (1987) focusses on the ways in which World War II altered women's lives. A 1986 major motion picture, Running On Empty, parallels the story told in Vida quite closely.

Piercy addresses critical response to Vida in a 1982 essay, Parti-Colored Blocks for a Quilt, published by the University of Michigan Press.