Interview with John Green by GoodReads

Instructions:
Read the following interview. Come to class with the interview
annotated to the best of your ability.
Goodreads: Did people usually want to be visited by a chaplain?
John Green: It varied a lot. I think people who are religious are more likely to want one around, but
it's a very secular position. You're ministering to a lot of nonreligious people. I don't think
ministering requires a religious context. The number one thing is that every parent is extremely
worried about their kid. Of course, when a chaplain shows up, that can exacerbate this worry rather
than calm it.
GR: What first interested you in religious studies?
JG: I wasand in some ways remainreligious, but my inherent academic interest was Islamic
studies. It was 1999, and I was interested in interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims.
There are lots of scholars who do this stuff, who talk to people within the Islamic community and
publish papers. It's like any other academic gig. But I was also 21 years old, and I had a deep lack of
understanding of what I wanted in life.
GR: Almost a decade later you met Esther Earl, a teen whose YouTube videos and blogs
inspired many before her death at age 16 of thyroid cancer. How did you meet?
JG: We met at a Harry Potter conference in 2009. My brother sings songs about Harry Potter, and
they're very popularhe attends a lot of these conferences, and I went to one in Boston. So I went to
this concert at the conference; there's a lot of dancing going on. I don't dance, and neither did she, so
we ended up talking in the back of the room and became friends.
GR: You've talked about her being an inspiration for The Fault in Our Stars?
JG: I could never have written this if I hadn't known Esther. She introduced me to a lot of the ideas
in the book, especially hope in a world that is indifferent to individuals, and empathy. She redefined
the process of dying young for me.
Walking out of the hospital in 2000, I knew I wanted to write a story about sick kids, but I was so
angry, so furious with the world that these terrible things could happen, and they weren't even rare
or uncommon, and I think in the end for the first ten years or so I never could write it because I was
just too angry, and I wasn't able to capture the complexity of the world. I wanted the book to be
funny. I wanted the book to be unsentimental. After meeting Esther, I felt very differently about
whether a short life could be a rich life.
GR: Did you think that it couldn't?
JG: I guess I'd never quite imagined it in that way before I met Esther. She lived a very full and rich
and good life despite dying at 16. Not to acknowledge the goodness and richness of that life would be
a disservice to her.
GR: Part of the challenge of writing about a kid with cancer, especially when the book
is inspired by an actual kid with actual cancer, is not making that kid into a hero just
for being sick. That's clearly something you struggle with and your characters struggle
with, but in the end Hazel and Augustus are special, Esther Earl seems specialwhat

makes them that?

JG: Well, all good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic,
likeGatsby. There's always a measure of uncertainty in the heroic journey. Even in Huckleberry
Finnthere was an ambiguity to the heroism of the protagonist's journey, and I certainly didn't want
to argue that Hazel and Gus aren't heroic, because I wanted them to be heroes. I wanted them to be
heroes not because they were sick but because they made difficult choices. Gus especially is so
obsessed with what the hero's journey is, but I didn't want him to get the kind of hero's journey that
he wanted, because the vast majority of us don't.
GR: Is that something you were obsessed with?
JG: I've never been. I probably did think about it a lot when I was younger, and then I lost interest
because I had to pay the mortgage and take care of my kid, but it interests me as a writerhow we
imagine our heroes affects our social structure.
GR: How would we ideally imagine our heroes?
JG: Let's imagine a world where we don't celebrate Snooki and the Kardashians. There are any
number of nerdy cool people in the world. If we restructure things to see that the hero's journey is a
degree in astrophysics rather than a journey to star in a reality show, that's a better world. One of the
jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very
specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our
everyday lives.
GR: But don't you think that nerd heroes are very much celebrated today?
JG: Let's be honest about why that is: the rise of the Internet, the niche-ification of the Internet. We
don't mock people celebrating those things, so it's possible to have nerd heroes. They existed in the
past, like Mr. Wizard, but they tended to be dehumanized and emasculated, they tended to have their
humanness removed.
If we're really restructuring our ideas of heroism, then we get a world where that knowledge is widely
sought not to achieve as in a physics degree but just as part of being a well-rounded human.
GR: Did having a son change the way you were able to write this book? A really
significant piece of it is about the parents and the ways that they relate to kid world, in
a way that hasn't happened in your other books.
JG: Becoming a father made me much more interested in the parent character in my novels. I've
never found parents that interesting. I think when you're 16, if you have good parents, they generally
just fade in the background. I had great parents, and because they were great, I thought very little
about them in high school.
The nature of the love between a parent and child really is literally stronger than death. As long as
either person in that relationship is alive, that relationship is still alive.
GR: In a way it seems like one of the first problems a YA writer has to solve is how to
find some freedom for the characters. Most of the time people do it by getting rid of the
parents somehow, but in this one the parents are so present but also very permissive.
Is this something you observed a lot in parents of sick children?
JG: I knew from the beginning that Hazel and Gus were in an unusual position, in that they would be
more reliant on an adult. But they also make pretty mature decisions, and their parents empower

them to because they're a little less concerned about the long-term. They want their kids to have the
biggest life that they can have.
GR: Goodreads member Stephanie Stickley asks, "One thing that really struck me
about The Fault in Our Stars was its compassionate portrayal of the parents. I wonder
what feedback Green's gotten from people who have experienced the pain of the
families in his book.
JG: I just went out to dinner with a group of women who have lost kids to cancer or have kids who
are living with cancer. It was really interesting to talk with them. In many of their cases the kids were
much younger. They were very generous and supportive readers and very, very kind to say I got some
things right. It means a lot to me to read letters from kids who have cancer or other serious illnesses
that's been the biggest surprise.
GR: You didn't think they would like it?
JG: I thought a lot of sick kids would dislike it, maybe. It's a very bold and strange thing to do as a
healthy 34-year-old man, to publish a book [written in the voice of] a 16-year-old girl. I knew the
book would have a nice first week because of presales, but I never, never in my life imagined this.
The subject matter itself is such a huge hurdle, I can never imagine a situation where someone would
pitch this to me and I would want to read it. I thought its commercial potential was very limited.
GR: But don't teens love sad books?
JG: I read a lot of sad books when I was a kid, when I was between 12 and 14, but frankly the vast
majority of the people are adults.
GR: Why do you think that is?
JG: Well, I'd like to think it's because it's good! My hope is that it's because the adult characters are
well drawn and because with a good book, genre distinctions matter less. I think we crave
unironized, unsentimental emotion because it's also very hard to come by. We have a lot of ironic
stories, a lot of sentimental stories. I wanted to not use irony as a tool to create distance, but still to
create something that stripped away all sentiment.
GR: When Hazel and her dad talk about the afterlife, he says, "I believe the universe
wants to be noticed" and that the universe "enjoys its elegance being observed." Tell
me about this idea. Did you actually have a professor say this? And do you think this is
true, or do you think the universe could basically not care less?
JG: That idea comes from a YouTuber named Vi Hartshe's very successful and famous on
YouTube. We were having a conversation, and she made the argument. Well, she would actually say
she wasn'tmaking it because she believes in a truly cold and indifferent universe, but that's how I
interpret her argument: The universe is biased toward consciousness because the universe wants to
be noticed. It's a way into existential hope that doesn't have too much clich wrapped around it.
GR: That's true of people, too. People just want to be seen.
JG: Yeah, that was intentional.
GR: Is that what you want?
JG: No, I feel adequately observed. But I have felt that way, and I think that it's a universal urge to
have our pain not be felt alone and to have our joys not be felt alone.

GR: So this book was inspired by a girl with cancer, and in the book a girl with cancer
meets her favorite author and he's a huge disappointment, but in real life you and
Esther Earl became friendswhat kind of weird reverse, inverse, perverse psychology
is that?
JG: Well, there's a couple things going on. I never expected this would be read by very many people
who didn't know me through the Internet. I wanted to play with their expectations. Also, I wanted to
think about the relationship between the people who create the things we love and the things
themselves, and our instinct to conflate the two even though the people are often at least as flawed as
we are.
GR: Do you feel like your readers have expectations of you that you haven't been able
to fulfill?
JG: Oh, yes. I feel bad that I can't talk to all of them on the phone, I can't even properly e-mail all of
them back. That it's not OK if they come to my houseyou laugh, but they dothey don't know that I
have very bad social anxiety, and that's kind of terrifying for me. You know, I was a fan of Kurt
Vonnegut, and I knew he was not the best person, but I still thought he had it all figured out, I
thought he had the best possible life.
GR: In some ways The Fault in Our Stars is a warning against meeting your heroes.
Have you met any of yours in real life?
JG: I very briefly met Jeffrey Eugenides and Sherman Alexie. And I've become very good friends
withM.T. Anderson (Feed, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing) and Markus Zusak, who
wrote The Book Thief.
GR: And were any of them terrible disappointments?
JG: No, they were all very nice. Though I wouldn't tell you if they weren't.
GR: You've said that Hazel's relationship to the fictional author Peter Van Houten's An
Imperial Affliction is similar to yours with Infinite Jest. Tell me about your experience
with that book.
JG: I read it when I was a freshman in college. I read it twice that year.
GR: Twice? Most people are lying when they say they've read the whole thing even
once!
JG: The language is so fresh and alive and vividly observed that I never found it a chore. As young
readers we're much more comfortable with not knowing what the hell is going on. It was hugely
important to me, and there were times when I felt like I was almost reading scripture, prophecy, not
just great fiction but something tremendously relevant to my life on a minute-by-minute basis. It's
still deeply relevant, not just to how I think about fiction but how I approach the world every
morning.
His idea that the central obligation of the human being is to be observant, to respond to what to you
see empathically and compassionately, which is at the center of all of his work really, that idea is a
guiding principle in my life.
GR: The universe just wants to be observed.

JG: Right.
GR: In this story was retaining a sense of hope important to you?
JG: I think all true stories are hopeful stories. I don't think there's any room for narcissism among
humans, I think it's wrong. Sorry, I meant nihilism. I think it's a mistake. I don't see any point in
nihilism...just as I suppose the nihilist sees no point in everything else.
GR: Let's talk about your influences. To me, John Green World feels kind of like
Holden Caulfield caught reading an issue of Sassy Magazine, but that's all from so
long ago. How do you keep your characters feeling contemporary?
JG: I'm interested in Internet cultures. I'm interested in what the teenagers who drive the Internet
culture are passionate about. I follow their leadthey go to tumblr, I go to tumblr. What really
interests me is that they're passionate about utilizing the conventions and tools of the Internet that
we adults associate with detachment and disengagement for intelligent ends. Like repurposing
Honey Boo Boo animated GIFs and making her talk about macroecon and quoting John Maynard
Keynes. Subtly repurposing things that we associate with distractions.
GR: Do you have any writing rituals? Anything you do to get yourself in the mood?
JG: The only thing I do is I change my keyboard between every book. I usually shop around. I'm very
passionate about the physical feel of pressing the keys. It's got to have the right springiness. I tend to
find the built-in keys very unsatisfying, the keys are low-profile and don't really do anythingI want
it to feel like I'm typing.
GR: What are you reading right now?
JG: I'm really trying to finish Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel. I've been reading it for a couple of weeks
already, it's really good but so long!
GR: And which vlogs are you watching?
JG: Well, I'm working on educational videos with YouTube right now, so a lot of them are
educational. I watch Minute Physics, I like Vi Hart a lot. Also CGP Greyhe does these weird
animations that explain the way things work.
GR: Besides Infinite Jest, is there a book that really influenced you?
JG: Growing up in Orlando, I had a very close relationship with Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes
Were Watching God. I think we had to read her for school in fifth grade, and I really liked it and
sought out more.
GR: A question along those lines from Goodreads member Maddison: "What is the
book you can read again and again and never get tired of?"
JG: Gatsby. I don't get tired of it, ever.
GR: Final question: What will you do when your son grows up and falls in love with a
manic pixie dream girl?
JG: Ha! I will get him Looking for Alaska and tell him this idea that a human being is more than a
human being is a mistaken idea and in the end does no service either to him or the person he's
imagining. That trope has become so deeply embedded in American culture, and as someone who

writes about young people falling in love, I feel like I can't ignore it, but I try to make it clear that life
works best when we think of people as people.