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Saturday, May 17, 2014
John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars"/The New Yorker & CBS Sunday Morning Profiles/Nerdfighters
Scroll down for coverage on CBS Sunday Morning, June 1, 2014, AND from The New Yorker.
Wall Street Journal, Friday, May 16, 2014, ARENA section, Front Page, Page D1:
Headline reads: "John Green and His Nerdfighters Are Upending the Summer Blockbuster Model"
"With the new movie 'The Fault in Our Stars,' John Green is expanding his digital fan base to the mainstream"
John Green Mike McGregor for The Wall Street Journal, Grooming by Nickee David
It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment when John Green went from being famous on the Internet to being just plain famous.
It might have happened in late June, 2011, when massive online preorders for his novel, "The Fault in Our Stars," propelled the book to No. 1 on Amazon and Barnes and Noble,BKS +1.85% six months ahead of its release date and before Mr. Green had even finished writing it.
Or it could have been two weeks ago, at the first public screening of "The Fault in Our Stars," a movie based on Mr. Green's novel about two teenagers with cancer. When he took the stage at a theater in Chelsea after the credits rolled, Mr. Green drew more fervent screams of "I love you!" than the film's stars, Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort. Mr. Green finally chastised the crowd into temporary silence: "We can't do the awesome Q and A part unless you let us talk," he said.
John Green, "The Fault In Our Stars" author, is changing the whole genre of young adult fiction, WSJ's Alexandra Alter reports on Lunch Break. Photo: Getty.
Whenever the shift from Web fame to mega stardom occurred, Mr. Green, 36, is reeling from the effects. As a self-described hypochondriac who suffers from anxiety, Mr. Green says he avoids making physical contact with strangers and feels unsettled by the massive crowds he has been drawing during a nationwide tour to promote "The Fault in Our Stars" movie, which comes out June 6. Fans routinely show up at his house in Indianapolis. At a recent screening for fans at a mall in Miami, some 5,000 people turned out and the event was shut down early due to safety concerns. And he is struggling to keep up with his day job—not writing novels, but making online videos about art, literature, science and history. His shows have drawn 8.6 million subscribers on YouTube, and have been viewed more than 1.6 billion times.
Mr. Green still insists that he's better known for his hammy, enthusiastic YouTube persona—his catch phrase is "Don't forget to be awesome"—than for his novels.
Based on the novel by John Green, 'The Fault in Our Stars' is shaping up to be one of the most anticipated films of the summer. Twentieth Century Fox
"Ninety percent of people who approach me in Target or wherever know me from "Crash Course," Mr. Green said during a recent interview at his office in Indianapolis, referring to one of his popular YouTube shows about literature and humanities.
Clearly, that is about to change. "The Fault in Our Stars," which has more than nine million copies in print world-wide, has gone from being a surprise hit to a crossover phenomenon that is redefining notions of what works in the fickle young-adult market. With the movie adaptation, which is shaping up to be one of the most anticipated films of the summer, Mr. Green is becoming an even more potent force in the publishing industry. Four of his novels are in the top 10 on the New York TimesNYT +0.67% young-adult best-seller list, as readers who pick up "The Fault in Our Stars" tear through his previous books. His five books now have 13.5 million copies in print in North America. His novel, "Paper Towns," a quirky mystery about a group of high-school friends who search for a missing classmate, is also being adapted into a feature film.
Some credit him with ushering in a new golden era for contemporary, realistic, literary teen fiction, following more than a decade of dominance by books about young wizards, sparkly vampires and dystopia. A blurb or TwitterTWTR -1.56% endorsement from Mr. Green can ricochet around the Internet and boost sales, an effect book bloggers call "the John Green bump." He's thrown his weight behind several young-adult authors who write realistic novels and are now regarded as rising stars, including Rainbow Rowell, E. Lockhart, and A.S. King.
"We had the big paranormal fantasy trend with "Twilight" and the big dystopian trend with "The Hunger Games," and now the trend is a return to normalcy," said literary agent Michael Bourret of Dystel & Goderich Literary Management. "There's a contemporary realistic trend afoot with stories set in the real world, about real teens."
Mr. Green's success still scarcely rates next to blockbuster series like "The Hunger Games," which has more than 65 million copies in print, or Harry Potter, which has sold more than 450 million copies world-wide. And realistic young-adult fiction has been popular and culturally significant since the days of Judy Blume. But literary agents and publishers say Mr. Green's rapid rise has sparked new interest in literary realism aimed at young readers, and paved the way for the sub genre to flourish again.
John Green on the set of 'The Fault in Our Stars' movie. Twentieth Century Fox
"Contemporary realistic is something all editors are telling agents, I need more of it, I want more of it," said Zareen Jaffery, executive editor of Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers. "What I really like about what people are calling 'the John Green effect' is that there's more of an interest in authentic, genuine, relatable characters."
The enthusiasm for non-fantastical fare is spilling over into Hollywood, where "The Fault in Our Stars" has emerged as a new model for low-risk, high-reward teen blockbusters. The film, which was made for $12 million, is ushering in a crop of other realistic young-adult adaptations, like Gayle Forman's bestseller "If I Stay," about a teenage cellist who's in a coma. DreamWorksDWA +4.39% recently optioned "Eleanor & Park," Rainbow Rowell's quirky novel about two misfit teens and their unlikely romance.
As his profile and influence continues to grow, Mr. Green is wary of straying too far from his core fan community of "Nerdfighters," the passionate devotees who have followed him from the start of his YouTube career seven years ago and helped send him to the top of the best-seller list. He says he was shocked recently to see someone on Twitter asking if hard-core fans of "The Fault in Our Stars" had a name for themselves, in the way "Twilight" fans are called "Twihards." He assumed fans of the movie would be called Nerdfighters. Instead, Fox 2000 coined a new moniker for the fandom in its online promotions: "Fault Fanatics."
Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern in 'The Fault in Our Stars' Twentieth Century Fox
Mr. Green's office in Indianapolis is a sort of meandering shrine to "Nerdfighteria." The walls are cluttered with fan art. Near the reception area, there's a Renaissance-style portrait of Mr. Green with his wife and their son, all holding their hands in the Nerdfighter salute (arms crossed, fingers spread into V's). Another wall bears a large portrait of Mr. Green and his younger brother, Hank, that upon closer inspection turns out to be a collage made up of thousands of photographs of fans in the Nerdfighter pose, which Hank made and gave John for his birthday in 2012. At the center of the office is the arcade videogame machine that gave the movement its name. The game is called "Aero Fighters," but Mr. Green originally mistook the cursive wording for "Nerdfighters."
The space has the bustling, laid-back air of a startup. There is a studio with several sets, where Mr. Green shoots his YouTube shows. There are several offices for producers, writers and directors. Mr. Green's sunny office, where he often writes in the morning in his tan La-Z-Boy, LZB +1.73% has a spare, institutional feel compared with the controlled chaos of the rest of the place. Mr. Green's wife, Sarah Urist Green, has an office down the hall from him. The couple moved to Indianapolis seven years ago so that Ms. Green could work as a curator at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and decided to stay. She left the museum last fall to co-host the do-it-yourself art show "The Art Assignment," a collaboration with PBS Digital Studios, with Mr. Green.
They now have two children, Henry, age 4, and Alice, who is almost 1, and a West Highland white terrier named Fireball Wilson "Willy" Roberts, who makes occasional cameos in Mr. Green's videos. Mr. Green says Indianapolis has been good for his career. "I like working with these people, and they live here," Mr. Green says. "Living here is good for my writing. It's a very American city, in the best ways and the worst ways."
With a small staff of five writers, editors, directors, and producers, Mr. Green spends most days making his punchy Web videos. "Crash Course" is a jokey, animation-heavy show that covers history, science and literature. "Vlogbrothers," his goofy, warm video correspondence with his younger brother, Hank, and their two million subscribers, covers everything from Justin Bieber to conflicts in the Central African Republic and Ukraine. "Mental Floss," a co-production with the trivia magazine and website, features Mr. Green delivering a rapid-fire flood of weird facts on such diverse subjects as dogs, quirky museums and American presidents.
Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort Twentieth Century Fox
On a recent morning, Mr. Green was cracking jokes in front of a camera at 10 a.m. He was filming several back-to-back episodes of "Mental Floss" so that there would be fresh material to air while he was away touring the country with the stars and director of the film. Though Mr. Green affects an intimate, off-the-cuff, "here we are hanging out in my living room" persona, there's nothing spontaneous or casual about his approach. Working from a script, he delivered most of the lines three or four times before he was satisfied, and edited and tweaked the jokes in between takes.
When the director, Mark Olsen, moved the camera closer for a tighter shot, Mr. Green straightened up in his seat. "It emphasizes my belly. Can you keep it solar plexus up?" he said, gesturing to his chest.
"You're the only one who notices that," Mr. Olsen said.
"That's not true!" Mr. Green said. "I read the comments. They say 'John Green is pear shaped.'"
Mr. Green's attentiveness toward his fans and his careful cultivation of his image has helped him expand his online empire, which all sprang from video messages that Mr. Green and his brother started making seven years ago.
Since then, the Greens's operation has swelled to 25 employees. They now produce 11 shows—with sponsors like G.E., Intel and Audible, and star in six of them. In 2010, the Greens started VidCon, a conference for online-video creators and fans, which is expected to draw some 17,000 paying attendees this June, up from 1,400 the first year. They also have a charity organization called the Foundation to Decrease Worldsuck, and a for-profit merchandise company, DFTBA Records, which sells T-shirts and fan-designed art and grossed $2.3 million last year. (More than a million was paid to the artists). The bulk of the profit from merchandise sales, YouTube advertising and sponsorships has been reinvested in new productions and staff, according to Hank Green.
"It's been incredible to follow his career and how he approaches the whole entrepreneurial process of being a writer and a public persona," said novelist Daniel Alarcón, who's been a friend of Mr. Green's since high school and often spars with him in their fantasy soccer league. "Early on, he was very attuned to different ways of narrative with the whole video blog thing, and he was able to very quickly recognize its potential as not just story telling but community building."
Until now, Mr. Green's publishing career and his Web-video business have grown hand-in-hand, with a significant overlap between his readers and his viewers. But as the movie of "The Fault in Our Stars" draws a much larger, and increasingly adult audience to the book, the John Green demographic is rapidly changing. And lately, Mr. Green has found himself torn between his two roles.
"Nononononononono," he said in frustration during a break between filming "Mental Floss" episodes, as he checked his email on his phone. There was a message from the marketing department at Fox, asking if he could travel to another promotional event for the film. Mr. Green said that he needed to film his educational show "Crash Course" on the day of the event. "They don't understand that this is my job," he said.
Mr. Green was born in Indianapolis and grew up in Orlando, Fla., where his father was the executive director of the state's Nature Conservancy and his mother was a community organizer. He grew up reading "girl books" like Nancy Drew, he says. But for much of his youth, he felt alienated and anxious. "In retrospect, I was probably having some mental-health problems," he says. He and Hank weren't close as kids, and he admits to stealing his younger brother's allowance money to buy cigarettes. He elected to go to Indian Springs School, a boarding school in Alabama, when he was 15. He came in second place twice for the school's creative-writing prize, behind his classmate, Mr. Alarcón. The school served as the setting for Mr. Green's 2005 debut novel, "Looking for Alaska."
Mr. Green wrote throughout his youth but never saw it as a viable career. At Kenyon College, he studied early Islamic history. He started attending an Episcopal church and considered entering the priesthood. He changed his mind one day when he was with a priest, who had become his mentor and was ordering candles from a catalog to restock the congregation's candle supply. "I remember being like, 'Oh, I have been romanticizing this job."
After college, he worked as a student chaplain in a children's hospital for a few months, where he counseled dying children and their families. He moved to Chicago and planned to go to divinity school. But he wavered and instead found a job at Booklist, a book-review magazine, where an editor, Ilene Cooper, encouraged him to write and publish his fiction. She worked with him on the draft of his first novel for more than three years. Dutton Juvenile, a Penguin imprint, bought "Looking for Alaska" for $8,000, and published it in 2005.
"Looking for Alaska," a semi-autobiographical novel about a smart, sensitive boarding school student who gets bullied, won the Printz Award, young-adult literature's highest prize. But it sold modestly, and didn't become a best-seller until seven years after it was published, when "The Fault in Our Stars" catapulted Mr. Green to mainstream fame. He published three other novels with Dutton, including "An Abundance of Katherines" and "Paper Towns." With his clever, precocious young narrators and his distinct, idiosyncratic prose style, Mr. Green was instantly celebrated as a sharp new talent.
"The Fault in Our Stars" was a story that he struggled with from the beginning of his career. He'd been trying to write about children with cancer ever since his time at the children's hospital. "I spent eight years trying to write it, and the voice was always bad," he said.
The story cracked open when he settled on the clever, sardonic voice of his heroine, Hazel, a teenager with terminal thyroid cancer. He based Hazel partly on Esther Earl, a Nerdfighter who became friends with Mr. Green five years ago. Ms. Earl died of thyroid cancer in 2010, at age 16. "In the final days of her life, she was as funny, open, alive, angry, and cynical as she had ever been," Mr. Green said.
Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort in a scene from 'The Fault in Our Stars' Twentieth Century Fox
In the novel, Hazel falls in love with Augustus Waters, a 17-year-old cancer survivor, after meeting him in a support group. The story takes a dramatic, unexpected turn when Augustus and Hazel fly from Indianapolis to Amsterdam to track down Hazel's favorite novelist so that he can tell them what happens to the characters in his book, which ends midsentence.
Mr. Green's agent, Jodi Reamer, said she knew when she read the manuscript that this would be the book that launched Mr. Green as a blockbuster author. "It had fully fleshed-out adult characters that would bring that crossover adult audience, and there were so many more mature and complex themes," she said. "I knew they could sell the hell out of it."
The book made its debut at No. 1 and has spent 121 weeks on the best-seller list.
Mr. Green was reluctant to make a movie based on the book at first, certain that any film would be sappy and would whitewash the story's complexity. When his Hollywood agent said she wanted to send the book to film scouts and producers, Mr. Green said no.
"I didn't want to be in a meeting discussing whether the girl in the movie is going to have a tube in her nose, and not to have any control over that, or worse yet, not to be invited to that meeting," he said.
Then Wyck Godfrey, one of the producers of the "Twilight" films, called and asked for a meeting. He promised Mr. Green that he would make an unsentimental movie that was true to the book's portrayal of Hazel's illness, and that the star would wear an oxygen tube. Mr. Green was heavily involved in the production from the start. He sat through auditions and approved casting Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort as Hazel and Augustus, and spent weeks on the set in Pittsburgh and Amsterdam. Fox encouraged him to engage his fans early on by posting photos and video from the set on Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr and to his 2.3 million Twitter followers, a PR strategy that has paid off. The trailer for the film has been viewed more than 17 million times on YouTube.
"The fans saw that John was invested and John was happy with it, and it really went a long way toward easing any fears John's fan base had about the movie," said Erin Berger, executive director of marketing at Penguin Young Readers.
Right now, Mr. Green is facing pressure from readers to deliver more. When he took the stage after the New York screening, a fan asked him how far along he was in his next book, and if he had a release date in mind.
"I was thinking of doing a sequel to 'The Fault in Our Stars'," he said, as the crowd erupted into screams. Mr. Green looked momentarily stricken at the response. "Oh God, that was a joke," he said.
Corrections & Amplifications
John Green went to boarding school when he was 15. An earlier version of this article said he went to boarding school when he was 11.
Countless young readers are starstruck by the works of John Green. Our friend David Pogue of Yahoo can explain why:
His videos on YouTube have been viewed 1.5 billion times. His latest book has been a New York Times fiction for 123 weeks. His live appearances sell out in minutes . . . .and you've probably never heard of him.
But your teenager probably has.
Author John Green.
CBS NEWS
His name is John Green. Thirty-six, married, father of two, and cult hero to millions of young people. He's written four books, including his biggest bestseller, "The Fault in Our Stars." The movie version is about to open.
Green showed Pogue the screening room where he saw the movie with his wife, Sarah. "It was just the two of us alone in the theater and it was so romantic."
"And what was your reaction? Is it the same as a normal movie-goer's?" asked Pogue.
"No, no, 'cause I started crying during the opening credits!" he laughed.
Green's own story began in Orlando, Florida. He said as a kid he was "kind of a rule-breaker, kind of trouble. I feel bad, I want to have been ... But it's it's nice for me to draw on a lot, actually, because I was a troubled kid.
"I was anxious and depressive and I felt very socially isolated at times, but I was still intellectually curious."
Then came Kenyon College, a brief enrollment at divinity school, and a job at a children's hospital in Chicago, as student chaplain.
"When I was at the hospital, I met all of these young people who, yes, they were sick, but they were also many other things. They were funny and angry and sad, and they had all of the emotions that any other human has, all the desire, all the wishes. And that was what really resonated with me."
Green spent years trying to turn his hospital experience into a book. In the meantime, he published three other novels.
Then, in 2008, he met Esther Earl, a fellow YouTube videomaker who had thyroid cancer -- met her, befriended her, and was changed by her.
She died in 2010.
"It's not fair that Esther died," said Green. "I am angry that she was sick. I am angry that she suffered as long as she did, but her life had meaning. And understanding that was very important to me finally being able to write this story."
That story is "The Fault in Our Stars." It's a funny and unsentimental book about two teenagers who meet in a cancer support group and fall in love. The book became a sensation, as Pogue's panel of hard-core Green fans made clear.
Pogue asked, "So, if you're trying to explain to an adult about 'The Fault in Our Stars' and why you love it, isn't the reaction going to be, 'But dude, it's a cancer book - I' not going to read that'?"
"It's not about cancer" was their reply.
"It's part of the book, but it's not what it's about," said one fan. "It's really just this love story between two normal teenagers that just so happen to have a really terrible disease."
Green has sold over 7 million copies of the book. But millions of fans know him not just as John Green, author; they also know him as John Green, YouTube hero.
In 2007, he and his brother, Hank, began exchanging public video messages as a way of keeping in touch -- and they've never stopped.
Fans of John and Hank have become a tightly-knit community, with their own inside jokes. For starters, they call themselves Nerdfighters. Seamus, on our panel, showed off his Nerdfighter tattoo.
And then there's the acronym, DFTBA: "Don't Forget To Be Awesome."
And yes, there's a Nerdfighter hand sign.
The Nerdfighters insist that they are not a cult. But the Green brothers do motivate their followers to take action -- for charity.
"We have this big project called the Project for Awesome, which is kind of a 48-hour-long YouTube telethon every year," said Green. "This year, I think we raised about $800,000."
You can find the occasional detractor -- he's been accused of romanticizing illness. But most people have nothing but nice things to say about his writing, including the stars of the movie.
"I sat down with Fox and I was like, 'Listen. I would love to audition for Hazel,'" said Shailene Woodley. "If I'm right for the role, I'm right for the role. If I'm not, then that's fine -- somebody else is better. But you need to, like, please make this movie!"
Pogue asked, "Do you feel any greater pressure when you show up on this set, knowing that you're sustaining the hopes and dreams of all these people who don't want you to mess up their book?"
"We didn't need anybody else's pressure," said Laura Dern, "because we already -- each of us -- were the obsessed fan the minute we found the book.'"
A movie of another Green novel, "Paper Towns," is already in the works.
Green gives the credit not to his own talent-but to his readers.
Pogue said, "We are led to believe that teenagers have their faces behind screens, they're anti-social now, they don't care about the world."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just not true," Green replied. "I mean, that's what our parents said about us. That's what their parents said about them. It's always been untrue. It's still untrue.
"Yes, they are learning in different ways, but they are still learning, they are still reading, they are still thoughtful, and I am inspired every day by their intellectual curiosity."
Green wanted to write “an unsentimental cancer novel” that offered “some basis for hope.” Illustration by Bartosz Kosowski.
In late 2006, the writer John Green came up with the idea of communicating with his brother, Hank, for a year solely through videos posted to YouTube. The project wasn’t quite as extreme as it sounds. John, who was then twenty-nine, and Hank, who was three years younger, saw each other about once a year, at their parents’ house, and they typically went several years between phone calls. They communicated mainly through instant messaging.
Hank was living in Missoula, where he’d started a Web site about green technology. John was living on the Upper West Side while his wife, Sarah Urist Green, completed a graduate degree in art history at Columbia. He had published two young-adult novels, “Looking for Alaska,” in 2005, and “An Abundance of Katherines,” in 2006, and was working on a third. Like the best realistic Y.A. books, and like “The Catcher in the Rye”—a novel that today would almost certainly be marketed as Y.A.—Green’s books were narrated in a clever, confiding voice. His protagonists were sweetly intellectual teen-age boys smitten with complicated, charismatic girls. Although the books were funny, their story lines propelled by spontaneous road trips and outrageous pranks, they displayed a youthfully insatiable appetite for big questions: What is an honorable life? How do we wrest meaning from the unexpected death of someone close to us? What do we do when we realize that we’re not as special as we thought we were?
Green was more forgiving toward adults than Salinger was, but he shared Salinger’s conviction that they underestimate the emotional depth of adolescents. Green told me, “I love the intensity teen-agers bring not just to first love but also to the first time you’re grappling with grief, at least as a sovereign being—the first time you’re taking on why people suffer and whether there’s meaning in life, and whether meaning is constructed or derived. Teen-agers feel that what you conclude about those questions is going to matter. And they’re dead right. It matters for adults, too, but we’ve almost taken too much power away from ourselves. We don’t acknowledge on a daily basis how much it matters.”
Y.A. novels are peculiarly well suited to consideration of ethical matters. It seems natural when a high schooler like Miles Halter, of “Looking for Alaska,” is depicted struggling to write essays on topics like “What is the most important question human beings must answer?” Miles is equally preoccupied with girls and with collecting the dying words of famous people. (His favorite: Rabelais’s “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.”) Though “Looking for Alaska” sold modestly, it won the Michael L. Printz Award, the American Library Association’s honor for best Y.A. book of the year. At the time, Green was living in Chicago, working at the association’s magazine, Booklist, where he had reviewed books in a peculiar constellation of subjects: conjoined twins, boxing, and theology. Upon graduating from Kenyon College, in 2000, Green had thought of going to divinity school, and he worked for six months as an apprentice chaplain at a children’s hospital in Columbus. He found the experience almost too sad to bear, and decided that such a life was not for him. Still, he remained deeply interested in spiritual matters, with one exception: “Is there a God?” struck him as “one of the least interesting questions.”
After “Alaska” won the prize, Green quit his day job. He got more writing done, but he missed the intellectual camaraderie that he’d always had with his peers. The YouTube project was, in part, an attempt to fill that void. (It was also a smart marketing stunt, though Green could not have predicted how smart.) Hank had reservations about becoming the repository for John’s excess energy. He told me, “I found John exciting and smart and interesting but also a little dramatic. He gets frustrated easily. He’s anxious. Hypochondriacal.” At the same time, he said, “John, for me, has always been the baseline of what was cool and valuable and important. If he liked a band, I’d buy all of their CDs and memorize them and become a bigger fan than he ever was.”
In 2006, YouTube was entering its second year, and people were starting to post video diaries, which, in their more theatrical moments, looked like performance art staged in somebody’s basement. John Green was a fan of several such series, especially “The Show with Zefrank,” which enlisted viewers in quirky projects, such as dressing up their vacuum cleaners as people. Hank shared John’s enthusiasm for these experiments, and it trumped any hesitations that he had. “We really believed in the importance of online video as a cultural form,” Hank said.
The Greens started posting videos several times a week, under the name the Vlogbrothers. The project was less a conversation than an extended form of parallel play. They shared personal stories—John confessed that the only sports trophy he ever got was made by his parents, and bore the inscription “All-Star in Our Hearts”—but mainly they exchanged ideas. The brothers had signature preoccupations, which they discussed with excitable urgency, talking into the camera at tremendous speed. John discussed books, existential anxiety, and pizza; Hank was into science, math, and corn dogs. John invented a highly undignified “happy dance”; Hank wrote and performed songs, many of them about Harry Potter. The tone of their monologues ranged from goofily informative (how giraffes have sex) to wonkish (“Why Are American Health-Care Costs So High?”). Many posts dispensed adult wisdom, but in a reassuringly modern way. In a post advising boys on how to charm a girl, John jokingly said, “Become a puppy. A kitten would also be acceptable or, possibly, a sneezy panda”—an allusion to a popular clip on YouTube. But he also said, “If you can, see girls as, like, people, instead of pathways to kissing and/or salvation.”
The Greens’ vlogs were filled with in-jokes and code words that rewarded dedicated viewing. “D.F.T.B.A.” stood for “Don’t Forget to Be Awesome,” and John referred to his wife as “the Yeti,” because she was much talked about but—by her choice—never seen on camera. When a brother broke a rule that they’d established, such as posting a video longer than four minutes, the other brother could impose a punishment. Hank once had to spend fifteen consecutive hours in a Target; John had to eat a generous helping of “slobber carrots.” (His toddler, Henry, provided the slobber.)
In February, 2007, John was stuck at the Savannah airport, and he spotted an arcade game called Aero Fighters. He initially misread the name as “Nerdfighters,” and later, in a video, he started riffing: what if Nerdfighters were a real game? As he put it, “The band geek would be, like, ‘I will destroy your ears with my tuba!’ And the theatre guy would be, like, ‘I am an expert at sword fighting!’ And the English nerd would be, like, ‘Hmm, I know a lot of Shakespeare quotes!’ ” Why did people still pick on nerds, anyway? Who did the popular guys have on their side—George W. Bush and Tom Brady? Green declared, “I raise you an Abraham Lincoln and a Franklin Delano Roosevelt and . . . an Isaac Newton, a William Shakespeare, a Blaise Pascal, an Albert Einstein, an Immanuel Kant, an Aristotle, a Jane Austen, a Bill Gates, a Mahatma Gandhi, a Nelson Mandela, and all four Beatles. We win.”
Fans loved the term “nerdfighter” and started using it to identify themselves. Initially, Green talked about nerdfighters with a hostile edge: they stood against the popular people. But the word soon took on a more celebratory, inclusive cast. Nerdfighters weren’t against anything; they were simply proud to immerse themselves in interests that others might find geeky or arcane. Indeed, the nerdfighter community is strikingly civil and constructive for an Internet subculture. Through an annual charity event, the Project for Awesome, nerdfighters have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for one another’s favorite causes. Their comment sections, on YouTube and elsewhere, are filled with earnest suggestions for further reading and mock complaints that Green has made them care about a distant war that they’d been ignoring. Rosianna Halse Rojas, a pioneering nerdfighter, recalls the moment the concept caught on. “It was like the formation of a nation,” she told me. “Only we weren’t fighting anybody to do it.”
On June 6th, Twentieth Century Fox releases “The Fault in Our Stars,” the movie version of John Green’s wildly successful 2012 novel about teen-agers with cancer. “T.F.I.O.S.,” as fans call it, has been on a Times best-seller list for a hundred and twenty-four consecutive weeks, and has spent forty-three weeks as the No. 1 Y.A. book. The trailer for the movie, which stars Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, has been viewed nearly twenty million times.
Publishing executives talk about successful books as if they were lightning strikes, but the popularity of “The Fault in Our Stars” was no accident. Nerdfighters, who by then numbered in the millions, were evangelical about it, tucking notes into copies of the book and encouraging readers to join their movement. In fact, “The Fault in Our Stars” reached the No. 1 position on Amazon six months before it was published, when Green announced its title online. Many authors do pre-publication publicity, but Green did extra credit: he signed the entire first printing—a hundred and fifty thousand copies—which took ten weeks and necessitated physical therapy for his shoulder.
In recent years, whenever Green has appeared at a book signing he has been greeted by hundreds, often thousands, of screaming fans, mostly teen-age girls. The weirdness of this is hard to overstate. Green is a writer, and his books are not about sexy vampires. “Stars” is a novel about young people with a deadly disease; its title is taken from Shakespeare, and it has an uncompromising ending. In the movie, as in the book, the lead character, Hazel Lancaster, wears an oxygen tube in her nose. Green did not write the film’s script, but he was an informal consultant, and it was important to him that the film retain this detail: “It flies in the face of the notion that romance, particularly about teen-agers, has to be straightforwardly ‘aspirational,’ as they always say.”
Green, now thirty-six, is thin and tall, with light-brown hair that shifts around like a haystack in a stiff wind; he often rakes his hands through it, causing random clumps to stand up straight. He has the charm of the middle-school teacher you secretly thought was cute, but he is no match for Elgort, the twenty-year-old who plays Hazel’s romantic interest, Augustus Waters. I attended a preview of the movie in Manhattan this spring. Thousands of fans had lined up for free tickets, and, after the screening, they screamed when Elgort strode down the aisle for a Q. & A. But they screamed louder for Green. “We love you, John!” they called out. When Green told the crowd that, though he was proud of the movie, it wasn’t his movie, someone shouted, “But it’s your plot, John!”—which marked the first time I’d ever heard heckling about the nature of authorship. One questioner, who had to apologize for hyperventilating as she spoke, asked the five actors onstage to name their favorite lines from the book. Woodley was partial to “I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, and then all at once”; Elgort cited “The world is not a wish-granting factory.” I had never watched a movie in a theatre where there was mass crying—not discreet nose-blowing, or stifled sniffles, but wracking sobs. (I was not immune.)
Green told me that he had loved and hated Erich Segal’s “Love Story” when he read it in high school, and that he had wanted to write “an unsentimental cancer novel.” A story about dying teen-agers would be too wrenching, he decided, if it weren’t also romantic, and funny in a way that offered “some basis for hope.” Much of the novel’s vibrancy comes from the first-person voice of Hazel, which is irreverent but never nihilistic. After she reads online tributes to a girl who’s died of cancer, Hazel observes that the girl “seemed to be mostly a professional sick person, like me, which made me worry that when I died they’d have nothing to say about me except that I fought heroically, as if the only thing I’d ever done was Have Cancer.”
When Green initially tried to write about kids with cancer, he centered the narrative on a young chaplain—“the worst kind of wish-fulfillment version of me.” The result, he once said, was “like a terrible ‘Grey’s Anatomy.’ ” Then, in 2007, he became aware of a girl from Quincy, Massachusetts, named Esther Grace Earl, who was one of the earliest nerdfighters. Esther had thyroid cancer, as Hazel does in the book, and was dependent on an oxygen tank. Green got to be friends with her online, and later visited her in person. Green is careful to say that Hazel—whose middle name is Grace—is not Esther, but Esther’s father and sister have spoken, appreciatively, of how much Green’s creation reminds them of her. Esther died in 2010, at the age of sixteen. “I could not have written it without her friendship,” Green said, adding that “there is definitely something weird about her not being here to give her blessing or not.” (“This Star Won’t Go Out,” a collection of writing drawn from Esther’s journals, letters, and blog posts, came out in January from Green’s publisher, Dutton, with an introduction by him.)
When Green finished the manuscript of “Stars,” he and his editor, Julie Strauss-Gabel, felt that they had something special. Most Y.A. readers are girls, but because Green is male and his first books featured boys as protagonists his new novel seemed capable of reaching both genders. “Stars” is a love story, but Strauss-Gabel successfully pushed for a cover that did not look like a traditional Y.A. romance: no pink, no photograph of a pretty girl. Instead, the title dominates, and the background is blue.
The stripped-down cover also meant that adults could read it on the subway without embarrassment. Adults have become big consumers of Y.A. fiction, and Green treats his grownup characters with unusual empathy. Hazel worries a good deal about how her death will affect her parents: “There is only one thing in this world shittier than biting it from cancer when you’re sixteen, and that’s having a kid who bites it from cancer.” Green gives Hazel’s mother not only a devoted temperament but a sense of humor; she watches “America’s Next Top Model” with her daughter and takes her to Amsterdam to meet her favorite author, Peter Van Houten. Green’s books seem calibrated for an era in which parents—vigilant and eager not to seem out of touch—often read the books that their children are reading.
Lizzie Skurnick, who runs a publishing imprint that reissues Y.A. literature from the past, told me that “Green writes books that are appropriate for teen-agers and for the adults who want books to be appropriate for teen-agers.” Such parents may be pleased that their child is touched enough by a book to cry over it, but they don’t want the experience to be too unsettling. Skurnick feels that Green’s approach is a bit tamer than that of Y.A. authors from earlier eras: Judy Blume, Lois Lowry, Richard Peck. In Katherine Paterson’s beloved 1977 book, “Bridge to Terabithia,” a fifth grader’s best friend dies alone in the woods after falling from a rope swing, and there is little consolation in the form of either teachable ideas or romantic spark. “John Green’s books all have a point and a lesson,” Skurnick said. “They’re sophisticated points, but they’re there.”
In April, I visited Green in Indianapolis. He has lived there since 2007, when Sarah took a curatorial position at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In the Midwest, the Greens added to their household, in this order: Willy, a West Highland terrier; Henry, their now four-year-old son; and Alice, their daughter, who just turned one. When Sarah was pregnant with Alice, the Greens did a Google Hangout with Barack Obama, during which they asked him which name he preferred: Eleanor or Alice. The President demurred, saying, “The main thing is, tell either Eleanor or Alice not to forget to be awesome.”
I was staying downtown, and Green picked me up in his car, a Chevy Volt, to take me to his office and video-production studio, in the Broad Ripple neighborhood. He was wearing a checked shirt, jeans, and Adidas sneakers with green-and-turquoise Argyle socks. At one point, he told me, “I don’t see why anyone would ever wear socks that are not Argyle.”
Broad Ripple is as cute as its name. There are coffeehouses tucked into bright-painted wooden buildings and brewpubs in older brick ones. Green’s office occupies the third floor of a solid, Midwestern-looking building. Nearby, there’s an encampment of youngish homeless people, known locally as the Bridge Kids, and a weekly farmers’ market that makes an appearance in “Stars.”
At work, Green has surrounded himself with people who are approximately as smart as he is, but a lot calmer. When I asked Sarah how anxious John was, she laughed and said, “The word ‘very’ comes to mind.” But, she said, “it’s part of his identity and the way he experiences the world, and it’s not a wholly inward-focussed anxiety. It also helps him to be empathetic.” Green told me that he had been prone to “obsessive thought spirals for as long as I could remember”—but he’d had good therapy, starting when he was a teen-ager, and felt that his emotions were “fairly well managed.” Besides, “from a novelist’s perspective, the ability to cycle through all the possibilities and choose the worst is very helpful.”
Vlogbrothers, which has more than two million subscribers, has become the anchor of an online empire. In 2011, after YouTube approached the Greens about doing additional series, they launched Crash Course videos—short educational lectures with animation accompaniments. John handles the humanities, Hank the sciences. The videos, which have the jump-cut aesthetic and speedy delivery of the Vlogbrothers posts, are the pedagogical equivalent of Red Bull shots, and if you watched them all you’d know a lot, but you’d also think you knew more than you did. Raoul Meyer, a history teacher who taught John Green in high school, and who now writes scripts for Crash Course, is sometimes bothered when people say that John is the best teacher they’ve ever had, because in real life teachers tell you when you’re wrong. “This is delivery of content and we do a really good job of it, but that’s just one part of teaching,” he said.
The walls of Green’s office are covered with framed nerdfighter-themed art work, most of which has been thrust into his hands at book signings. In one corner is an Aero Fighters arcade console, a birthday gift from Hank to John. Another gift from Hank hangs on a nearby wall: a photographic mosaic, amassed from hundreds of images of fans, of the “nerdfighter salute,” a gesture in which the hands are crossed at the wrists in a way that makes actual fighting impossible.
A video blog may not sound like an intimate medium, but it has brought John and Hank closer. After the first year of Vlogbrothers, they resumed other forms of communication; John told me that they now talk on the phone every day. “If anything, we talk to each other too often,” he said. “Now our collaboration is so deep, and our work together feels so intertwined, that I can’t imagine we were ever so distant. But we still need projects. We still don’t talk about personal stuff.” They say “I love you” once a year—on Esther Day, which is a holiday that Esther Earl asked nerdfighters to observe on her birthday. Her idea was that it could become a celebration of non-romantic love—a day when you’d say “I love you” to people who don’t often hear it from you.
John walked me into his inner sanctum, where a grubby, oatmeal-colored La-Z-Boy hulked in a corner. “I know it’s not a physically beautiful item,” he said. But his mother gave it to him for his twenty-second birthday, and he has written parts of all his books in it. “It has moved successively farther from the center of our house,” he observed. “In New York, it was dead in the middle of the apartment.” A bookshelf held translated editions of his books. The Norwegian edition of “Stars” is called “Fuck Fate.” Green laughed. “That is, arguably, a better title than ‘The Fault in Our Stars,’ ” he said. “You’ve got to love Norway—you can put ‘fuck’ on the cover of a young-adult book!”
That morning, Green was making a Crash Course video about “Beloved,” the Toni Morrison novel. Unlike his Vlogbrothers posts, Green’s Crash Course videos are written not by him but by hired experts. He revises them, however, and as he read the script on a teleprompter he added jokes and asides. The video was being filmed by Stan Muller, a tall, broad-shouldered guy who answered a Craigslist ad placed by Green three years ago. Muller adopted the role of fond, soothing parent. Green reveres “Beloved,” but it’s harrowing—Sethe, a runaway slave, kills her baby—and he was worried about getting the tone right.
In Crash Course videos, Green often performs as Me from the Past, a jaded younger version of himself who asks obvious questions. In the guise of this alter ego, Green slouched in a chair and said into the camera, “Like, do you think Beloved is a ghost or not?”
As his current self, he complained, “You’re ruining it, Me from the Past. We were having a moment there.”
They stopped filming for a second, and Green said, hopefully, “That was kind of a joke. It was almost a joke. It’s about to get really unfunny, though.” One of his knees was jiggling. “Oh, man! How about if I add, ‘You have a special gift for finding the least interesting question’? Can I say that, or is it too dismissive of a large body of scholarship? I don’t care—I think it’s funny. Stan, do you like it?”
“I do,” Muller said.
“It is the least interesting question you can ask.”
“I agree.”
Nerdfighters have a term for assessing the heights that Green’s hair achieves when he worriedly tugs on it—“puff levels”—and this morning they were rising. “Fuck, it’s literally haunting, this book,” he said. “Like there’s a ghost in the room.” It was a little surprising to hear Green use “fuck” so often, because he is careful not to do so in his videos or his books.
He continued reading the script, evoking the book’s themes of dehumanization, buried memory, and love that’s “too thick.” He then described the moment when Sethe, caught by her slave-owner, takes her kids “out back to the woodshed to kill them all before he can take them.” In an unusually slow voice, he noted, “She only manages to kill one, sawing through its neck.”
Afterward, he worried some more: “Gaaaaah. This is going to get, like, the least views of any Crash Course video ever made.”
“Nah,” Muller replied. “It’ll get a hundred thousand.”
Afterward, in Green’s office, we talked about the years of his life that might be chronicled in a Y.A. novel. He grew up in Orlando, Florida, where his father, Mike, was the state director of the Nature Conservancy; his mother, Sydney, stayed home with John and Hank when they were little, then worked for a local nonprofit called the Healthy Community Initiative. Green’s parents now live near Asheville, North Carolina. “They have goats and chickens and a vegetable garden and make goat’s-milk soap,” Green said. “I was so worried about them leaving their home of twenty-five years and, like, an hour after they arrived they were the happiest they’d ever been.”
In middle school, Green said, he was a regrettable combination: a nerd who was not a good student. He was also bullied and unhappy. When he was fifteen, his parents sent him to Indian Springs, a boarding school outside Birmingham, Alabama. It was an excellent move. Green had always loved to read—he had a soft spot for “girl books,” like the Baby-Sitters Club series—but in high school he read Salinger, Vonnegut, Morrison, and Chabon, and found other people who liked to talk about books. Indian Springs offered the kind of verdant, self-contained setting where one could have a preëmptively nostalgic coming-of-age. You could almost feel yourself missing it while you were still there. Green captures this delicious melancholy in “Looking for Alaska,” which tells a story of friendship, first love, and intellectual questing at a school very much like Indian Springs.
Green was much happier in Alabama, but he remained a “genuinely poor student.” He told me, “I had always been told I was smart and had potential, but I had never shown the ability to deliver on it. It’s a bit cliché to say, but I think I actually was scared I wasn’t smart.” (After a beat: “I was actively bad at math. And languages.”) Raoul Meyer, then a young teacher at Indian Springs, has a different take. He told me, “John was very vocal about his relationships with his friends being more important than his schoolwork. He broke a lot of rules—he smoked very visibly, for instance, and frequently got caught. You had the impression that if he’d wanted to be an A student he could have been, but that wasn’t the identity he wanted.”
The writer Daniel Alarcón was in Green’s class, and remembers that they both wanted to be writers then, and “shared a seriousness about it that wasn’t exactly normal for adolescents.” Not until Alarcón enrolled in the M.F.A. program at Iowa was he again around people who, like Green, “talked about literature the way other people talked about sports, and who could break down a story over beer and not think of it as pretentious or boring.” Alarcón recalled a road trip to Orlando that he took with Green and Townsend Kyser, the scion of a catfish-farming family. Once there, they “spent, like, a week writing oblique and inscrutable messages on construction paper and planting them in public places, like the manicured lawns of branch banks.”
At Indian Springs, Green also became friends with boarders who staged brazen pranks. In one infamous episode, someone invited a woman who was supposedly an academic expert on teen sexuality to speak at an assembly; in fact, she was a stripper, and started disrobing in response to the urging of a guy in the audience. In “Looking for Alaska,” a similar incident occurs, but the stripper is a man, the student in the audience is a young woman, and the whole stunt is an homage to a troubled girl who has died in a car accident—all of which makes it far more palatable.
When Green was at Indian Springs, a girl at the school was killed in a car accident. She wasn’t a close friend, but it was a small school, and, as he said, “it’s so hard to get your head around that when you’re a kid.” He went on, “Infinite sets are a difficult thing to get your head around generally, but the forever of it—I just felt so bad for her. I still feel so bad for her.”
Although Green often suggests that he was a sad-sack dork as a teen-ager, his old friends don’t remember him that way. Alarcón said, “At our school, we didn’t really have jocks. It was a pretty high-achieving school. I’m not saying it was paradise. Plenty of kids are socially awkward, and there’s nothing that will save them from other adolescents. But John wasn’t like that at all. John was funny and charming, and people looked up to him.” Green was sensitive, and he fell hard for the girls he had crushes on, but Alarcón said that “John exaggerates his haplessness with women,” adding, “This is just speculation, but if your fans are a lot of thirteen-to-fifteen-year-old girls, it seems kind of smarmy if you come across like a ladies’ man.”
Green enrolled in Kenyon in 1995. He chose a double major in religion and literature. His friend Kathy Hickner, who also hung out in the religion department, remembers him as “one of these really huge personalities” who was “always talking,” but also as the person she could count on “to go to church with me and discuss the sermon.” She added, “We were both into this whole layer of Christian thinkers who were very open-minded, scholarly types.”
Green continued to pursue writing, particularly in an evening seminar that he took with the novelist P. F. Kluge, who was, Green recalled, “encouraging of my work but also very, very critical of it—I once titled a story ‘Things Remembered, Things Forgotten,’ and he said, ‘Green, you don’t get to title your stories anymore.’ ” When Green was not accepted into the advanced creative-writing course at Kenyon, “it was crushing,” he recalled. “Kluge took me to his house and poured me a drink and said, ‘I think you should have gotten into the class. But your writing isn’t that great.’ I think he called it a ‘solid B-plus.’ But, he said, ‘the stories that you tell during the smoke break—if you could write the way you told those stories, then you would write well.’ ”
Kluge told me that what he remembered most about Green was not his writing but his “spoken energy.” “He was so rapid-fire,” he said. “Also decent, self-deprecating, and funny.”
In class one evening, Green read aloud a story with a sex scene in it. When he was done, the other students offered polite critiques. Kluge then said, “Green, you’ve never had sex before, have you?” Green said no. In subsequent classes, he provided updates on the status of his virginity, which for a long time was “nothing new to report.”
Upon graduating, he moved to Chicago, where he eventually ended up at Booklist. He was hired to do data entry, but he found mentors in the editor-in-chief, Bill Ott, and Ilene Cooper, a staff editor who also wrote children’s and young-adult books. Cooper said of Green, “He was a horrible slob, and he didn’t do his job all that well,” recalling that he failed to send out checks to freelancers. “He was smoking but trying to quit, so he was chewing tobacco, which was kind of gross. But he was so engaging, and he would want to talk about things like our place in the universe.” Green’s older colleagues chided him for what Ott called “some of his outrageous young-person pronouncements,” such as the claim that black-and-white movies are a waste of time. Ott said that he and Cooper, who are now married, saw him through a “ ‘Sorrows of Young Werther’-like downturn” after a girlfriend dumped him; Green told me that Ott ordered him to watch the profoundly silly 1950 film “Harvey,” which both lifted his spirits and cured him of his antipathy toward black-and-white. Eventually, Ott started assigning Green reviews, and Cooper did several edits on the manuscript of “Looking for Alaska,” which she passed along to her publisher, Dutton.
When Green was twenty-six, he met Sarah Urist, who was managing an art gallery in Chicago. She had been three years behind him at Indian Springs, and they became reacquainted through the woman Green was then dating—Sarah’s sparring partner at a boxing gym. After Green and the girlfriend broke up, he and Sarah started a friendship with a large epistolary component. “We e-mailed back and forth for a year and talked about everything,” Green said. “It was one of the most invigorating conversations I can remember having.”
When I met Sarah, she was wearing red lipstick, black boots, and tortoiseshell glasses; she is at once hipper than Green—she’s grounded in theory and cutting-edge art—and steadier, with a quieter, more skeptical sense of humor. She left her job at the Indianapolis museum last fall, and now works with Green on a Web series called “The Art Assignment,” in which she showcases contemporary artists who then “assign” viewers to make a specific work of art. Sarah told me that she had an intellectual interest in fandoms like her husband’s, but found them difficult to identify with. “It’s a bias I have to get over, because being a fan is so much a part of young life now,” she said. “But there’s part of me that’s always wondering, How much could you really love all of these things?”
One of the themes of “The Fault in Our Stars” is the relationship between authors and readers. Hazel says, “Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book. And then there are books like ‘An Imperial Affliction’ ”—Peter Van Houten’s novel—“which you can’t tell people about, books so special and rare and yours that advertising your affection feels like a betrayal.”
In a different era, “The Fault in Our Stars” could have been that kind of cultish book. For many young people today, however, reading is not an act of private communion with an author whom they imagine vaguely, if at all, but a prelude to a social experience—following the author on Twitter, meeting other readers, collaborating with them on projects, writing fan fiction. In our connected age, even books have become interactive phenomena.
Green, for his part, seems to feel that it is a betrayal not to advertise your affections. Every day, he gives his fans a live stream of his stream of consciousness. In addition to posting on YouTube, Green contributes indefatigably to Tumblr and Twitter. Even when he’s feeling anxious, he’s willing to chat with people who approach him in public. As his fame has grown, he has discovered the need for a few limits: he doesn’t like it when fans show up at his house or make Tumblrs about his kids.
Green’s boyishness and his energy make a lot of what he does look easy. But it’s hard for him to channel the emotional kid inside while remaining an analytical adult—to embrace simultaneously the voluble aesthetic of the Internet and the contemplative sensibility of the novelist. Raoul Meyer, the history teacher, told me, “John strikes me in some ways as the same teen-ager he once was, just trying to figure out his place in the world. Only now the world is changing much faster and he’s an agent of that change, creating the world he’s trying to fit into. And that’s a tough role.”
Green’s online projects keep proliferating along with his fans, and he seems determined to keep up with them all. He told me that he has sketched out some scenes for a new novel, about “two male best friends who live less privileged lives in a world of privilege,” and that he hopes to work on it after the movie junkets are over and he has taken a few days of vacation with his family, in a Tennessee farmhouse devoid of electronic devices. One wonders, however, when he’ll actually find the hours to recline in the La-Z-Boy. E. Lockhart, an acclaimed Y.A. novelist, is an old friend of Green’s. She said, “Most of us look at what John does and say ‘That’s awesome,’ but we’d rather be in our pajamas writing.”
On my second day in Indianapolis, Green woke up early to record a Vlogbrothers video called “Understanding the Central African Republic.” He supplied a staccato history of the recent conflict, which, he lamented, had received little international attention, because people are drawn to simpler narratives, such as “Harry versus Voldemort.” Nevertheless, he concluded, we “have to make room in our stories for the world as we find it.” He filmed the video at home, in the basement, which doubles as a guest room, and edited it at the office while stockpiling segments of yet another online series, in which he plays a soccer video game while giving unrehearsed answers to such questions as “What five books would you take to a desert island?” At about 6 P.M., he posted the Central African Republic video and went home.
Sarah was at the park with Henry and Alice, so Green opened his laptop and checked out the immediate response to the video. Noticing two “dislikes” on YouTube, he said, “How can they dislike it already?” He responded to several comments, typing rapidly and talking at the same time.
Four or five times a month, Green talks on the phone with kids who have cancer, some of whom have requested the conversations through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Once every few months, he Skypes with sick teens. That evening, he had a Google Hangout scheduled with young fans from upstate New York—some from a high school and some from a support group called Teens Living with Cancer. We went downstairs, and he set his laptop on the bed, positioning his chair close to it. His screen soon filled with an image of a dozen teen-agers, most of whom held copies of “The Fault in Our Stars.”
A boy named Brendan appeared, and posed a delicate question about the distance that can arise between the healthy and the dying. Green said that people sometimes built a wall between themselves and those with chronic illnesses, because it was easier for them to think of sick people as “other.” He continued, “But if you are alive you are as alive as anybody else. And the full breadth of human existence is available to you. The wall is a lie.” When he finished, he said, “Does that seem like a reasonable answer?”
“It’s a great answer,” Brendan said.
After some nervous giggling about who was going next, a boy asked Green if he had ever considered a different ending for “The Fault in Our Stars.”
“The first ending I wrote was so epically terrible that I don’t even want to tell you about it,” Green said. “But I will. I mean, you seem like nice people.” Green had told me about this ending, and it was indeed a very bad idea—a Hail Mary attempt to avoid the inevitable conclusion. In the discarded version, Hazel and Peter Van Houten go on a road trip in an attempt to honor Augustus’s idea of an extraordinary life; they end up in Mexico, where they unsuccessfully try to infiltrate a narcoterrorist organization.
When Green recounted this to the group, everybody laughed. “Shut up!” he said, laughing himself. “That’s not nice! It was a mistake!”
The mother of a kid in the cancer-support group was participating in the Hangout. “Your book was frustrating to me,” she told Green, sounding polite but urgent. “I want to know—what happened to Hazel’s parents?”
Green dipped his head. “You’re going to be so mad at me,” he said. “But I don’t have an answer for that. I hope I left them in a place where it’s possible to go on.” From knowing Esther Earl’s parents, he could say that “loss does not end love in your life.” He added, “I genuinely believe that love is stronger than death.” Several people clapped, but the mother looked unhappy, and Green apologized to her.
“It’s O.K.,” she said.
A smiling girl in a bright-pink shirt introduced herself: “Hi, I’m Brittany. I’m fifteen and I had the same kind of cancer Gus has, osteosarcoma.” John reached out his arms to give her a virtual hug. Brittany reached back and said, “You did an amazing job of capturing the fear, the humor, and the real pain of being a teen-ager with cancer.” Her words echoed something that Hazel writes to Van Houten: “As a three-year survivor of Stage IV cancer, I can tell you that you got everything right in ‘An Imperial Affliction.’ Or at least you got me right.” Afterward, a teacher wrapped the session up, and everybody waved. The screen went blank. Green put his head down on his arms and cried. ♦
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