Questions about Looking for Alaska (SPOILERS!)

NOTE: This page is for people who have read Looking for Alaska. As such, it contains numerous huge spoilers. If you have not read Looking for Alaska, kindly avert your eyes.

Q. Do you really know all those people’s last words?
A. Yeah. I’m sort of obsessed with last words. (Many of my favorites did not make it into the book, actually.) You can watch me reciting favorite last words here and then listing the last words of every American President here.

Q. How long did it take to write Alaska?
A. I began the book in earnest just after 9/11, and it was published in March of 2005. But for one of those years, I was in the process of breaking up with a girl (well, technically, she was in the process of breaking up with me), which is not a situation conducive to writing well. Also, I rewrite a lot.

Q. How did you come up with the countdown chapter titles?
A. Well, right after 9/11, everyone on TV was talking about how this was a defining moment in American history, and how we would all view the world through the lens of 9/11. (Indeed, for years afterward, one could not turn on the TV without hearing someone say that we live in a “post-9/11 world,” which is the stupidest observation in human history. I mean, we also live in a post-World War II world and a post-invention-of-fire world.) But I think what is meant by the phrase “post-9/11 world” is really interesting: Humans tend to measure time within the framework of important events. In the Christian world, we date from the birth of Christ. The Islamic calendar dates from the Muslim community’s move from Mecca to Medina. Alaska is a novel about the most important event in these people’s lives, so it made sense to me to structure the story in the same way. Also, I thought it would be neat.

Q. Is “bufriedo” pronounced bu-FRY-do or bu-FREE-do?
A. Well, first let me say that books do not belong to their authors. Books belong to the reader. So you can pronounce bufriedo however you’d like; my pronunciation of it is not inherently better than yours. But now that we’ve got the philosophical question out of the way, I say buh-FREE-doh.

Q. Are bufriedos real?
A. Sort of. There was a similar thing at the boarding school I attended called a crispito. A chimichanga is basically a deep-fried burrito. I imagine bufriedos tasting a bit fried-er than chimichangas, but again, the way I imagine things is totally irrelevant because books belong to their readers.

Q. What do you think happened to Alaska? I know you don’t say it in the book, but what’s YOUR opinion?
A. I knew when I started the book that we would never be inside Blue Citrus with her that night, and so I still don’t have any idea what happened to Alaska—which is to say that I genuinely don’t have an opinion. I really believe that your reading of a book I wrote is just as legitimate as my reading of a book I wrote. (It’s possible you can even read the book better than I can.) I know that’s not a terribly fulfilling answer, but it’s the only answer I have. Frankly, I kind of want you to be haunted by the unansweredness of the question, because I think being haunted by such things is a valuable part of being a person.

Q. Do you have any teaching suggestions for Looking for Alaska?
A. Yes. There are discussion guides available for both “Looking for Alaska” and “Paper Towns,” which can be downloaded here. They’re pretty good. A lot of schools teach “Looking for Alaska,” so there may also be teachers’ guides created by teachers you can find online. If I were to teach Alaska, I would ask: What is the point of death? and What is the point of literature? and In an essentially and irreperably broken world, is there cause for hope? That is not really much of a lesson plan, though.

Q: Can you explain the ending of Looking for Alaska?
A. Well, when I was writing “Alaska,” I wanted the end NOT to give us what we want, which is of course to know whether Alaska’s death was a suicide or an accident. The truth is that in our lives we are all going to encounter questions that should be answered, that deserve to be answered, and yet prove unanswerable. Can we find meaning to life without those answers? Can we find a way to acknowledge the reality (and injustice) of suffering without giving in to hopelessness? Those are the questions I think Miles is confronting at the end, and I wanted to argue that through forgiveness, it is possible to live a full and hopeful life—even if our world is saturated with injustice and loss.

Q. Do you plan on writing a sequel to Looking for Alaska?
A. I don’t plan on writing a sequel to any of my books at the moment. I feel like I left Pudge and the Colonel and Lara and Takumi where I wanted them to be. My grandmother taught me to never say never, but certainly there will not be a sequel in the foreseeable future.

Q. Did you know an Alaska?
A. That is the rare question that is too personal.

Q. What about Culver Creek is realistic, and what isn’t?
A. The physical setting of Culver Creek is very, very similar to the physical place where I went to boarding school, Indian Springs School. There’s a lake and an evil swan and a barn and there was an unairconditioned dorm circle when I was a student. (The dorms are now much nicer.) It’s an excellent school. Attending Indian Springs made my life possible, and I am very grateful to the school and its teachers.

Q. What’s your favorite part of LFA?
A. I’m not sure I have a favorite part. (For one thing, I wrote it a long time ago, and I haven’t read it since it came out, so to be totally honest there’s a lot of it I don’t remember.) I guess I am still pretty proud of that line at the end about never needing to be hopeless because we can never be irreparably broken; that line seems to have meant something to a lot of people. (For instance, I recently saw it tattooed around a person’s neck.)

Oh, and I still like the fox hat.