My brother is neither a stoner nor a basketball player, if that’s what you’re asking. :)

Influences are too broad and numerous for me to pin down like that. I’m sure Hank has influenced my work; certainly, the way he looks at the world has shaped the way I look at the world. But I’ve never consciously modeled a character after Hank.

At the time, I could never have imagined that anyone would ever know that I had a brother named Hank. (I was just a writer then, not…like….a  professional Person Of The Internet or whatever.) I was thinking about Hank Williams when I named that character, not my brother.

It makes you nervous; it keeps you reading; and ultimately, anticipation makes for more interesting and engaging reading than surprise.

 I love her as a person.

As for liking her: I’ve always sort of preferred people who are not entirely likable.

You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone.

No, it does not bother me. There is no one right way to read a book. (There are wrong ways, certainly: If you read Huck Finn and think it is a great defense of slavery, you are doing it wrong. But there are many right ways.)

These Q&As exist to answer specific questions from people who are usually reading the book very closely and have intertextual questions about them. I answer those questions because A. it’s interesting and useful for me as a writer to think about this stuff, and B. I hope it might be interesting and useful to some minority of readers, and C. I like to get insight into other writers’ processes and so feel like mine should be fair game.

The truth is, if the foreshadowing and the metaphors and everything else work, you don’t need to be conscious of it—and you certainly don’t need to be hunting for it. The foreshadowing will unsettle you whether you’re aware of it or not, and when the twist comes, it won’t feel like as much of a twist as it otherwise would’ve.

And metaphor (which to me is not really distinct from “the beauty of the language” that you refer to above) is just another way to build the story and its inhabitants so that it will be real and alive to you as you read it.

You don’t need to think “smoking cigarettes is a symbol for adolescents’ self-destructive impulses” to know that smoking is bad for you, and these kids are aware that it’s bad for you.

Your job as a reader is to read the book you want to read. You shouldn’t worry too much about which book I want you to read, but rest assured: I am very, very happy when people like my books and find them helpful or interesting or fun or anything other than dreadfully boring.

No.

I guess the book might have a broader audience without that scene, but if I wanted the broadest possible audience, I wouldn’t write books at all. I’d write screenplays.

I wrote that book almost fifteen years ago, and while I certainly don’t think it’s perfect, I’m still proud of it. That means a lot to me. I’d be much less proud of it if I’d taken out a scene that’s central to the emotional arc of the book just so that it would be more acceptable to censors. And if people are reading the scene out of context, they aren’t reading. There is no text without context.

If a terrible blow job keeps Alaska from being taught in schools, that’s unfortunate. But what matters to me is that so many people have found the book and shared it with their friends and family. I could never have imagined that little book would be published in dozens of languages and read by so many hundreds of thousands of people.

I’m very happy, and very grateful, and I stand by the massively unerotic blow job.

If I recall correctly, I was conscious about not identifying either the Colonel or Alaska by race, so I’ll continue not doing that. But yeah, I think those are certainly valid imaginings.  

The story as it is includes metaphor and meaning and symbolism and all the rest.

But there are lots of different ways to read a book well, and one of them is to be—as J. D. Salinger put it—the reader who reads and runs. I don’t want to tell people how to read my books, or anyone’s books. I do think there’s a lot to be gained from reading critically—I think it can help us feel less alone and more engaged and also help us better formulate ideas about our responsibilities to ourselves and to others.

But I also think reading should be enjoyable. It should be fun. And if all the symbolism is working right, readers don’t have to be conscious of it for those elements to add power and emotional heft to the story. 

Oh, sure, of course. If people say that Looking for Alaska is a defense of Marxism, or an attack upon elm trees, or a book about caramelized onions, then I absolutely disagree with them.

I also disagree absolutely with people who claim that Alaska is pornographic or that it encourages promiscuity or alcohol use or cigarette smoking or mixing vodka with milk. (…which is a terrible idea.)

A book is a conversation between a reader and a writer, but we both have to hold up our end of the bargain there. It’s possible to write a book terribly; it’s also possible to read a book terribly. (Witness, for instance, those who read Huck Finn as a defense of slavery.) 

I love you guys.

No.

I’m just going to shorten Books Belong To Their Readers to BBTTR from here on out. 

Oh, I think the pleasure is in the seeking. That’s what I eventually realized. 

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.

It’s a way of writing about the relationship between the identities we’re given (our names) and the ones we choose or adopt as we come of age (nicknames). Most of the nicknames in my books are nicknames that are given to, and accepted by, a character in his or her adolescence. Taking a nickname is a way of establishing identity and claiming some sovereignty over one’s self. So Miles will not only be Miles, the person named by his parents. He will also be Pudge, the person named by his peers.

The relationship between these identities—and the shifting between them—is really interesting to me, because it’s a way of thinking about how in adolescence you go back and forth between identifying as part of your biological family and identifying as part of the social network you’re building separate from that family.

Because it’s like the simplest household task a person could hope to accomplish.

I wanted that moment to show them as kids, albeit very different ones: Pudge doesn’t know how to use an iron because someone has always done his ironing for him, and the Colonel doesn’t know how to use an iron because he’s never worn anything that needed to be ironed.

But neither of them knows the first thing about how to be an adult in the world. 

Yes.

It is my experience that you don’t stop looking for your lost friends simply because they are dead. In some ways, you search even harder for every scrap of information you can find that will help you to understand the people they were and also help you to understand what led to their deaths.

But as Pudge and the Colonel find out, while the search can be informative, it can also be destructive. The core question—why did this person I love die—cannot be answered by reading their diaries or retracing their journeys.

It is a question that must be asked of the universe. And this is why philosophy and the study of religious traditions and history etc. is not some abstract boring intellectual enterprise: It is the very stuff that makes it possible to go on and live an engaged, attentive, productive life even though the world contains so much suffering and injustice.  

The idea initially came to me while watching the movie The Royal Tennenbaums, which features a cover of the Velvet Underground song, “Stephanie Says,” part of which goes, “She’s not afraid to die / The people all call her Alaska.”

I liked the name Alaska because it’s grand and mysterious and far away, part of our country but a mythologized part, in much the same way that Alaska herself is (disastrously) mythologized by her classmates.

I also liked it because of what it actually means. It is often translated “that which the sea breaks against,” and I think that is Alaska’s experience of herself: She feels that the sea is breaking against her, again and again, with all the incumbent turmoil, excitement, and pain.

Early. The first draft of that was I think in the 40 single-spaced pages I sent to Ilene way back in 2002. I don’t even think it changed that much over time. That’s one of the very few passages that survived from 2002. (It might’ve even been written in late 2001.)

No, from the moment of its inception in my mind, the story was about whether (and how) one can live a thoughtful, hopeful life in the face of unresolvable ambiguity.

I wrote this book over so many years, and there were so many dozens of drafts between when it was a single-spaced 40-paged blob to when it was a novel, and so it’s hard to remember the process.

I wrote the scene in the gym where they find out very early on, probably in 2001. I wrote a couple of the later scenes where the Colonel and Pudge are playing video games early on, and the scene where the Colonel and Pudge meet survived in more or less its original form. 

Also Barn Night. And Lara/Pudge’s watching of the Brady Bunch. I think those were the first scenes.

It was a lot of fun to write Barn Night. That was probably the most fun—Best Day/Worst Day, the rapping, the Strawberry Hill, all that stuff.