1. I don’t feel like I’m killing anyone. The person is dying, and that sucks, but I don’t feel responsible for it any more than I feel responsible when a friend in real life dies.

2. With TFiOS, for me, there is no book without death. You cannot meaningfully confront the universe’s indifference to us without seeing the horrific suffering and injustice and awfulness of what really happens to real people who do not deserve to suffer and die. When writing the novel (and really throughout my writing career), I was very angry about this, very angry that people die for no good reason, and very dissatisfied with all the flimsy, Encouragement-y things that people say in the wake of such tragedies. So honestly, I wasn’t trying to make you feel anything gratuitous; I just could think of no other way to lay bare the absolute hideousness of living in a world where parents have to bury their children. And we live in that world, humans have always lived in that world, and always will.

3. The challenge—and this is not just a challenge when writing a novel but also when, like, trying to get out of bed every day—is to acknowledge these truth and still live a hopeful, productive life. Are the only options 1. lying to yourself or 2. nihilism? I believe not. I believe there is great beauty and meaning to be found and constructed in this life, but we must find and construct that meaning in this world, and to do that, we must be honest about this world.

I mean, for ten years of my life, I tried to write this book and it taunted me and it sucked and it kept sucking and nothing I could do for years and years made it suck less, and then finally I was given a way into it and I worked very hard to make it the best book that I could possibly make it, but books will always be a collaboration between reader and writer, and at some point I have to stop doing my job so I can start letting you do your job.

I mean that a book is a problem in that it is composed out of meaningless scratches on a page that must be translated into ideas that live inside your head, and you use a set of skills (literacy, critical thinking, etc.) to make that happen. I don’t mean that it is an UNFORTUNATE problem; I just mean that it is a thing that has to be created by both of us, like a crossword puzzle or something.

Honestly, I think he said that he thought it was going to change my life a lot and that I didn’t really know what I was getting into. (That proved prophetic, as Hank usually does.)

And then he told me that I had to keep making vlogbrothers videos no matter what.

I’m not good at spotting puns or I might’ve named him something else just because I don’t want to distract readers. Anyway, he’s named after the Isaac who went blind who plays a pretty big role in Judeo-Christian-Islamic history.

She does like it, yeah. It’s her favorite of my books, I think.

Sarah, did you submit a question anonymously?

Sarah helped in every possible way; it is impossible to list or even verbalize all the ways she shaped the book through her readings of it, our conversations, our life together, etc.

There are video games for the blind, but from what I’ve gathered, they are not as awesome as the one Isaac plays.

It was about like a dozen kids with cancer who created a club called the Dead Person’s Society in a cave (ridiculous) near the children’s hospital (doubly ridiculous) and they’d sneak out of the hospital together and visit the cave and convene the DPS (triply ridiculous).

It was basically a very flimsy, high-concept way of allowing me to think through my own thoughts and angers about death and suffering and so on. It was not good.

You have access to the same text I do (said the author for the millionth time) but I would guess he says something about Hazel’s resemblance to Caroline Mathers.

I wrote like 40,000 words of the desert island story and the only things I really liked were:

1. The sentence, “It was kind of a beautiful day.”

and

2. This rant about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and its weird, paternalistic, imperialist insistence that humans cannot be fully human when they are sick or deprived of necessities, when in fact the truth is that humanness is always transformed by whatever we are in want of, and we are always in want of something.

and

3. A shoe-shopping flashback.

All three of these things ended up in TFiOS in one form or another.

The beginning was really fun to write—Hazel making fun of Patrick and all that. I’m kind of a Patrick in real life, and I’m very conscious of it: Like, it’s super easy to make fun of me for being this hugely earnest Internet persona, and I guess I am really narcissistic because I really enjoy making fun of myself in fiction.  (See also, Peter Van Houten.)

I was conscious of that connection when writing, yes. I wrote the video game scene in a very early draft of the novel, years and years ago, and then the first time Hazel imagines herself as a grenade appeared in revisions (probably in early 2011? I think before we went to Amsterdam), and I got the idea from the earlier scene.

Whether it’s a coincidence in the story is up to the reader to decide, I guess?

Esther did not see any of the book before she died. (It did not feature a character named Hazel with thyroid cancer when she died, either. It was a vastly different story.)

So much of the story was inspired by her and my friendship with her and my affection for her family and friends, but I didn’t take very many specific things (except for superficial stuff like the oxygen and whatnot).

What inspired me most was Esther’s unusual mix of teenagerness and empathy: She was a very outwardly focused person, very conscious of and attentive to her friends and family. But she was also silly and funny and totally normal. And in our conversations about heroism and strength or whatever, she was very conscious of cliches (many of which I threw at her) but mostly unconvinced by them.

I just really liked Esther. That was maybe the biggest thing. I really liked her, and I was really pissed off after she died, and I had to write my way through it, because I was desperately looking for some hope in it. (I am still pretty pissed off about it, for the record.)

All that said, I really don’t want to seem to be appropriating Esther’s story, which belongs to her and to her family and not to me. Hazel is a fictional character, and she is in many important ways very different from the person Esther was.

Esther was a nerdfighter who died of cancer in August of 2010. She and I were friends for a couple years before that, and I am friends with her friends and with her family.

You can watch her YouTube videos here and learn about the organization her family set up in her memory here.

Yes, this happens all the time. It happens a lot with Looking for Alaska, and now it is happening even more with TFiOS, which surprises me, because I did not think the ending of TFiOS was particularly ambiguous. (To be fair, I have a pretty high tolerance for ambiguity, I guess.)

I understand the impulse, I guess, particularly since many contemporary readers have read a lot of book series, which leave cliffhanger after cliffhanger before wrapping things up with some marriages and crazily named children.

But I genuinely feel unqualified to tell you what happens after the end of the book, and to make something up—as Van Houten briefly attempts to—feels really disingenuous.

In general, I personally agree with a lot of what Van Houten says in the novel. He’s like a drunk, dickish version of myself, basically.

He is American, of Dutch descent, living in exile in the Netherlands, so I would assume that he has an American accent.

Well, mostly I just wanted him to give it a try and then give up because the whole affair seemed silly to him.

But there was also a little joke in it that I liked: Sisyphus has to roll a rock up a hill, watch it roll down, and then roll it up again for all of eternity, and when you give characters in a book a life outside of the book, you are kind of doing the same thing to them: You are forcing them to go on, even after they’ve done their jobs, and do them again.

Well, Van Houten is always trying to dodge direct emotional engagement with the world by creating this intellectual distance, so I think he’s using the Trolley Problem as a way to deflect talk about the real, gut-wrenching, totally unintellectual pain that Hazel is trying to make him acknowledge.

But why the Trolley Problem in particular? It’s a good example of how inaction is a kind of action, something that is very much on Hazel’s mind as she thinks about what constitutes a heroic or well-lived life.

(For those who don’t know, the trolley problem can be expressed like this: A madman has tied five people to train tracks. If you flip a switch, you can send the train onto another path, where two people are tied to the tracks. Doing this will result in the death of three fewer people but make you an active participant in the process. What do you do?)

Sure, yeah. I mean:

1. Happily, I am not an alcoholic.

2. At the time of writing, I did not have an assistant.

3. I am not particularly reclusive.

4. I hope that I do not use pomposity and pretension to shield myself from trauma.

5. Most of the bad things that have happened to Peter Van Houten have not happened to me.

6. I am somewhat younger than he is.

However:

1. I also like Swedish hip hop.

2. I share PvH’s belief that books belong to their readers, and that authors are not qualified to comment on what happens after their books have ended. Like PvH, I am often asked about what happens in my books after they ended, and like him, I have no answer.

3. Like PvH, I am I guess somewhat depressive and very introverted and therefore can get overwhelmed by readers’ expectations of both me and my work.

4. I know what it’s like to feel that I’ll never be able to write anything worth publishing ever again.

5. I think sometimes I probably do intellectualize emotionally painful experiences so that I don’t have to confront/process them emotionally.

6. I also understand set theory better than Hazel Grace Lancaster does. :)

I like Swedish hip hop. I tried listening to Croatian and Hungarian and Dutch and French and German hip hop, and I just like Swedish hip hop much more.