If anything, I shortened the timeline because I didn’t want to be unnecessarily cruel either to Augustus or to the reader. I talked a lot with doctors and families of sick people about this, about the timeline and the pace of deterioration etc. to make sure I was reflecting it as accurately as possible. It is a very, very difficult thing to live through, because a lot of what you value about life, particularly as a teenager—autonomy, physical vibrancy, social connections, dignity—is stripped away from you, and you’re left being the thing that you never thought you’d have to be again: a child dependent upon your caregivers for every little thing.

I felt it was important to reflect that as accurately as possible, because I didn’t want to romanticize suffering, and I didn’t want to conflate it—as so many stories do—with beauty.

Honestly someone suggested it on twitter and I loved it, but it became in the midst of so many @replies that I could never find the person who suggested it so as to properly thank/acknowledge them. If anyone can find The Price of Dawn person, let me know!

I think that is a good reading, about wanting control over a killing thing.

Well, the actual moment of people’s deaths tend 1. not to be peaceful, and 2. not to be romantic or poignant or anything other than violent and horrible. Plus 3. Hazel and Gus are in love, but they’ve only known each other for a few months, and it seemed most likely to me that his immediate family would be alone with him at the end of his life.

I also felt like I’d put the reader (and the characters) through enough.

Well, Sisyphus is always pushing a rock up a hill without ever getting anywhere, and hamsters are always running around on a wheel without ever getting anywhere. That’s all I was thinking about, although again, books belong to their readers, and if there’s a better/more evocative/more useful metaphor to be drawn from it, then yay!

Oh I quite like Kaitlyn. I mean, one of the things you can’t see very well because the novel is written from Hazel’s perspective is that Hazel is 1. very beautiful, and 2. was pretty popular when she attended school. She just hasn’t attended school for a long time.

We have this idea that the opposite of “popular” is “smart.” (We nerds are particularly found of this idea.) But in fact there are many popular people who are also brilliant and deeply intellectually engaged. (Kaitlyn is maybe not such a person, but Hazel certainly is.)

As for why I put Kaitlyn in the book: I wanted the reader to be able to have a few moments of glimpsing Hazel’s life before illness, which was so radically different from the live she lives in the book, and I wanted the reader to feel the distance between A Regular Life in High School and The Life That Hazel Has Now.

Hazel and Augustus, like all very sick teenagers, are caught in an in-between space: They are similar to other teenagers, but they’re also similar to old people in an important way (i.e., they are not allowed the luxury of feeling that life is a thing that will just go on forever). I wanted to try to capture that in the plot of the story (and I also wanted to acknowledge that sick and disabled people are still sexual people, and that there’s nothing wrong with their sexuality, which I guess was a little preachy of me, but so it goes.)

Also, they don’t get drunk. They have two glasses of champagne!

That’s a really interesting question, because it makes me wonder to what extent I’m writing with an eye toward the international readers of my novels. (Some relatively high percentage of my readers are not American.) Certainly, I was not aware of doing that: I didn’t think, and never think, “Oh, I need to write it this way so that it will play in Austria” or whatever. When I’m writing, consciously at least, I only think about what will in my opinion best serve the story.

But it’s impossible to say for sure if/whether/how commercial concerns factor into creative decisions, because you can say all day that you turn that stuff off when you’re writing, and I hope that I do, but I have no actual way of proving whether I do.

Anyway, in general I did want TFiOS to feel more, like, out of time and place than any of my previous novels, because that’s how romantic epics tend to feel, and I was very much trying to write a little epic.

1. I did quite a lot of research on cancer, probably more than a hypochondriac should. I am particularly indebted to the books I cite in the acknowledgements, both of which I read more than once. (Also, my father-in-law is a cancer surgeon.)

2. I’ve talked about this elsewhere, but I think cancer is to the contemporary world what tuberculosis was to the 19th century: It’s this seemingly random, capricious disease that strikes old and young alike, that sometimes kills you and other times doesn’t, and that we don’t understand very well. And this randomness/indifference was really important to me, because I wanted to think about how/whether we can be hopeful in a universe that is (apparently) entirely indifferent toward its inhabitants.

3. I gave Gus osteosarcoma because it’s a common adolescent cancer and can go quiet for a long while before roaring back, and I gave Hazel thyroid cancer with mets in her lungs because A. I was fairly familiar with it (it’s similar to what Esther had), and B. I wanted her to have some kind of tumors in her lungs because it allowed me to have the water metaphor.

It sounds so weird and cold and calculating to talk about it that way, but…yeah. 

Well, I wanted to ignore traditional gender roles whenever possible in the novel, because I was kind of working in the Romantic Epic genre, which tends to have very narrowly defined gender roles (the man is the protector; the woman suffers beautifully; etc) and I wanted to write a different kind of Romantic Epic. (A much smaller one, for starters, about disease instead of war/politics/royal families/etc.)

It just seemed to me—and I say this respectfully—like both the most reprehensible and the most formatted (i.e., functionally scripted) of the competitive reality shows I’d seen.

Well, I always want to write books that stand up to re-reading, but to be clear, there’s more than one good way to read a book. The great thing about figurative language and symbols and the like in novels is that you don’t have to be conscious of them for them to work.

Like, let’s say you read The Catcher in the Rye and somehow your English teacher doesn’t tell you about the red hunting cap, and so you read the whole damn novel without ever thinking much one way or the other about this hat Holden keeps putting on and taking off.

Even if you haven’t thought about any of this consciously at all, there’s still a pretty good chance that something inside you will break open when Phoebe puts the hat on Holden at the end of the book, because it’s such a small and kind and humane gesture. And maybe if you’re heavily invested in the red hunting cap, that moment will hit you harder, but it will hit you regardless.

But the red hunting cap isn’t what makes Catcher good, and if TFiOS is good, it isn’t because of any symbols or metaphors in isolation. Catcher is a great book because it lets you see the world out of someone else’s eyes; it gives you the rare opportunity to escape the prison of your consciousness and imagine in a big and complex and generous way what it would be like to be Holden Caulfield. All the language in the novel exists to make your experience of Holden’s life richer and more compelling and more real.

I couldn’t write the book until I understood that the love between a parent and child (like many other kinds of love) is literally stronger than death: As long as either person survives, the relationship survives.

So my grandmother may be dead, but she is still my grandmother. Augustus may be dead, but he is still the great star-crossed love of Hazel’s life.

I didn’t really understand that until I got to know Henry.

The time I spent as a chaplain was very helpful, because I got to know a lot of different people with many different kinds of cancer. But for the first several years after my months as a chaplain, all the writing I tried to do about illness was terrible.

So I do think knowing and caring about Esther was probably the most important thing in terms of thinking about the mindsets and emotional realities of chronic illness. I also talked a lot to families of people with cancer and I read a lot of books about cancer, which were extremely helpful. But if I hadn’t known Esther, I never would have written The Fault in Our Stars. I might’ve eventually finished a book about adolescent illness of some kind, but it wouldn’t have been this one.

I do see myself as Patrick-like in a lot of ways, yes. Also PVH. Also Hazel’s dad, I guess. I identify personally closer with the (male) adults in the novel than the teenagers, I guess.

No. Everything I wrote for NaNoWriMo was about a zombie apocalypse caused by corn monoculture.

Well, I didn’t want to bullshit the reader, but I also didn’t want to be gratuitous about it. I left the worst of it off the page, I guess, but I don’t really regret that. You might be asking whether I regret being so explicit, in which case the answer is definitely not. Our literature has enough novels that glorify suffering as transcendently beautiful.

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.