I don’t think smart people are better than other people. More importantly, I view intelligence (at least the kind of intelligence that most of the characters in my novel display) as something learned not inborn. I don’t think Hazel or Gus necessarily have particularly high IQs (Gus in particular is constantly misusing words). I just think they’re intellectually curious.

That said, books belong to their readers, and I don’t have a problem with people disliking or criticizing books that I have written, because I don’t really see those books as mine. I did my best. The reader does her/his best. If we can make something worthwhile together, I’m grateful. If we can’t, that’s too bad, but fortunately there are lots of other authors out there.

I don’t think there are many human beings who do not act for the sake of metaphorical resonance. (Like, I think at its core this is what fashion is about, and sports, etc.) Quite a lot of life is about constructing meaning, which often (usually?) involves metaphor.

Oh, there is a lot inside of me that wants a big, grand adventure of a life—I just think most of that urge is bullshit and not very deeply thought out.

But Hazel is far more thoughtful about her actions and their implications than I am.

Yes.

I really haven’t known any terminally ill people who lived in fear of hell. Maybe that’s just my personal biased experience, but yeah.

(Also this is definitely a personal bias: I just don’t find hell very interesting theologically.)

Well, for starters I really like Swedish hip hop, and especially Afasi och Filthy. But yeah, I wanted Van Houten to be the kind of guy who cultivates his own eccentricity, which is basically the most narcissistic and self-indulgent variety of human being I’ve ever come across.

Every single human being alive on the entire planet is going to die, including you. The question for me is not why we die; the question is what constitutes a full and well-lived life.

I wanted to argue that a good life need not be a long one.

I didn’t want to sentimentalize or romanticize anything in the book. And one of the most common ways that we sentimentalize death and dying is by talking about the dead or dying person’s “beautiful soul,” or just generally by talking about the soul and its imperishability and resilience and so on.

But when I worked at the hospital, I saw several young men and women with brain tumors whose personalities and spirits were utterly transformed by their disease, which calls into question the whole idea of a soul.

I was so tired of the idea that suffering is transcendent, and that cancer suffering in particular strengthens you and makes you better. That can be true for many people, but it’s an oversimplification, because there are cancers that attack parts of the brain and turn kind, generous people into selfish, impulsive, cruel people.

I wanted to make that clear, to make it clear that when we talk about the human soul we had better do so carefully and thoughtfully, because otherwise we dehumanize people like Caroline Mathers whose diseases attack and transform their personalities.

Also, I didn’t want Gus and Hazel to be this Pure As The Driven Snow, Never Loved Before couple, because I also dislike the convention of the epic romance genre wherein the doomed lovers are somehow more innocent and golden than the rest of us. I wanted Gus and Hazel to be people, just regular nice smart people, who also happen to have a chronic illness.

I don’t know how you can say that Hazel does not have one huge terrible flaw when it is repeatedly stated throughout the novel that she regularly watches America’s Next Top Model.

The characters in the novel who are romantically interested in each other often describe each other as beautiful not because they’re objectively beautiful but because they find each other attractive. But in books like LfA and Paper Towns, part of what I was trying to do was explore the weird and worship-y relationship contemporary American boys in high school often have with the girls they admire from afar, an attraction that is usually seen pretty positively even though I think it is kind of sick and crazy to treat a person like a precious object.

It was supposed to be complicated. Here’s this moment that should be this great moment of romance and emotional connection, but Gus isn’t being honest with Hazel, and besides that, the whole thing is awkward and nerdy and physically challenging, and Gus still wants to be someone he’s never going to be, and Hazel thinks she’s going to make Gus’s life worse in the long run, but they still love each other anyway.

Well, she is a voiceless character. (You never directly hear her speak, except for the word “always.”) I wanted Hazel to be aware of this voicelessness in a way that Gus and Isaac weren’t, and to stand up for her even when it was very difficult to do so. (Throughout the novel, she repeatedly defends Monica and seeks to understand her, while the boys just want to put her into the easy category of Enemy.)

Hazel does this quite a bit—she’s a very empathetic person and repeatedly defends and seeks to understand people and be generous to them. (See also when she doesn’t get mad at Augustus for hiding his diagnosis from her, or when she delivers the eulogy full of Encouragements).

This compassion breaks down only once, I think—when she sees all the posts on Gus’s wall about how he’ll live forever in the memory of his acquaintances.

I wanted her to break there so the reader really felt Hazel falling apart—even the core ideas of humility and compassion that make her up abandon her in the crush of loss and grief.

At that point in the novel, they’ve known each other for quite a bit longer than a week, and he doesn’t give her anything; he shares it. But more generally this points to something very important about Augustus, which is that he is given over to grand, Romantic (in the larger sense of the word) gestures. (See also, smoking unlit cigarettes.) I think Hazel initially sees this as a very endearing quality, but it comes to be really frustrating for her—a frustration that reaches its sad pinnacle at the Speedway when he is trying to buy himself cigarettes. This is meant to be part of Gus’s attempt to embody traditional, sacrifice-based models of heroism.

Well, the last sentence is not in the past tense, just to be clear.

I wrote the book in the past tense so the reader would know that Hazel is telling the story of something that happened to her in the past—at least until the last sentence.

First off, thanks to Rosianna for contextualizing the quote for me in a way that made me want to use it as a title in the first place.

So there’s this moment in the play Julius Caesar where one Roman nobleman says to another, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” And in the context of the play, that quotation makes perfect sense—these two guys did not suffer some unjust destiny; they made decisions that led them to their fates.

However, that quote has since been decontextualized over and over and used universally as a way of saying that the fault is not in the stars (i.e., fate/luck/whatever) but in individual people.

Well, that’s of course ridiculous. There is plenty of fault in our stars. The world is a profoundly unjust place in which suffering is unfairly distributed, and in all of my novels but especially this one, I am trying to find ways to live honestly and hopefully in the world without ignoring/denying the universe’s cold and painful indifference to us.*

The whole problem of reconciling ourselves to the fault in our stars seems like a really big problem to me—and not just an abstract, philosophical problem but a problem that has to be solved in order for us to get up every day and get dressed and brush our teeth and try to live full, productive lives.

* Well, I can’t say categorically that the universe is indifferent to us. But I think the way the universe looks and the way it would look if it were totally indifferent to us are disconcertingly similar, if that makes any sense.

Well, Gus is definitely conscious of this. (Hazel doesn’t know he’s sick in the Anne Frank House, but Gus sure does.) And I think that’s a lot of the reason he feels so angry and defiant, and probably also some of the reason it does not feel inappropriate to him to make out in the Anne Frank House.

Generally, I wanted both of them to take back the weird, empty, quiet, sacred space that is the Anne Frank House (and more generally is the reverent but distant way we are always thinking of the dead) and find a different way to honor her life.

Well, always is just an inherently ridiculous concept, but of course you want to say it to people you love, right? You want to promise them that you will always love them, that you will always take care of them, that they needn’t worry because you’re always going to be there. You won’t always be there, because at some point you’ll be dead or stuck in traffic or in love with someone else or whatever.

Most of us (me included) don’t think about the ridiculousness of what we’re actually saying when we say, “I’ll love you forever*,” or “”I will always remember this day,” or, “I’ll never forget** you” or whatever. Like, I say those things all the time, like most people do. But Hazel and Augustus are both a lot more measured in the way they imagine themselves and their love for/responsibilities to other people, hence them adopting “okay” as the word that serves as an expression of their love for each other.

* It’s important to note that forever is not a long time just as infinity is not a large number. Forever is infinite, and it’s a very bold to make declarative sentences about infinities.

** This seems to me a very fate-tempting thing to say. Like, what if you develop dementia?

Well, a couple things here, I guess:

1. One of the weird things about cell phones and the ubiquity of caller ID is that there is no longer a need for hello; there’s this instant familiarity so conversations start quicker than they used to, which I find fascinating.

2. Hazel makes a point early in the novel that she likes people (like Gus/Augustus) with two names, and that she has always just been Hazel, a name that doesn’t lend itself to nicknames. But Gus finds a way to choose her name anyway by calling her Hazel Grace. I just liked that, I guess.

Augustus was not inspired by Josh Sundquist, although Josh Sundquist is a wonderful guy and I am also pretty fond of Augustus.

Really, Augustus and Josh are complete opposites. Josh responded to his amputation by becoming an amazing athlete; Gus responds to it by abandoning all athletic endeavors. Josh is positive and project-focused; Gus is brooding and introspective and finds it difficult to finish anything even as he fetishizes his ideas about heroism and sacrifice.

I also started writing about the character who became Augustus many years (like, seven) before I knew Josh Sundquist. Josh helped me out by answering questions about disease progression and that kind of thing, but I want to be very clear that Josh responds to life and everything in life in a much better-adjusted way than Augustus ever could.

I gave him one leg because that’s the most common disability resulting from osteosarcoma. I gave him osteosarcoma because A. it’s one of the most common cancers among teens, and B. it has a pretty good survival rate, but not as good as the other cancers I considered.

He could be doing a bunch of things, including disposing of some kind of liquid medicine that he realizes he can’t take on the plane when he gets in line, or throwing up, or freaking out, or he could be telling Hazel the truth. I wanted that moment to be ambiguous and out-of-character so the reader might start to feel just a smidge unsettled about Augustus and his well-being.