A lot of people ask this question.

First, people with all kinds of disabilities can and do have sex.

Secondly, despite what I guess you are seeing in porn or in the movies, sexual intercourse does not have to be a particularly aerobic activity. I suppose it’s helpful if at least one partner can do some work, but you’ll recall that Gus ascended the stairs at the Anne Frank House with relative ease.

Thirdly, I don’t know how y’all are doing it, but it’s not that challenging.

Well, Hazel is just flat wrong about infinity.

The infinite set between 0 and 1 is actually the same size as the infinite set between 0 and 2, so Hazel is technically incorrect.

(It is not easy to succinctly explain why this is, although this site does a reasonably good job—there, the example used is the set of positive integers being the same size as the set of all integers, but it’s the same principle.)

However, Van Houten is right* when he says that some infinities are bigger than other infinities. For instance, as proven by Cantor’s diagonal argument, the infinite set of real numbers is bigger than the infinite set of natural numbers.

So Hazel takes Van Houten’s correct observation and makes an intuitive but incorrect conclusion from it, albeit one that provides her with real and lasting comfort.

The idea there was that I liked that 16-year-olds could make—as they do—incorrect abstract conclusions about complex mathematics. But even if these conclusions are incorrect, they can provide real and lasting consolation. I felt like it would be too neat/tidy to have everything be correct; I wanted her to make incorrect inferences from Van Houten’s monologue that still guide her thinking in a correct/helpful direction.

*I am not a mathematician, but I tried my best to get this stuff right. I don’t mean ‘think’ in the sense that this is the kind of thing you’re allowed to have opinions about. You don’t get to have an opinion on whether .999… is equal to 1, for instance. It is equal to 1. People smarter than us have worked hard to figure this stuff out, and we owe it to them and to the universe to respect what they’ve figured out.

I didn’t see it as txt language; I saw it as a callback to 19th century (and earlier) written correspondence, when yrs was a popular salutation.

This obviously dates me and is a weakness in the book, and I’m sorry.

I never think about txt language. I had no idea that people on sms contracted yours into yrs.

Weird.

Right. It’s okay to live with finality. (And also, within these finite spaces/lives, there are infinite sets to be found.)

But this is dangerous thematic ground to tread, because saying that sequels don’t exist for a reason (i.e., that a book ends when it ends for a reason) and then linking finite fictions to finite human lives is dangerously close to saying that lives end for a reason, which (I hope) the book does not argue.

It seems to me that one of the pleasures and consolations of fiction is the ways in which it is not like life.

I don’t think the area of meaning is defined by the author—at least not exclusively—but otherwise I agree.

When I say books belong to their readers, I do not mean, “If you think Huck Finn is a novel that defends slavery, you are entitled to your opinion.” That reading is wrong. It’s as wrong as thinking that 2 + 3 = 7.

I mean that readers should not define reading as the act of divining an author’s intents. Readers are co-creators of a fiction, and should be empowered.

As a thought experiment: Imagine that Huck Finn contained the exact same words that it currently contains, but that Mark Twain insisted it was a book about how slavery is a great idea. I would argue that Mark Twain would be every bit as wrong about the novel as anyone else who thinks that it is a pro-slavery novel.

The author defines the area of meaning through choosing the words in the novel. But beyond the words in the novel, the author is not in the defining-an-area-of-meaning game. Readers do that collectively.

(All of this stated with the caveat that I might be wrong and have been wrong before.)

Well, I guess Hazel wants to know what will happen to her own mother after she dies, right? Hazel is very concerned about the way that her illness hurts her parents, and she is very concerned that her death will devastate or incapacitate them, which is why it means so much to Hazel when she finds out that her mom is planning to have a life even when she is gone.

But to think about those things directly is so terrifying and so awful and so upsetting that she thinks about them through the lens of AIA instead. (We all do this a million times a day in one form or another.) So she is focused on whether Anna’s mother ends up okay for the same reason Holden Caulfield wants to know if the ducks in the pond end up okay: She wants to know that she’ll be okay, and that her family will be okay.

It was purposeful. I needed Hazel to believe (at least at the beginning of the book) that upon her death, her mom would no longer be a mom. That was really important to me.

I think that’s more of a both/and proposition than an either/or one.

I am conscious that they don’t exist, but I still feel bad for them.

This is the same way I feel about house elves, come to think of it.

Yes, well, I had to have Gus point it out just in case you weren’t noticing it. :) 

Augustus is a big name. It’s the name of the first emperor of the Roman Empire, a name one associates with confidence and bravado and marble statues and stuff. Gus is a much shorter, smaller name—the kind of name that appears in children’s picture books, for instance. In some ways, they’re opposites: the one a big, strong man; the other, a fragile and endangered little boy.

Hazel calls him Gus more as she knows him better, as the manic pixie dream boy falls away and she comes to know and grapple with and love this fragile, desperate, beautiful boy.

When they’re on the plane together and his facade breaks down and he gets nervous and excited about flying for the first time and she can’t help but like him, that’s Gus. When he’s using big words slightly incorrectly, that’s Augustus. :)

Drugs like phalanxifor will exist, although probably with less metaphorically resonant names.

Phalanxifor is based on the breast cancer drug herceptin, which is for certain patients very effective. Targeted therapies like herceptin are a very promising site of research in cancer treatment, though, and hopefully there will be hundreds of drugs like it within the next decade or two.

(That said, it is now clear that “curing cancer” will be extremely complex, because cancer is not just one disease. It is thousands—arguably millions—of diseases.)

I think she just hates hurting him. She worries a lot that she will become a mere sadness in her parents’ lives, and at one point explicitly says that she feels like she is the alpha and the omega of her parents’ suffering. And it becomes impossible to forget that when she sees her dad crying.

The general problem here is one of entitlement: People think it is okay to have an opinion about facts. This happens all the time and not only in mathematics (as, for instance, when people think it is legitimate to have the opinion that capitalism hasn’t resulted in GDP growth, or that humans aren’t contributing to climate change, or that Huck Finn is pro-slavery).

You are not entitled to have an opinion about a fact.

But anyway, for a good explanation of why .999… = 1, visit wikipedia.

I think people tend to spend a lot of their time thinking about food when they are hungry. But to classify this phenomenon into some rigid hierarchy is ridiculous and unfair to the hungry, because it says, “The highfalutin’ world of art and music and philosophy is not for you. It is only for we rich, well-fed people.” That bothers me.

In general, Maslow’s ideas about human motivation don’t hold up for me, and the whole affair smacks of the mid-20th century believe that psychology could describe and quantify human experience and behavior at least as precisely as physics can describe and quantify gravity.

I think you have define your terms pretty carefully—terms like “God” and “love” and protect” and especially “forever” mean different things to different people. So you have to decide what those words mean to you, and it may be that these words are being defined for you in a way that you find to be theologically inconsistent or implausible way. (This is pretty common, I think.)

The actual seeing of horrible things shouldn’t affect your worldview that much, at least if you’re able to acknowledge and internalize the reality (and relative commonness) of horrible things. If you understand that half the planet lives on less than $2.50 a day, that for almost all of human history infant mortality was above 20%, that until very recently children dying of disease was astonishingly common, you do not need to see anything personally to have trouble reconciling some constructions of God with the reality of suffering in the world.

(It’s also very important to note—and remember that I am saying this from a faith-based perspective—that religion did absolutely nothing to change any of that. There’s no evidence that over the last 1,000 years, Christians have on average been less poor or sick than Muslims, for instance.)

That doesn’t negate theistic worldviews in any way. But theistic worldviews that fail to grapple meaningfully and thoughtfully with the world as it is are not very interesting to me.

I don’t know the text better than any of its readers. That’s just factually incorrect. I don’t have access to a secret story. I do not know what happens outside of the story any more than anyone else does.

Stop privileging the voice of the writer. Empower yourself. You are the reader. It is your story.

Oh I assume because he wants to make out with her. Is that strictly honorable? I think it is!

I am really bothered by the idea that people in pain who are being wrenched from existence should be perpetually cheerful and compassionate about it.

More generally, I wrote this book partly because I was tired of reading stories in which dying or chronically sick people served no purpose in the world except to teach the rest of us to be Grateful For Every Moment or whatever. Making the lives of the dying about the betterment of the social order for the well really offends me, because it implies that the dying are already dead, and that their lives have less intrinsic meaning than other lives.

I wanted to try to reflect dying as honestly as I could, and part of that is frustration and anger and shortness and fear. Gus is supposed to seem less charismatic and less heroic (at least by standard definitions of heroism) as he gets weaker, but he is more human, and the love they share is more human and more sustainable than the performed, monologue-laden love they both initially think of as perfect.

We have this cultural idea—some of this is due to certain interpretations of Christianity that have held sway over our culture—that humans are made more heroic and more perfect through dying and death, that dying elevates us to perfection. Romantic epics tend to further that idea, but I didn’t want to: I wanted to show that people in dying often become weaker and more human, but that this humanness is what is actually heroic, not grand gestures of sacrificial suffering. In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business—and I wanted to try to reflect that.

1. I don’t think TFiOS has a necessarily secular worldview. It really depends on your reading of the book. Hazel’s dad, for instances, makes the argument that the universe is invested in consciousness, which is not a strictly atheistic thing to say and is in fact perilously close to claiming the existence of heaven.

1a. Of course Hazel dismisses her dad’s argument, so there’s that.

1b. Then again, many of the central events of the novel take place in the Literal Heart of Jesus. Setting a novel inside the heart of God’s son does not strike me as a particularly unChristian thing to do.

1c. Of course the kids are always making fun of the place and claiming that Patrick’s use of the phrase Literal Heart of Jesus is a misuse of literality.

1d. But then again, Hazel and Gus and Isaac themselves come to call the place the Literal Heart.

1e. It seems to me that different characters in the book find varying degrees of secular, religious, theistic, and atheistic ways to confront the reality and injustice of suffering, and that the book (at least if I did it right) is more an exploration of the variety of responses to suffering than an argument in favor of one over another.

2. I do not believe the job of a novelist is to thrust his or her belief system upon a reader.