No.

It’s not my book. It’s your book. I don’t make decisions about things that happen outside the text of the book; I can’t read something that isn’t there any more than you can.

Anyway, there is no definitive way to end it or any other book. No story is ever over, because every human life ripples into every other one, and there is no way to end a story definitively and the search for a definitive end is (imho) the wrong search.

I never wish I could go back and write more, no. I spent a long, long time trying to write the book that became The Fault in Our Stars and to be completely honest with you, I am entirely happy that the story is no longer my problem and is now your problem.

There’s some great fan fiction about Isaac meeting a girl at a movie theater.

No no no I love fanfiction and I love it when people imagine worlds outside of the text for the characters. I just think that if I do it, then my opinion will be privileged over other opinions, and people will be like, “Well but John Green said that Isaac miraculously recovered his sight and became a ballet dancer, so that is what happened.” I don’t want to close off the reading experience in that way.

I love you guys so much for continuing to believe, despite my repeated protestations to the contrary, that I can tell you what happens outside the text of the book.

I can’t! I’m sorry! I’m Peter Van Houten! I can’t do it! I have no idea! I have no idea what happens to Isaac or Hazel or Gus’s parents or who wins America’s Next Top Model or whether the Dutch Tulip Man was God and if so whether He is benevolent. I promise you: I DON’T KNOW.

I have access to the exact same text that you do. I do not have access to any information outside of that text, because then it would just be me speculating about what might happen, and my speculations are no more valuable or authoritative than anyone else’s. Books belong to their readers! Own it! Make it yours!

I don’t know what happens to anyone outside the text of the novel. I have access to the exact same text that you do, and any speculation on my part about the characters or events outside the text of the novel would be no more informed or authoritative than your speculation.

I have no idea. I’m different from Peter Van Houten in many important ways, but in this respect (and some others) we are the same: I have access to the exact same text that you do. My thoughts about the world outside of that text are not any more informed or authoritative than yours.

Textually, Hazel is clearly weaker at the end of the novel than she was in Amsterdam, but that’s all you know, and that’s all I know, too.

Yes. This is inevitable in translation. (Many other lines that are a big deal in English may also get lost in translation.)

But here’s what is often overlooked: Just as there are inevitably losses in the translation process, there are also opportunities. There are ways in which a translation can become richer than the original text.

This is an extension of books belonging to their readers and novels being inherently collaborative. We think, “Well, the author’s original text is the ideal text,” but A. there is no actual “original text” because the entire process of creating the novel is collaborative, and B. it is perfectly possible for a translator to improve an author’s text—at least in places—by working thoughtfully with a different set of linguistic tools.

Well, I was definitely aware that Shakespeare’s comedies end in marriage and his tragedies end in death, and I was rather fond of the idea that my book could end (symbolically, at least) in both.

I was not under the impression I ended it abruptly.

The central thing that Hazel has to realize at the end of the book is that she has been wrong all along about how she imagines her relationships with people she loves. She wasn’t wrong about being a grenade (although we’re all grenades), but she was wrong about how that should shape her behavior.

More importantly but in the same vein, Hazel has to realize that her mom was wrong when she said, “I won’t be a mother anymore.” The truth is, after Hazel dies (assuming she dies), her mom will still be her mom, just as my grandmother is still my grandmother even though she has died. As long as either person is still alive, that relationship survives. (It changes, but it survives.)

So the dual significant to “I do,” to me is 1. she’s realizing that she can still love Augustus and that there is still value in that love, and 2. there is a permanence to the present tense. An infinity within the finite. The present tense is always present. It is always happening now.

(This can obviously be overread: They aren’t really married. You can’t—AND SHOULDN’T—marry a dead person. But I wanted to use the language of that ceremony to connect them to each other, to give her the chance to say the words she’ll probably never get to say in a church while wearing a dress, and to acknowledge that their love was real and important and, in its way, lasting.)

It signifies something that is still happening, that is continuing, that is ongoing, that is not over.

1. It’s present tense.

2. What do you say at your wedding?

Well, as she says, she wants to minimize the number of deaths for which she is responsible. (And more generally, Hazel’s conception of a well-lived life is all about walking lightly upon the earth while she’s here.)

I should add that this idea came not from me but my friend Marina. I was telling her about Hazel’s character and she said, “So she’s a vegetarian right?” And I blinked ever so slightly and said, “Yes, of course,” as if I’d thought of it years before.

The first time I read on tumblr someone say that only Gus should be allowed to call her Hazel Grace, I literally burst into tears*.

I still can’t believe how generously readers have responded to the novel and its characters, and how lovingly they’ve treated Hazel and Gus.

* Total misuse of literality, as nothing in or on me burst in any way. I just started crying.

Hazel strikes me as very much a popular person who happened to get cancer, not as a socially awkward girl. (I mean, she’s very intentional about spending most of her time alone, but that’s not because she’s awkward in social situations or something.)

Well, I think this is a pretty widespread teenager thing. Your parents still imagine you as a child, but you are this sentient sovereign creature, and there starts to be something almost CREEPY about cuddling with your parents for a lot of teens.

This was one of those places where I wanted to establish that just because Hazel is sick and dying or whatever, she is still a teenager, and more generally she is still human and developing emotionally at the standard human rate, and not at some wildly increased rate of development that’s only available to you if you have incurable cancer or whatever.

I don’t really know the answer. Lots of other readers, some of them angrily/critically, have insisted that it is a metaphor for Hazel’s feeling of otherness and her own sense of isolation/ghettoization. That seems like a legitimate reading to me, but personally I just liked the idea of Hazel’s excessive empathy extending even unto scrambled eggs.

Gus.

(Just not in any literal, actual way. But then marriage itself is not really a literal or actual thing. It is a weird, nebulous, spiritual, constructed thing.)

Well, the current of the river returns her to her father over and over again, so water is sort of this benevolent force in that scene. But water is not always a benevolent force in the book (for instance, it is filling her lungs and killing her). It was just a little example, one of many, of how water can function both as nourisher and destroyer.