“John Green tried to write this book more than once. Over the years that passed since he abandoned his original life plan (to be a priest) and chose option B (to be an author) he wrote and erased an endless amount of sentences that were meant to become this story, which describes the lives of children and teenagers who are suffering from terminal diseases - children he met during five months in which he worked at a hospital, as part of his training as a religion man. Some of these sentences, he says, eventually even got in to “The Fault in Our Stars”, but most of them didn’t, because most of the drafts always featured a young and desired priest that almost drowned in puddles of sentimentalism that hasn’t really developed into a good story. “I was mad and I was angry about what the ill kids I met have gone through,” says Green. “But I was writing mostly about myself, mostly so I can make peace with it, which is why a book was not born out of it and there was no way other people were going to find interest in it.” 

The final version of “The Fault in Our Stars” was already translated into German, Dutch, French, Icelandic, Swedish, Chinese, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish and Hebrew, was featured on the bestselling lists of newspapers like “The New York Times” and the “Wall Street Journal”, and as opposed to Green’s concerns, interested many people. How did it still happen? “In 2009, I made friends with Esther Earl, a very funny and enchanting girl who got sick with Cancer. Our friendship eventually got out of me the story I was trying to write for years. Hazel, the heroine of “The Fault in Our Stars”, is not Esther, but without her I wouldn’t be able to write.” 

“The Fault in Our Stars” is a story about the 16 year old Hazel, a cancer patient whose parents are forcing to go to a support group meeting. She meets Augustus there, a 17 year old boy whose leg was amputated because of the disease, and they, of course, fall in love. but the story isn’t so simple and isn’t such a cliche. This is about a very sensitive examination of life with a terminal disease, with helplessness and depression, and also of friendship and love and the determination to live what life allows you to. Green is following Hazel and other ill teenagers she meets, sends them to Amsterdam in the search of an eccentric author who wrote an inspiring book, confronts them with the adult world, with their parents, with real and imagined abandonment, with concerns like what would happen to their parents after they’ve lost them, with funerals, with medicine and with the lost of close friends. And it’s hard to believe, but all of this is happening in a warm and very funny book, that even has sex in it (and yes, that hurts, but not only.) 

Green, 35 years old, was born in Indianapolis and grew up in Florida. He was studying literature and religion, lived for a few years in Chicago and in New York and wrote in the most prestigious literature magazines. He has more than a million followers on Twitter, tens of thousands of friends on Facebook, and a video blog on Youtube, on which he constantly looks like he woke up from a coma straight away to a seizure of hyperactivity. Another video blog (Brotherhood 2.0) he’s been maintaining for over five years now with his brother, in an attempt to communicate only through public social media. They’re known as “The Vlogbrothers”, and their website (www.nerdfighters.com) has millions of readers. Before his current book got published, he promised the fans online that he would sign every copy of the book that will be pre-ordered, and as a result he signed 150,000 copies. He mostly writes for young adults, and “The Fault in Our Stars”, his 4th book, won many awards. He lives in Indiana with his wife Sarah, who will not expose herself to the vlogging camera, his son Henry and their dog - Fireball Wilson Roberts.

How did you get from priesthood to writing?

“Look, I wasn’t really good as a priest. After a period of time at the youth hospital, I was going to continue studying religion at the University of Chicago, but then I got a minor job at a literature magazine. I started to write and writing started taking a bigger place in my life, and eventually became the major thing.
Your heroine, Hazel, is reading a book that’s written by a mysterious author who has major influence on what happens to her, on her perspective on life and on her relationships with other people. Do you hope this is what “The Fault in Our Stars” is going to do for other teenagers in her condition?
“I’m not that ambitious. I hope sick and healthy people will read the book and enjoy it. There are so many stories about diseases who are unable to reflect the true reality of this experience, and it was important to me to specify and describe the things correctly as much as I could. I got a lot of comments from readers who say that in their opinion, I managed to reflect what they’re going through and what they feel, and I am grateful for that. One woman wrote in a forum of young cancer patients online that ‘He succeeded in describing the things just the way they are’, and that was very meaningful to me. But trust me, I am not Peter Van Houten, the author Hazel is going to look for. He - as opposed to me - is living a very uncomfortable and stressful life.” 
Apart from talking about diseases, the book makes it very clear that you are a big believer in the powers of the written word. 
“I believe in the power of text. I believe stories make us feel less lonely, and that stories can make us find more empathy towards other people, and identify with their lives. I find, and I’m pretty sure it’s the same with most human beings, that it’s very hard to truly, deeply identify with other people’s lives, that are completely different from me and my life. When I read literature, I manage to grasp that my world is not the only world, and that my life are not the only life form that exists. I read a lot, and I read a large variety of texts: children books, thrillers, romantic novels. Everything.”
“The Fault in Our Stars” deals with a painful and hard issue. How did you manage to combine so much humor into it? Do you really think that sick children are capable of such humor and of such a perspective, but we, the healthy ones, are unable to accept it? 
“Sick people are living people, just as much as living people are living people, and I think that sometimes when people are dying we treat them like they lost some of their human aspects, like they’re less human than others. We think about them as different from us in some deep sense, but from my experience, things are a little more complex: teenagers I knew and faced a disease were funny, intelligent, angry, sarcastic - exactly like other teenagers. This is what I wanted to feel in the book. When I worked at the hospital there were, as expected, very tough days. But there were also very funny moments. I knew a lot of kids with sharp humor, and none of them could stand fake sympathy or sentimentalism.”
Hazel isn’t very glad to go to the support group, and it’s kind of obvious: she doesn’t want to meet more kids with diseases and to see more suffering and pain around her. what do you think of such groups?
“I like support groups, but that’s me. I am not a sick and angry sixteen year old. Hazel is scared of meeting people and of making friends and starting relationships because she doesn’t want to hurt or pain anyone. She knows her odds of living are very slim, and she doesn’t want to build relationships that will hurt people after she dies. The truth is that I think Hazel, Augustus and Isaac love their group, at least in a way that when all their known environment falls apart and they have to meet again one last time - they go to the place where the group used to meet up.”
Have you received surprising feedback from readers?
“The huge amount of readers surprised me. I was surprised of the fact that the book even got translated to Hebrew and here I am, being interviewed for a magazine in Israel. The number of comments that I got is amazing and makes me very happy, especially feedback from doctor and nurses and people who know the disease up-close.”
“The Fault in Our Stars” will soon be adapted into a movie. Who would you like to see as the lead actors? 
“I know so little about what happens today in Hollywood, so I can’t even start to guess who they’re going to cast for the movie. In my imagination there will always be Hazel and Augustus, not the actors that will be chosen by the assemblers.”


19 notes | 7 months ago | Reblog


Posted on October 21st at 1:05 AM
  1. bungee-machete reblogged this from panicmixiedreamgirl
  2. bluehospitality reblogged this from panicmixiedreamgirl
  3. theoddgirl12 reblogged this from panicmixiedreamgirl and added:
    My friend translated an Israeli interview with John Green about The Fault In Our Stars. Check it out!
  4. panicmixiedreamgirl posted this