“LANGUAGE ALWAYS COMES UP SHORT IN THE FACE OF PAIN”

On Monday, Masthead members participated in an exclusive conference call with author John Green. Listen to the full call below.

Aza Holmes, the protagonist in Green’s new book, Turtles All the Way Down, has severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder. Throughout the book, she wrestles with what she calls “thought spirals,” episodes when destructive thoughts swirl around, one after another, and she can’t get out of her head. Green chose to write about these experiences, he told us on Monday, because they mirror his own. “When I get into these thought spirals, it's not that I can't get out of them for a while,” Green said. “It's that it feels like I can't get out of it ever, because this thing is going to tighten forever until I die, until it kills me. It's really scary.”

Both for Green and his characters, one core difficulty of the experience of mental illness is articulating it. Throughout the book, Aza struggles to explain her internal experience to the people around her. “Language always comes up short in the face of pain,” Green said. “I think that’s part of what makes pain so isolating.” Instead of directly describing what she’s going through, Aza opts for the “thought spiral” metaphor. That resonated with Masthead member Jason, who has anxiety and depression. When Jason asked Green to elaborate on how he came up with the metaphor, Green said it was inspired by a painting by Raymond Pettibon. “When I saw the painting, I just thought, ‘Yeah, that's it, that's it. That's what it feels like.’”

In the book, the people around Aza—her mom, her best friend, the guy she likes—react to her illness in different ways: One tries to fix it; one is brutally honest; and one just (mostly) rolls with it. Green wanted to convey how difficult it is for people to watch someone they love battle mental illness and “not be able to take that pain away, not really know how to respond to it, even.” As for himself, Green said he wants people to bear with him. “The most effective people are the people who... reassure me that even though it is difficult to live with this and to love someone who is living with this, there are also a lot of things about caring for me that are very rewarding.” Be patient, he says, and let your loved one know that “there’s going to be an other side to this.”