Posted by Goodreads on December 4, 2012

Interview by Jade Chang for Goodreads. Jade is a journalist and writer living in Los Angeles. Learn more about Jade and follow what she's reading. Would you like to contribute author interviews to Goodreads? Contact us.

A tour bus. Screaming fans. One hundred and fifty thousand presale autographs. It might sound like a pop album release, but this was the frenzy that accompanied the publication of young adult author John Green 's latest book, The Fault in Our Stars . Some of the early excitement came from Green's loyal online followers, dubbed Nerdfighters (though they're more nerd lovers), who tune in weekly to the author and his brother's funny, frenetic vlog. These are also the readers who propelled his earlier books to success, including Looking for Alaska (2005), An Abundance of Katherines (2006), and Paper Towns (2008) as well as the collaborative effort Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010) with David Levithan The Fault in Our Stars , which spent 44 weeks on thebest-seller list, is both tougher and more romantic than anything Green has written. This love story about two teenagers with cancer does not shy away from talk of death—a former divinity student, Green conceived the idea more than a decade ago while serving as a chaplain at a children's hospital. He talks to Jade Chang about hero complexes, reading Infinite Jest as scripture, and manic pixie dream girls.: It varied a lot. I think people who are religious are more likely to want one around, but it's a very secular position. You're ministering to a lot of nonreligious people. I don't think ministering requires a religious context. The number one thing is that every parent is extremely worried about their kid. Of course, when a chaplain shows up, that can exacerbate this worry rather than calm it.: I was—and in some ways remain—religious, but my inherent academic interest was Islamic studies. It was 1999, and I was interested in interreligious dialogue between Christians and Muslims. There are lots of scholars who do this stuff, who talk to people within the Islamic community and publish papers. It's like any other academic gig. But I was also 21 years old, and I had a deep lack of understanding of what I wanted in life.: We met at a Harry Potter conference in 2009. My brother sings songs about Harry Potter, and they're very popular—he attends a lot of these conferences, and I went to one in Boston. So I went to this concert at the conference; there's a lot of dancing going on. I don't dance, and neither did she, so we ended up talking in the back of the room and became friends.: I could never have written this if I hadn't known Esther. She introduced me to a lot of the ideas in the book, especially hope in a world that is indifferent to individuals, and empathy. She redefined the process of dying young for me.Walking out of the hospital in 2000, I knew I wanted to write a story about sick kids, but I was so angry, so furious with the world that these terrible things could happen, and they weren't even rare or uncommon, and I think in the end for the first ten years or so I never could write it because I was just too angry, and I wasn't able to capture the complexity of the world. I wanted the book to be funny. I wanted the book to be unsentimental. After meeting Esther, I felt very differently about whether a short life could be a rich life.: I guess I'd never quite imagined it in that way before I met Esther. She lived a very full and rich and good life despite dying at 16. Not to acknowledge the goodness and richness of that life would be a disservice to her.: Well, all good American literature is always interested in people who are ambiguously heroic, like Gatsby . There's always a measure of uncertainty in the heroic journey. Even in Huckleberry Finn there was an ambiguity to the heroism of the protagonist's journey, and I certainly didn't want to argue that Hazel and Gus aren't heroic, because I wanted them to be heroes. I wanted them to be heroes not because they were sick but because they made difficult choices. Gus especially is so obsessed with what the hero's journey is, but I didn't want him to get the kind of hero's journey that he wanted, because the vast majority of us don't.: I've never been. I probably did think about it a lot when I was younger, and then I lost interest because I had to pay the mortgage and take care of my kid, but it interests me as a writer—how we imagine our heroes affects our social structure.: Let's imagine a world where we don't celebrate Snooki and the Kardashians. There are any number of nerdy cool people in the world. If we restructure things to see that the hero's journey is a degree in astrophysics rather than a journey to star in a reality show, that's a better world. One of the jobs of a writer is to add nuance and ambiguity to that straight line that people often draw to very specific kinds of heroism. Most of us don't get to be Snooki. For most of us heroism has to be in our everyday lives.: Let's be honest about why that is: the rise of the Internet, the niche-ification of the Internet. We don't mock people celebrating those things, so it's possible to have nerd heroes. They existed in the past, like Mr. Wizard, but they tended to be dehumanized and emasculated, they tended to have their humanness removed.If we're really restructuring our ideas of heroism, then we get a world where that knowledge is widely sought not to achieve as in a physics degree but just as part of being a well-rounded human.: Becoming a father made me much more interested in the parent character in my novels. I've never found parents that interesting. I think when you're 16, if you have good parents, they generally just fade in the background. I had great parents, and because they were great, I thought very little about them in high school.The nature of the love between a parent and child really is literally stronger than death. As long as either person in that relationship is alive, that relationship is still alive.: I knew from the beginning that Hazel and Gus were in an unusual position, in that they would be more reliant on an adult. But they also make pretty mature decisions, and their parents empower them to because they're a little less concerned about the long-term. They want their kids to have the biggest life that they can have.: I just went out to dinner with a group of women who have lost kids to cancer or have kids who are living with cancer. It was really interesting to talk with them. In many of their cases the kids were much younger. They were very generous and supportive readers and very, very kind to say I got some things right. It means a lot to me to read letters from kids who have cancer or other serious illnesses—that's been the biggest surprise.: I thought a lot of sick kids would dislike it, maybe. It's a very bold and strange thing to do as a healthy 34-year-old man, to publish a book [written in the voice of] a 16-year-old girl. I knew the book would have a nice first week because of presales, but I never, never in my life imagined this. The subject matter itself is such a huge hurdle, I can never imagine a situation where someone would pitch this to me and I would want to read it. I thought its commercial potential was very limited.: I read a lot of sad books when I was a kid, when I was between 12 and 14, but frankly the vast majority of the people are adults.: Well, I'd like to think it's because it's good! My hope is that it's because the adult characters are well drawn and because with a good book, genre distinctions matter less. I think we crave unironized, unsentimental emotion because it's also very hard to come by. We have a lot of ironic stories, a lot of sentimental stories. I wanted to not use irony as a tool to create distance, but still to create something that stripped away all sentiment.: That idea comes from a YouTuber named Vi Hart —she's very successful and famous on YouTube. We were having a conversation, and she made the argument. Well, she would actually say shemaking it because she believes in a truly cold and indifferent universe, but that's how I interpret her argument: The universe is biased toward consciousness because the universe wants to be noticed. It's a way into existential hope that doesn't have too much cliché wrapped around it.: Yeah, that was intentional.: No, I feel adequately observed. But I have felt that way, and I think that it's a universal urge to have our pain not be felt alone and to have our joys not be felt alone.: Well, there's a couple things going on. I never expected this would be read by very many people who didn't know me through the Internet. I wanted to play with their expectations. Also, I wanted to think about the relationship between the people who create the things we love and the things themselves, and our instinct to conflate the two even though the people are often at least as flawed as we are.: Oh, yes. I feel bad that I can't talk to all of them on the phone, I can't even properly e-mail all of them back. That it's not OK if they come to my house—you laugh, but they do—they don't know that I have very bad social anxiety, and that's kind of terrifying for me. You know, I was a fan of Kurt Vonnegut , and I knew he was not the best person, but I still thought he had it all figured out, I thought he had the best possible life.: I very briefly met Jeffrey Eugenides and Sherman Alexie . And I've become very good friends with M.T. Anderson The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing ) and Markus Zusak , who wrote The Book Thief : No, they were all very nice. Though I wouldn't tell you if they weren't.: I read it when I was a freshman in college. I read it twice that year.: The language is so fresh and alive and vividly observed that I never found it a chore. As young readers we're much more comfortable with not knowing what the hell is going on. It was hugely important to me, and there were times when I felt like I was almost reading scripture, prophecy, not just great fiction but something tremendously relevant to my life on a minute-by-minute basis. It's still deeply relevant, not just to how I think about fiction but how I approach the world every morning.His idea that the central obligation of the human being is to be observant, to respond to what to you see empathically and compassionately, which is at the center of all of his work really, that idea is a guiding principle in my life.: Right.: I think all true stories are hopeful stories. I don't think there's any room for narcissism among humans, I think it's wrong. Sorry, I meant nihilism. I think it's a mistake. I don't see any point in nihilism...just as I suppose the nihilist sees no point in everything else.: I'm interested in Internet cultures. I'm interested in what the teenagers who drive the Internet culture are passionate about. I follow their lead—they go to tumblr, I go to tumblr. What really interests me is that they're passionate about utilizing the conventions and tools of the Internet that we adults associate with detachment and disengagement for intelligent ends. Like repurposing Honey Boo Boo animated GIFs and making her talk about macroecon and quoting John Maynard Keynes. Subtly repurposing things that we associate with distractions.: The only thing I do is I change my keyboard between every book. I usually shop around. I'm very passionate about the physical feel of pressing the keys. It's got to have the right springiness. I tend to find the built-in keys very unsatisfying, the keys are low-profile and don't really do anything—I want it to feel like I'm typing.: I'm really trying to finish Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel . I've been reading it for a couple of weeks already, it's really good but so long!: Well, I'm working on educational videos with YouTube right now, so a lot of them are educational. I watch Minute Physics , I like Vi Hart a lot. Also CGP Grey —he does these weird animations that explain the way things work.: Growing up in Orlando, I had a very close relationship with Zora Neale Hurston and Their Eyes Were Watching God . I think we had to read her for school in fifth grade, and I really liked it and sought out more. Gatsby . I don't get tired of it, ever.: Ha! I will get him Looking for Alaska and tell him this idea that a human being is more than a human being is a mistaken idea and in the end does no service either to him or the person he's imagining. That trope has become so deeply embedded in American culture, and as someone who writes about young people falling in love, I feel like I can't ignore it, but I try to make it clear that life works best when we think of people as people.