Well many years ago I worked as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, and I think it got lodged in my head then. The kids I met were funny and bright and angry and dark and just as human as anybody else. And I really wanted to try to capture that, I guess, and I felt that the stories that I was reading sort of oversimplified and sometimes even dehumanized them. And I think generally we have a habit of imagining the very sick or the dying as being kind of fundamentally other. I guess I wanted to argue for their humanity, their complete humanity.

So that was the initial inspiration.

That took 12 years. I was very intimidated by it.

What were the things you were worried you would get wrong? Or what were the things you struggled with as you wrote the book?

I was very conscious of the fact that it wasn’t my story. And I really didn’t want to appropriate someone else's story, particularly because people who live with terminal illness so often get their stories taken from them. And I really didn't want to do that and I tried to be really conscious of that.

I am wondering whether, since the book came out, you’ve gotten any reactions from young people who are sick with a terminal illness. Have they read the book? What have you heard from them?

Yeah. They’ve been very generous. That was something that really scared me—was thinking about what sick kids in particular would think about the book, and whether they would feel like it was just another, for lack of a better term, bullshit cancer book. And they’ve been really generous. You know, I tried really hard to listen to as many voices as I could as closely as possible during the many years that I was working on this book, and to pay attention and not to bring my own expectations too much into the story.

A lot of them have felt like there were things that I got right that were important to them, and that means a lot to me. That’s in some ways the most rewarding part of having written the book is being able to meet a lot of young people who are struggling with this and knowing that their life expectancy is different from what we in our contemporary culture associate a rich or full or good life.

The truth is, or at least the argument of the book is, I think, that a short life can also be a good life.

Yes, that really came through for me in Hazel's eulogy for Gus at the end. I was crying a lot when I read that.

I was crying when I wrote it too.

Are there any particular reactions, not just from kids, but from adults too, that have really stuck with you as more and more people have read the book?

I’ve always thought of myself as a young-adult writer, and always thought that my audience was going to be teenagers, and I was quite happy with that. It’s very weird to get all these emails from, you know, 85-year-old grandmothers writing in all capital letters about how much they liked the book. It’s just something I never anticipated.