Theirs is a textbook teen romance, only here the verbal interplay is cancer slang – his pet name for her is “Nosetube Girl” and losing their virginity is less a case of bra-strap fumbling than getting tangled up in oxygen tubes.
The Fault In Our Stars may be good, but it’s far from being an easy read. So bleak and unflinching is the subject matter that it has even been criticised for augmenting a new genre of “sick lit.”
“It’s hard to take that personally when some of the things that have been said about the book didn’t even line up with the plot line,” shrugs Indianapolis-born Green, who points out that, in any case, adults make up a huge percentage of its readership. “I don’t buy the idea that things are made worse by reading about illness or violence. As long as those subjects are treated honestly and authentically, I don’t see that we have to protect teenagers from the reality of them. They are living in the same world as us, after all, and while I understand that urge to maintain their innocence, I don’t think that there is any way to do that.”
Today’s young adult readers certainly don’t seem inclined to be spared the harrowing details of real-life tragedy. Jenny Downham’s 2007 novel Before I Die, which tells the story of a 16-year-old British girl dying of cancer, sold 70,000 copies in its first four months and has been made into a film, Now is Good, starring Dakota Fanning. Never Eighteen by Megan Bostic, published last year, features a leukemia-stricken hero in a race against time to tell his best friend he loves her. And Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why – about a teenage girl who leaves 13 recordings explaining why she killed herself – was also a bestseller.
“I haven’t read Thirteen Reasons,” says Green, when I ask whether such subject matter is irresponsible, “so I can’t speak to it directly. I do think that romanticising illness is dangerous and that novels about illness can be exploitative, but I tried very hard not to do that.
“Plus,” he adds sardonically, “I don’t think these books are among our larger social problems. I’m encouraged by teenagers reading for pleasure: I don’t think that books are going to make their lives worse. And isn’t it a bit odd to talk about contemporary literature that way when these kids are in school reading Dickens and Austen and Charlotte Brontë? I mean Jane Eyre doesn’t go so swimmingly all the time.”
With teenage fiction sales up almost 150 per cent in the past six years, Green feels that any kind of censorship wouldn’t just be unnecessary but harmful. “I feel it has been pretty destructive for films, actually – and counter-productive. Because instead of getting the most honest, interesting movies, we get movies where they’re very careful to use the word f-word only once, where they’re allowed to use lots of violence but no breasts. I’m very troubled by that. And I’m far more worried about what kids are seeing on the internet than by what they’re reading. The internet is a tool – I don’t think it’s good or evil in itself – but if you feel what’s being sold in a bookstore is the most problematic thing around, then you should think again.”
An ability to tap into the emotional intensity and curiosity of teenagers is just one of the qualities behind the praise ladled on Green for The Fault In Our Stars. Far from being a “kidult”, however, this father of two describes himself as “living a very able, slightly pear-shaped middle-aged life in Indianapolis – the 137th nicest city in America.”
He does, however, “remember being a teenager very well”, first in Orlando, Florida, and then Birmingham, Alabama, where he asked his parents – Green’s father was the director of a nature conservatory and his mother worked with underprivileged children – to send him to boarding school. Like the protagonists of his earlier books, An Abundance of Katherines, and Paper Towns – as well as Hazel and Gus in The Fault In Our Stars – Green was “a misfit”.
“I was a bad student and a miserable presence in the classroom and at home,” he says. He began to suffer from depression as a child and lives with it to this day. “Back then, I was never diagnosed. Now, although I would never say that I am in remission, I am able to manage it.”
The idea for The Fault In Our Stars sprang from Green’s work as a chaplain in a children’s hospice when he was 21, having studied religion at Chicago’s Divinity School. “I suppose I felt useful,” he muses, “but to be fair I have great admiration for people who do that and don’t, like me, leave after six months.”
It was, he explains, “unbearable, being confronted by kids dying from illness and serious accidents. It’s a very difficult thing to be a witness to every day and not take home with you. I would get home and just stare at the ceiling.” Green had been thinking of getting ordained, but the experience made that impossible. “All the pseudo fancy ideas that I carried with me into that hospice were completely irrelevant in the face of actual children actually needlessly suffering and then dying. I emerged from it very angry and very annihilistic.”
It wasn’t until years later when he became a father that the author was able to draw on the experience in The Fault In Our Stars. “From the moment my son Henry was born, I understood that as long as either of us were alive – and beyond – I was going to be his father and he was going to be my son. And in that way love really is stronger than death. I found a lot of comfort and hope in that. And it seemed like the kind of hope that wasn’t cheap.”
The scores of letters from terminally ill children that Green has received since the book was first published in 2012 would imply that the chord he has struck rings true. “As a result of the book, I’ve become friends with young people who are sick or dying. On a few occasions, people have made it their ‘wish’ to meet me and I will always accommodate that.
“But I also get letters and emails almost every day from kids who say, ‘I’m just like Hazel but without the cancer’ – which is a strange thing to say because cancer defines her life. But by the end of the book, although cancer is part of her, it’s not all of her.”
He may be living every writer’s dream, but as the countdown to the film’s release begins and Green-mania is at its peak, the author isn’t so much in a permanent state of jubilation as extreme caution. With depression, he says soberly: “All change is bad. The brain isn’t very good at differentiating between good and bad stress. And, of course, it is hard to write in the shadow of something like The Fault In Our Stars…” Which is perhaps why Green remains vague on the subject of his next book. “Hopefully there will be something in 2015…” he says. “And no, it won’t be a prequel. I want to try not to claim ownership over Fault. I think it should live with its readers now.”
‘The Fault In Our Stars’ by John Green (Puffin, RRP £7.99) is available from Telegraph Books at £7.99 + £1.10 p&p. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk
The Fault In Our Stars: "Jane Eyre does not usually go swimmingly"
