That is really compelling. I don’t think I was conscious of it, but it holds together better than a lot of metaphors I did intend.

The more I think about it, the more interesting it becomes. Swans are animals that we romanticize—endowing with nobility and beauty—but if you’ve ever actually encountered a swan, they’re a hell of a lot more complicated than that. The complex (and flawed) ideas associating whiteness and purity resonate for both swans and Alaska, too.

Most importantly, swans are traditionally associated with a passive beauty: They are things to be looked at. But in fact swans are capable of agency and power and biting people on the butt.

I like it!

I didn’t make those capitalization decisions; they were made by the book’s designer, so you’d have to ask her.

The cover had a candle on it because the original cover featured only the smoke, but then certain bookstore chains that are no longer in business said they wouldn’t carry the cover face-out unless a candle was added because the smoke “looked like cigarette smoke.” (Of course, it is cigarette smoke.) So the candle is unrelated to Alaska’s volcano.

Yes, well, welcome to America!

I think The Fault in Our Stars is (for lack of a better word) dirtier than Katherines or Paper Towns. It certainly contains more sex and f-bombs. But Alaska is my dirtiest book so far, I suppose, except maybe WGWG. Why? I wanted to write about sexuality and substance abuse because it felt true to the characters, who are in many ways more screwed up and self-destructive than the characters in my other books.

When you’re a teenager, you’re doing all kinds of important things for the first time, and in writing Alaska I wanted to deromanticize some of those firsts.

 That is the rare question that is too personal.

I don’t plan on writing a sequel to any of my books at the moment. I feel like I left Pudge and the Colonel and Lara and Takumi where I wanted them to be. My grandmother taught me to never say never, but certainly there will not be a sequel in the foreseeable future.

If I were to teach Alaska, I would ask: What is the point of death? and What is the point of literature? and In an essentially and irreperably broken world, is there cause for hope? That is not really much of a lesson plan, though.

That would be cool, except I do not own the movie rights to Looking for Alaska. (Paramount owns them.)

Update in 2019: Looking for Alaska is now an 8-episode Hulu Limited series! You can find out it more here on the Looking for Alaska adaptations page.

My intention was for it to be a complicated mess that was totally impossible to parse, just like real romantic interactions between teenagers in high school. (And also adults after high school.)

I don’t think we feel only one thing in our lives. I don’t think it’s as simple as either A. being in love or B. not being in love. I think our feelings for each other are really complicated and motivated by an endless interconnected web of desires and fears. I wanted to reflect that as best I could.

That’s a really important question. 

One of the challenges of reading a novel that’s written in the first person is that you have to decide how much to trust the narrator. In Catcher in the Rye, for instance, Holden Caulfield shows you over and over again that he is an inveterate liar, but for some reason you still kind of suspect that he is telling you the truth. In other novels (American Psycho comes to mind), the narrator is clearly unreliable.

In Alaska, I think Pudge is trying his best to be accurate to his experience and memory, but it’s also clear he is writing all this down at some point in the future. From the structure of the novel and from a few moments of foreshadowing, I think it’s pretty clear by the end of the book that he knew about Alaska’s death before he started telling the story. And when you look back at the dead, I think they are inevitably more beautiful. Plus, you’re absolutely right that when you’re romantically enthralled with someone, you see that person as more beautiful than other people might. So I think Pudge’s descriptions of her beauty are probably shaped by his memory and his experience. (And while some other people—Takumi and Jake for instance—also find her physically attractive, the Weekday Warriors never express much physical attraction to her.)

Not necessarily. Stories belong to their readers, and if I did my job, there are a bunch of different good readings of the book. But I think there’s a strong case to be made from the story that Pudge and Alaska really loved each other and were in many ways suited to each other. Obviously, one wishes that Pudge could’ve understood the seriousness of Alaska’s pain earlier, and that Alaska could’ve done a better job of reaching out to him. But when I think about those two characters, I never think of them as merely manipulative or merely misimagining. To me, they’re people. Young people, no less.
It’s very hard to love someone well, especially when you are doing it for the first time.

I am going to be totally honest with you:

You have to remember I wrote this book a long time ago. I remember there being a moment near the end of the story when Takumi and Lara are holding hands, but it’s possible that 1. I wrote it and then later cut it, or that 2. I never wrote it but imagined it or that 3. I neither wrote nor imagined it but saw it in the movie script and liked it, or 4. that I read it in some fan fiction. Anyway, I can’t even tell you guys if it’s canon because I don’t remember. But it’s not canon just because I mentioned it in this answer. The text of the novel is the only source material for the novel! BBTTR! etc.

I’m not a psychiatrist, so I’m not going to take a guess at that. I think Alaska is clearly struggling and in a lot of pain, though. And I think it’s particularly difficult for her because she feels alone in that pain, which is what really (in my experience, anyway) makes suffering unbearable and makes one experience real despair.

But the weird thing about depression is that it tends to further isolate you from people, thereby making it ever-harder for anyone to bridge the gap and really hear you in the way you need to be heard. So it becomes progressively more difficult to feel that you aren’t alone with your pain, which can make the despair feel permanent and unsolvable.

This is the most insidious thing about depression, I think: It makes itself more powerful by dragging you away from the world outside of yourself. So I don’t want to diagnose Alaska, but certainly she lives with terrible pain, and I think she clearly feels isolated by it, and I wanted to try to reflect that in the phenomenon in the story.

The same dark mahogany color of her coffin, according to Pudge.

 Sure. I was pretty reckless when I was in high school, and I have periodically lived with depression, and I really struggled against self-destructive impulses. But there are also of course a lot of ways in which I wasn’t like Alaska. I wasn’t living with grief the way she was, and I also had a better support network. (Also, I wasn’t a girl.)

I also never drove drunk. Driving drunk always seemed really crazy to me because you could hurt someone else. Of course, what I never thought through in high school was that when I hurt myself, I was also hurting other people, especially the people (like my parents) who loved me the most.

Fair enough; it is a little gimmicky. (Such things happen, though.) Bear in mind that Alaska didn’t kill her mother. Guilt is a very common response to the loss of a parent or loved one. One always feels that something should’ve been done, and the worst of it is when something actually should’ve been done, but didn’t get done because you are just a regular human being and screw up a million times a day in a million little ways.

That’s really what I was trying to get at: The universe is very capricious in the way that it punishes negligence. Usually, you don’t die if texting while driving. Occasionally, you do. As to your question, it’s so hard to speculate, even with fictional characters, about how their lives would be different if you removed central experiences. From my perspective, Alaska had some pretty serious emotional problems that weren’t about her mother but instead were probably about the way her brain was wired. But all that stuff is so interdependent. One of the reasons I find therapy so useful and interesting is that you can’t really separate nature from nurture.

Yeah, that was very intentional.

Like, the first time Pudge and Alaska have a real conversation, she’s sitting next to him in the dark and he can’t really see her. And throughout the story, there are times when he’s looking at her without seeing her, or there’s something between them that prevents him from seeing her whole face, or he only sees the back of her head, etc. etc. etc.

That was all meant to indicate how incompletely he sees Alaska, something she mentions to him again and again. But in all his fascination with her, he can’t help but romanticize her, which makes it difficult for him to understand the reality and seriousness of her pain.

Yeah, he starts to affect the action in the second half of the novel, but he is very conscious of this passivity. (He calls himself drizzle to Alaska’s hurricane, and the tail to his friends’ comet.) This inability to act is part of what keeps him from following Alaska out to the pay phone, a decision that he’ll have to live with for the rest of his life.

It was important to me when writing the story that Pudge not be blameless. It’s natural to feel guilty in the wake of a friend’s death, but usually, you can eventually say to yourself, “You know what? This wasn’t actually my fault. There was really nothing I could’ve done.” But in Pudge’s case (arguably like Alaska’s case with her own mother), there is something he should’ve done. He should’ve followed her to the pay phone. He should’ve stopped her from leaving. He should’ve acted.

And that’s a much more complicated kind of guilt to live with. Alaska’s death still isn’t his fault, of course. But he will always know he could’ve—and should’ve—stopped her.

The question for me becomes whether you can find a way to live with yourself, whether forgiveness is still available to you even though the person you need to forgive you is gone. Alaska can never reconcile that question for herself with regards to her own mother. Pudge does eventually find an answer that brings him comfort, but along the way he has to become much more proactive about his life and his choices.

Oh, I think Miles is probably just lying to his father. You know, as one does. I don’t think he has any intention of clean living at Culver Creek.

But yeah, Miles is weak-willed. He engages in self-destructive behavior and fails to recognize the seriousness of the self-destructive behavior around him. He doesn’t take full advantage of his extraordinarily privileged opportunities. He gives money to tobacco companies, which do not deserve his money. 

And he drinks horrible wine when he could afford to drink better wine, which is one of the worst sins of all.

But let me submit to you that we are all weak-willed, that we all participate in destructive systems, that we all fail to use our opportunities as fully as we might, and that the whole business of being a reader (and also being a person) is empathizing with the flawed and uncertain people we meet in books and in life. Miles is not simply heroic, but neither is your friend. Neither is anyone.

And for the record, he does make some changes. (Most notably, you don’t see him drinking in the second half of the book.)