Q: While reading, I noticed a lot of links to Looking for Alaska.
It was purposeful in the sense that I felt that in many ways I’d failed in Alaska to adequately address the danger of imagining our romantic interests as something more or greater than human.
That said, Alaska isn’t the only story in our culture that struggles to portray women as more than mysterious nymphs who float into the lives of men, change those men for the better, and then float away. This is a widespread trope in contemporary storytelling, and it’s also not specific to women: There is also the more-than-human (usually older, usually physically strong, frequently wealthy) man who swoops in and cares for the awkward, clumsy, just-a-regular-person woman.
Paper Towns was partly by inspired by my desire to respond to those gender constructions, and more generally to the difficulty of imagining others complexly. It seems to me that the central problem of being a person is that it is extremely hard to empathize with other people, and Paper Towns is an exploration of how we learn to empathize, even with people who may be super annoying or make terrible choices.