I am really bothered by the idea that people in pain who are being wrenched from existence should be perpetually cheerful and compassionate about it.

More generally, I wrote this book partly because I was tired of reading stories in which dying or chronically sick people served no purpose in the world except to teach the rest of us to be Grateful For Every Moment or whatever. Making the lives of the dying about the betterment of the social order for the well really offends me, because it implies that the dying are already dead, and that their lives have less intrinsic meaning than other lives.

I wanted to try to reflect dying as honestly as I could, and part of that is frustration and anger and shortness and fear. Gus is supposed to seem less charismatic and less heroic (at least by standard definitions of heroism) as he gets weaker, but he is more human, and the love they share is more human and more sustainable than the performed, monologue-laden love they both initially think of as perfect.

We have this cultural idea—some of this is due to certain interpretations of Christianity that have held sway over our culture—that humans are made more heroic and more perfect through dying and death, that dying elevates us to perfection. Romantic epics tend to further that idea, but I didn’t want to: I wanted to show that people in dying often become weaker and more human, but that this humanness is what is actually heroic, not grand gestures of sacrificial suffering. In my opinion, actual heroism, like actual love, is a messy, painful, vulnerable business—and I wanted to try to reflect that.

1. I don’t think TFiOS has a necessarily secular worldview. It really depends on your reading of the book. Hazel’s dad, for instances, makes the argument that the universe is invested in consciousness, which is not a strictly atheistic thing to say and is in fact perilously close to claiming the existence of heaven.

1a. Of course Hazel dismisses her dad’s argument, so there’s that.

1b. Then again, many of the central events of the novel take place in the Literal Heart of Jesus. Setting a novel inside the heart of God’s son does not strike me as a particularly unChristian thing to do.

1c. Of course the kids are always making fun of the place and claiming that Patrick’s use of the phrase Literal Heart of Jesus is a misuse of literality.

1d. But then again, Hazel and Gus and Isaac themselves come to call the place the Literal Heart.

1e. It seems to me that different characters in the book find varying degrees of secular, religious, theistic, and atheistic ways to confront the reality and injustice of suffering, and that the book (at least if I did it right) is more an exploration of the variety of responses to suffering than an argument in favor of one over another.

2. I do not believe the job of a novelist is to thrust his or her belief system upon a reader.

He says soliloquy when he means monologue, for instance. There are a few other examples, but I can’t think of any at the moment. You’ll notice them as you read, though.

I’m happy to answer questions about intent, or what I was thinking about when I did something, or why I made a certain choice. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like that stuff can be helpful both to readers and to aspiring writers, and I know it was (and remains) very helpful to me to read other writers discuss their processes.

That noted, I will continue to underscore that I don’t think authorial intent is all that important to a reading experience, and I certainly don’t think the job of reading is to divine authorial intent.

Obviously, though, I can’t speak to things I intentionally left unclear, because I wanted those things to be ambiguous—and I still do.

The line before that is, “You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who does the hurting.” What he’s saying is that the only choice you have is in who hurts you, not in whether you get hurt. Then he says that he likes his choices—i.e., that he does not regret loving and being loved by Hazel.

And then Hazel says, “I do,” which is her saying that she also likes her choices—and also simultaneously saying the words that one says when one gets married.

Nothing (at least that can be done by humans) immortalizes anyone. The Fault in Our Stars will hopefully have a long and wonderful life, but it will eventually go out of print, and eventually the last person ever to read it will die, and then the characters will no longer live in any consciousness.

Also, that is okay. That is good, actually. That is how it should be. One of the things the characters in this novel have to grapple with is the reality of temporariness. What Gus in particular must reconcile himself to is that being temporary does not mean being unimportant or meaningless.

Same reason his movie starts first on the plane. Foreshadowing.

But it ISN’T a conversation between you and me if all you’re doing is attempting to understand what I’m saying. That’s just you LISTENING to me, which is kind of boring.

Like, don’t get me wrong, that act of listening to art/media can be pleasantly distracting and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it. That’s essentially what watching an episode of NCIS is, I’d argue: The show knows who killed the person and you don’t and then at the end they tell you.

But I think what happens when you read a book—ideally, anyway—is much more complicated and beautiful and collaborative. My intent as an author matters some, but you as the reader get some agency, too. You get to discover meaning within the story, and sometimes the meaning you discover will be meaning I hoped you would discover, and sometimes it will be meaning I could never have imagined you discovering. But together, we get to build something that matters to you (hopefully), and that brings you pleasure and consolation and a feeling of unaloneness that you can never get from merely listening.

I think trying to divine an author’s intent is generally pretty wrong-headed, although I guess it shouldn’t be dismissed entirely (and obviously I’m willing to answer questions about intent).

That said, it can be a way into an interesting discussion: whether you suppose I wanted you to like Margo Roth Spiegelman, for instance, is not an interesting question to me. But if you go from there to discussing whether characters in novels need to be likable for a book to be good, and whether reading experiences need to be straightforwardly fulfilling in order to be positive, and what (if anything) the point of reading and telling stories is, and whether we can be empathetic toward people we dislike, and if shared values are at the core of human connection or if it’s something altogether less noble, and whether we can reconcile ourselves to the distance between who we want ourselves and one another to be and who we turn out to be…well, that’s pretty interesting to me.

Not really. Augustus’s way of imagining a good and heroic life is really problematic for Hazel, and she thinks that he is completely wrong. That’s very different from the standard manic pixie dream interaction, in which a character appears whose worldview the protagonist finds wholly convincing and totally revelatory. It’s true that Gus helps bring Hazel out into the world, but she never really buys into his wanting to live a big life crap.

Also, Gus’s obsession with living a kind of performed life can be really off-putting (like when he makes everything just so at the funky bones with all the Dutch things, except the conversation is bad because he just wants to deliver his memorized lines and the food is also bad because food chosen for metaphorical resonance does not tend to taste good).

Hazel is conscious of these immaturities, but she has some immaturities of her own. Their great gift is that they’re able to put that stuff aside and care for each other while also not backing down from their convictions.

I find it really offensive when people say that the emotional experiences of teenagers are less real or less important than those of adults.

I am an adult, and I used to be a teenager, and so I can tell you with some authority that my feelings then were as real as my feelings are now.

I don’t know; I wanted that to be ambiguous. (Like, in general I think people have very complicated reasons for wanting things, and we often have no idea whether we’re actually motivated by altruism or a desire to hook up or a search for answers or what.)

I always get annoyed when in books or movies characters want clear things for clear reasons, because my experience of humanness is that I always want messy things for messy reasons.

So I try as best I can to reflect that in fiction while still writing stories that you will hopefully like.

I mean, I sometimes go to church, if that’s what you’re asking.

I don’t think that’s foolish or childish at all. (I also disagree with Peter Van Houten about a number of other things, like whether it is appropriate to drink scotch in the morning.)

But it’s worth noting that your Trueblood or Hazel is not my Trueblood or Hazel, and that my characters can cease to exist in the universe of their creation while still surviving in the universe or your creation.

Well, you might have been wrong. I don’t agree with the notion that there “are no wrong answers” when it comes to reading and thinking about literature.

If, for instance, you read Gatsby and said, “This is a stupid novel about stupid rich people doing things that don’t matter,” you would be wrong. You’d also be wrong if you said the green light across the harbor was a metaphor for Gatsby’s joy and contentment.

But just as many interesting mathematical questions have more than one interesting/correct answer, and historical phenomena can be thought of in more than one way interesting/correct way, so too with literature. So if your reading of the text in question was a good reading, that opened up something in the story and offered a new way in to interesting questions, then that’s great. Like, if your teacher told you that your feminist reading of Jane Eyre was wrong, or that your Marxist reading of Jane Eyre was wrong, then I think your teacher was being unfair, because both Marxist and feminist readings of that novel can be interesting and useful.

But that doesn’t mean you’re entitled to any opinion you happen to have just because you happen to have it. It seems to me that the great pleasure of human life is not in having an opinion, but rather in learning all the ways you are wrong, and all the nuances you failed to account for, and all the truths that turned out to be not as simple as you once believed. And it seems to me that one of the central pleasures of attending school is that you get to read with really well-informed people (teachers) who can help welcome you into a complex world stuffed with rich and maddening ambiguity.

1. All meaning is constructed meaning, so if we construct an association between blue and sadness, and then between the curtains and sadness, and that reading of the text allows us an interesting insight into the characters or the human condition or whatever, then we have done ourselves some good. It does not matter whether the author intended this connection between blue curtains and sadness (although the author may well have: Remember, I spent a decade writing TFiOS; you spend a few hours reading it. I had to find some way to keep myself interested during those thousands of days I was working on it).

2. In the author’s note, I was trying to say several things. Most importantly, I was asking my readers—many of whom know me and know my past—not to read the novel as autobiography, or to try to find facts in it. Secondly, I was arguing that made-up stories can matter, that they matter to us in the real everyday world just as much (and in many cases more than) the real people we know and the real things we do. Made-up stories matter for precisely the same reason that anything matters: because we decide they matter, because we imbue them with meaning. Chimpanzees, while they are very smart and interesting creatures, cannot tell each other stories about war heroes fighting sirens and a cyclops to get home. They cannot use such stories to shape their values and their relationships and their worldviews. We can, and do, and this engagement with constructed narrative is (imho) a big part of what makes us human.

I probably smoked more while working on the book that became The Fault in Our Stars than I did while working on the book that became Looking for Alaska. (I quit smoking in like 2003, by which time I’d worked some on both books, although obviously neither was anywhere close to finished.)

I think Alaska is more of an anti-smoking novel than TFiOS is (Hazel has that one little rant about cigarettes, whereas huge chunks of Alaska are devoted to exploring all the sad ways that smoking is a way of us expressing our desire to self-immolate).

Anyway, I hope that neither of the books celebrates smoking, as smoking is a stupid and also fatal way to spend money. But smoking is a pretty fascinating (to me, anyway) example of how all of use signaling and other symbolic forms of communication to construct our ideas of ourselves.

I think we are as likely to harm the universe as we are to help it, yes. (Actually, I think nothing any human being ever does will have any overall effect on the universe. I mean, you’re talking about a single organism among trillions living on a single sphere among trillions in a single galaxy among 100-500 billion galaxies in a universe without an edge. It’s very difficult to get your head around just how small a part of the universe we are, and on some level, claiming that we can shape the universe is a little bit like the grain of sand on the beach that believes it can control the tides.)

Also, trying to do good is not the same thing as doing good. Many, many people have tried to do good and in the process done harm.

Of course, and this is the miracle to me, none of this exempts us from trying to do good. We must still serve our fellow humans, and the idea of life itself, as best we can—we must still strive to create a world in which people can lead healthy and productive lives without destroying biodiversity on our little sphere.

I don’t find our relative insignificance disheartening at all: The main thing it tells me is that in a culture that worships celebrity and the purportedly extraordinary, ALL people are ordinary people. ALL people have the same responsibilities to themselves and to each other. Maybe the universe cares nothing for us, but WE care about each other. And most encouragingly, we care not just for our friends or family but for the whole enterprise of life—we care about strangers and about humpback whales and, most beautifully of all, we care about the dead. We try with our lives to honor theirs. That’s how we make our lives meaningful, and how we make their lives meaningful, too.

So, like, to me the entire experience of human beings on this planet is all these people having a conversation about what we should and shouldn’t do, and then playing out the consequences of our actions and continuing the conversation across generations etc.

And this goes for big things, like slavery and unsustainable agriculture, and it also goes for little things, like whether authors have a right to speak about their stories outside the text of those stories and whether Justin Bieber is or is not a good musician.

It is important to remember which are the small conversations and which are the big conversations, and I definitely think, “Does JK Rowling saying that Dumbledore is gay make Dumbledore gay*?” is a pretty small question in the scheme of things, but it does have some limited application outside the specific world of Harry Potter.

This is something that JK Rowling and I disagree about, but she and I can still be friends. (Seriously, Jo. I AM READY TO BE YOUR FRIEND.) It’s important to have these productive disagreements, because that’s how we push literature forward. I believe that my opinion on extra-textual questions should not be privileged. I might be wrong. As that conversation with readers and other authors continues, I might one day realize that I am wrong, and then I will flood you with ‘the truth’ about the characters and what happened after the end of the book and Isaac’s secret gayness and whatever else. But for right now, I don’t think that I’m wrong.

*This is not a perfect example, because it’s repeatedly hinted at in the books that Dumbledore is gay and in some ways Rowling was just clarifying her reading of the text rather than introducing a new extra-textual element, and obviously I don’t mind answering questions about intent etc., or this section wouldn’t exist.

I don’t think smart people are better than other people. More importantly, I view intelligence (at least the kind of intelligence that most of the characters in my novel display) as something learned not inborn. I don’t think Hazel or Gus necessarily have particularly high IQs (Gus in particular is constantly misusing words). I just think they’re intellectually curious.

That said, books belong to their readers, and I don’t have a problem with people disliking or criticizing books that I have written, because I don’t really see those books as mine. I did my best. The reader does her/his best. If we can make something worthwhile together, I’m grateful. If we can’t, that’s too bad, but fortunately there are lots of other authors out there.