Teen love story with a twist touches lives
US AUTHOR John Green's life is "a little bit silly" right now.
Some 10.7 million copies of his book, The Fault In Our Stars, have sold to date, the movie version has just been screened at cinemas worldwide, he has 2.3 million Twitter followers, and two million subscribers to his YouTube video blogs.
Then there are the superlative, verging on hysterical, epithets: "the voice of a generation"; "the It boy of YA [Young Adult] literature"; one of Time magazine's "Most Influential People"; a "literary rock star".
"That really is silly," protested Green, "and embarrassing. I can tell you that being on stage reading extracts from one of my books, no matter how large the audience, does not in any way feel like being a rock star".
Yet Green is willing to concede that with The Fault In Our Stars – a teenage love story made into a film starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort – the 36-year-old somehow struck gold in a literary landscape monopolised by werewolves, wizards and dystopian war games.
"I've been astonished by the response," he said.
There's a good reason why many people might steer clear of The Fault In Our Stars: the protagonists – 16-year-old Hazel, "a millennial Natalie Portman", and Gus – are both dying of cancer.
Hazel, diagnosed with Stage IV thyroid cancer at 13 and permanently attached to an oxygen tank she calls "Philip", wisecracks her way through the tragedy that is her life ("the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: congratulations! You're a woman. Now die").
So, too, does Gus, who has a prosthetic leg and shares her acerbic wit ("Osteosarcoma sometimes takes a limb to check you out. Then, if it likes you, it takes the rest.")
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".
Green said 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 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% in the past six years, Green believes any kind of censorship would not 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.
"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 e-mails 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." – Celia Walden © The Daily Telegraph
