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The Fault in Our Stars - Ten Years Later

2022-01-11 · letter vlog · John · 3:57 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books & writing (also: Health) · mode: Personal essay · tags: timely hook, self promotion, heavy topic

Formerly titled The Fault in Our Stars is TEN YEARS OLD?.

Ill with the flu on the tenth anniversary of The Fault in Our Stars, John reflects that his first three books examined the consequences of misimagining other people and his last three the consequences of misimagining what happens to us, especially illness, which harmful metaphors and blame make doubly painful.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — A bout of flu; The Fault in Our Stars published ten years ago yesterday

  • ★★ John is emerging from a long bout of the flu, not COVID, an old-school virus that makes him feel like he is in the 1990s. (hedged) — 00:00:00 · COVID-19 pandemic
  • ★★★ The Fault in Our Stars was first published ten years ago yesterday (10 January 2012). — 00:00:00 · The Fault in Our Stars
  • ★★ John still doesn't know how to make sense of being its author, except that he is extremely grateful it is still in print and still finding new readers. — 00:00:00 · The Fault in Our Stars

00:00:29 — First three books: misimagining one another; Paper Towns; a writer without a theme finds a new one

  • ★★★ John realizes his first three books tried to understand the consequences of misimagining one another, and his most recent three the consequences of misimagining what happens to us. — 00:00:29
  • ★★★ His first three books were about failing to imagine others as full persons; it interested him because as a teenager he often failed to imagine others complexly, and he saw it in the culture. — 00:00:29 · imagine others complexly
  • ★★★ John says the culture dehumanizes people but also heroizes or romanticizes individuals, treating romanticizing as generous when it can be really destructive. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ After Paper Towns, whose plot hinges on the narrator realizing that Margo was not a miracle or an adventure but a girl, John felt he had explored that theme fully. — 00:00:58 · Paper Towns
  • ★★ Left without a theme, John wrote about 60,000 words of two novels that never worked: not bad, but without a reason to be. — 00:01:27

  • ★★★ At its best, language gives form and sense to the formless and senseless, which those stories weren't doing. — 00:01:27

    “At its best, language gives form and sense to the formless and senseless”

  • ★★★ Returning to something he began writing in 2000, John found a new theme: how we make sense of what happens to us that we don't control, and the consequences of misimagining it. — 00:01:27

00:01:56 — Misimagining illness: Sontag, divine retribution, the double horror, his dad's cancer, the sick-lit convention

  • ★★★ Citing Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor, John says it was commonly believed as late as the 1970s that cancer came from not being loved enough or from immoral behavior; the same was true of cholera and epilepsy. — 00:01:56 · cancer
  • ★★ Diseases are still often cast as divine retribution: John remembers people on TV, when he was a kid, saying HIV was sent by God to punish gay people. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Such ways of imagining illness are tremendously harmful, a double horror: the sick suffer the illness and also a social order that marginalizes or dehumanizes them for being ill. — 00:01:56
  • ★★★ Even benign-seeming metaphors, illness as a battle to win or a mountain to climb, complicate illness: if you don't climb the mountain, it's not your fault. — 00:02:26
  • ★★★ John's dad had cancer twice when John was a kid, so he saw people keep their distance though it wasn't contagious, and invent reasons for his dad's cancer to reassure themselves. — 00:02:26 · Mike Green, cancer

  • ★★ Such explanations, John says, always put the fault in the self, never in the stars, echoing his book's title. — 00:02:55 · The Fault in Our Stars

    “The fault always in the self, never in the stars.”

  • ★★★ John dislikes the genre convention in which sick people get sick so healthy people can learn lessons, so he wanted to write a book with no healthy kids in it. — 00:02:55 · The Fault in Our Stars

  • ★★ John continued the theme in Turtles All the Way Down, writing about what happens when we misunderstand mental illness. — 00:02:55 · Turtles All the Way Down, mental disorder

00:03:24 — Other themes of Turtles and The Anthropocene Reviewed, a tentative unifying theme, thanks and sign-off

In the description and comments

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: The Fault in Our Stars

Also: People: Mike Green · Susan Sontag

Works: Illness as Metaphor · Paper Towns · The Anthropocene Reviewed (book) · Turtles All the Way Down

Terms: imagine others complexly

Concepts: cancer · cholera · dehumanization · epilepsy · free will · HIV/AIDS · infectious disease · Influenza · mental disorder · metaphor · social stigma

Events: COVID-19 pandemic

Characters: Augustus Waters · Hazel Grace Lancaster · Margo Roth Spiegelman

Only in the description or credits: Bookshop.org

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