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On the Death of the Author

2026-07-07 · letter vlog · John · 7:34 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Books & writing · mode: Personal essay · tags: self promotion

As he prepares to publish Hollywood, Ending, John weighs Roland Barthes' 'The Death of the Author' against his own public life: he still believes books belong to their readers but cannot keep himself out of his novels, and argues a novel works when author and a generous reader co-create it.

What is said

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

00:00:00 — Preparing to publish Hollywood, Ending, John's discomfort with the author's presence in a novel; the TFIOS preface

  • ★★ John is preparing to publish his new book Hollywood, Ending this September and has been thinking about the place of an author in a novel. — 00:00:00 · Hollywood, Ending
  • ★★★ John says one reason he hasn't written a novel in nine years is that he became very uncomfortable with the non-fictional author's presence in a fictional story. — 00:00:00
  • ★★ John recalls writing in the preface of The Fault in Our Stars that neither novels nor readers benefit from divining whether facts hide in a story; readers kept divining, mostly his own fault. — 00:00:00 · The Fault in Our Stars

00:00:29 — 1992: reading The Mysteries of Pittsburgh knowing nothing about its author; John's videos demystifying authors

  • ★★★ In 1992, after a hard high-school year, a friend recommended The Mysteries of Pittsburgh to John; it lit him up, his first book with a queer character, its people glimpses of his deepest self. — 00:00:29
  • ★★ John says all he knew about that book's author was the About the Author page at the end of the book. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ John says authors then had total control over what readers knew about them, except really famous ones such as Stephen King, whose news was covered even in the 1990s. — 00:00:58
  • ★★ John says this meant an author couldn't make a book better by being a great person, or worse by being a terrible one. — 00:01:27
  • ★★ John began making YouTube videos only after becoming an author, partly to demystify authors as regular people rather than writers in ivory towers. — 00:01:27 · YouTube
  • ★ John says all authors are regular people, except Toni Morrison, who was different. (playful) — 00:01:57
  • ★★★ John says he didn't realize he was also inserting himself into the novel in a way that was kind of unprecedented. — 00:01:57
  • ★★ John says in 1992 you couldn't Google the author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, because Google would not be invented for six more years. — 00:01:57 · Google

00:02:28 — 1967: Barthes' The Death of the Author; John's belief that books belong to their readers

  • ★★ John says writers don't write from outside themselves, but glimpsed through one back-page paragraph, authors seemed to him magical, mysterious and a little irrelevant. — 00:02:28
  • ★★ John says the famous literary critic Roland Barthes published his essay The Death of the Author in 1967. — 00:02:28
  • ★★★ John summarizes Barthes: the reader's job is not to understand the author's intention or biography but to bring their deepest self, creating a multi-dimensional space that belongs to every reader, not the 'mere scripter'. (hedged) — 00:02:57
  • ★★ John says The Death of the Author was probably the most important essay he read in college. (hedged) — 00:03:26

  • ★★★ John says books belong to their readers: the author's intention should not be privileged over a reader's interpretation, nor should authors comment outside the text; the author is dead. — 00:03:26

    “books belong to their readers”

00:03:56 — The author problem: John's public life, OCD, Peter Van Houten, Turtles, nonfiction and sharing less

  • ★★ John admits he will not shut up: how can the author be dead when he is also asking you to subscribe to his YouTube channel? (playful) — 00:03:56 · YouTube
  • ★★ John asks how readers can avoid reading an author's life into a novel when they know both the author and the novel's main character have OCD. — 00:03:56
  • ★★ In The Fault in Our Stars John invented Peter Van Houten, an author who meets a dying young reader, knowing readers knew the book was partly inspired by his meeting Esther Earl. — 00:04:25 · The Fault in Our Stars, Esther Earl
  • ★★ In Turtles All the Way Down John tried to accept the problem and talked about his own OCD alongside the character's, which made him feel squeamish. — 00:04:25 · Turtles All the Way Down
  • ★★ John then tried writing nonfiction as himself, but missed writing fiction; he remains extremely flummoxed by the author problem. — 00:04:52
  • ★★ John says he could stop making videos and Instagram posts, and has become more careful about what he shares online so that more of his private life belongs to him. (hedged) — 00:04:52 · Instagram
  • ★★★ John says there is a lot of him in his videos and in his fiction; he cannot ask readers to separate the two when he doesn't know how to separate them himself. — 00:04:52

00:05:22 — Hollywood, Ending as coded autobiography; novels co-created by author and generous reader; sign-off

  • ★★ John says even if he shut up, we can't go back to a world where readers know only what's printed on a book's back page. — 00:05:22
  • ★★ John likes making videos: he doesn't really like the rest of the internet anymore, but still loves Nerdfighteria and wants to be here. — 00:05:22 · Nerdfighteria
  • ★★★ John says that, like all books ever written, Hollywood, Ending is coded autobiography: about movies, press junkets, trauma and sudden fame, which he has known. — 00:05:22 · Hollywood, Ending
  • ★★ John says Hollywood, Ending is still a made-up novel; he hopes it is about the reader's experiences and what they survived, not his. (hedged) — 00:05:51 · Hollywood, Ending
  • ★★★ John doesn't want novels to be riddles of intention and biography to be solved, but windows and doors to rooms in the mind that are hard to visit without art. — 00:05:51
  • ★★ While writing Hollywood, Ending, John thought a lot about art, why we make it and what it means to commodify it. — 00:06:20 · Hollywood, Ending

  • ★★ Citing his friend Kaveh Akbar's line that art is where what we survive survives, John says he tried to write about what we survive and how art records our survival. — 00:06:20

    “art is where what we survive survives”

  • ★★★ John says a novel works not because of the author's intention or biography but because author and reader co-create something neither could create alone. — 00:06:49

  • ★★ John says the same sunset viewed 632 times is 632 sunsets, and the same novel read 632 times is 632 novels, because only each reader brings their deepest self. — 00:06:49
  • ★★★ John says only a reader's generosity and openness turns a good novel into a great one; no story reaches its potential without a generous reader, true in 1967, 1992 and today. — 00:07:18

In the description and comments

Threads in this video

Where the stories that moved here went next

Mentioned

Central: authorial intent · Hollywood, Ending · reader-response criticism · Roland Barthes · The Death of the Author

Also: People: Esther Earl · Kaveh Akbar · Stephen King · Toni Morrison

Works: The Fault in Our Stars · The Mysteries of Pittsburgh · Turtles All the Way Down

Organizations: Google · Instagram · YouTube

Concepts: commodification · obsessive-compulsive disorder · principle of charity

Characters: Peter Van Houten

Also centred on authorial intent: Dec 18th: The Project for Awesome and Question Tuesday!!! · The Education Continuum WARNER CHILCOTTED · Question Tuesday! Paula Deen Riding Me (and critical reading) · On the Movies

Also centred on reader-response criticism: Looking for Alaska Five Years After the Printz Award · Zero Severed Hands: On Star Wars and Making Things

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