LFA Questions Answered

Here's how J. D. Salinger dedicated one of his books: "If there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children." 

It's okay to be a reader who reads and runs, to enjoy a book without trying to consciously read it critically. I think there are also many joys to critical reading, but I don't think reading should be a metaphor hunt. Metaphor and figurative language are so deeply ingrainted into how we imagine ourselves and our world that you don't need to look for them in a text to be affected by them.

I used it again in Paper Towns. I ALMOST used it in TFIOS, but Julie encouraged me to cut it. (Originally, TFIOS moved between past and present tense almost every paragraph.)

So when I am telling a story, I switch a lot between past and present tense. I might be like, "So I was driving down the street and then BOOM a deer jumps out of the woods and almost hits my car, and I almost peed my pants." That's a grammatically disastrous sentence, but the reason I switch tenses there is because when describing the moment of crisis--the deer jumping onto the street--I feel as if it is still happening, and I want to express to you that it was so intense that it is on some level not over.

I'm not cautious. Hank and I have both talked about that stuff before. I just don't find it very INTERESTING. I think this bright line between theism and atheism and all the assumptions that go along with it (that theistic worldviews are anti-science, that atheistic worldviews have no room for wonder, etc.) are false dichotomies and as I have said in the past I find all those discussions very boring. 

I think God is such a good idea that if God didn't exist, we'd have to invent God.

Soon after celebrating the 10th anniversary of Looking for Alaska's publication, we will celebrate the 10th anniversary of Paramount owning the movie rights to Looking for Alaska. Over the years, several attempts have been made to develop the film, but so far it hasn't happened.

There were many times writing this book that I felt it was my only hope. I would often say to my family or friends this like, "This novel is my only chance." I couldn't articulate it further than that--my only chance to what? my only hope of what? I didn't know, and still don't really. I just needed the story. I needed it to work. That made me patient: I kept writing, kept revising. The thing had to be pried out of my hands, basically.

Yeah.

Oh God I am so old and that book is so old.

So there are going to be questions in your life--big questions--that need to be answered and deserved to be answered but nonetheless go unanswered.

There will be questions around deaths and friendships and romances and religion and mysteries of every variety that never get solved to your satisfaction. The interesting question to me is: Can you go on in the face of that uncertainty? Can you live with integrity and hope even even with these unanswered questions?

Finding a way to live with that ambiguity matters.

...It is what I drank in high school.

(Trying to think of some metaphor...)

I'm going to recommend that you not read the book, actually.

BBTTR.

I don't know. I read and loved The Virgin Suicides as a high school senior, and it's possible it wasn't a coincidence at all but some lingering memory of that book.

The 773 number was my cell phone number until 2007.

It is now someone else's cell phone number in all likelihood, so please don't call it.

(A handful of people called me over the years, and it was always okay, but it turns out that I am a much more introverted and anxious person that I understood myself to be at the time of writing the novel, when I was only imagining these interactions abstractly.)