TFiOS Questions Answered

Well, it's not an opinion. It's a fact. The infinite set of numbers between 0 and 1 is the same size as the infinite set of numbers between 0 and 2. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on Hilbert's Paradox of the Grand Hotel, which is the most famous proof on this front.

Well, as Hank said in his song "The Universe is Weird," the weirdest thing about the universe is that it created an instrument (humans) with which to know itself. We are both products and observers of the universe, which is pretty mind-boggling if you think about it for a while.

And that leads to an overwhelming question: Is the universe somehow biased toward consciousness? Like, are we just the result of a totally random evolutionary process, or does the universe somehow tilt the odds in favor of beings likes us--creatures that can marvel at and even seek to understand the universe? Does the universe want to be noticed and apprehended and understood? 

Well, it goes back and forth some, but I do this a lot more in my other books, especially KATHERINES.

English grammar never really learned to capture dialogue very well. (Like, from Louise Erdrich to David Foster Wallace to James Joyce, many authors find the accepted rules of dialogue writing totally unacceptable.)

To my mind, the great thing about Funky Bones (which is real) is that it basically forces people to play and picnic upon the bones of the dead.

It is more than a coincidence. People with tuberculosis were often said to have a "hectic glow," so presumably the translator used that English phrase because it was a relatively common description of a symptom of tuberculosis. 

I first came across the phrase in a quote from Thoreau's diaries: "Disease and decay are often beautiful, like the pearly tear of the shellfish or the hectic glow of consumption." This conflation of illness and beauty is problematic but interesting, particularly in the context of tuberculosis, which in the 19th century was a capricious disease that struck young and old alike and sometimes killed you and sometimes didn't.

In early drafts of TFiOS, there was a lot of stuff about how cancer is to the contemporary imagination what cancer was to Thoreau (and Dostoyevsky and their peers), and I wanted to call the novel The Hectic Glow for a long time. But in the end that stuff was kind of pretentious and irrelevant to the story and it faded away until it was just the name of a band.

Well, I always want to write books that stand up to re-reading, but to be clear, there's more than one good way to read a book. The great thing about figurative language and symbols and the like in novels is that you don't have to be conscious of them for them to work. 

Like, let's say you read The Catcher in the Rye and somehow your English teacher doesn't tell you about the red hunting cap, and so you read the whole damn novel without ever thinking much one way or the other about this hat Holden keeps putting on and taking off.

Even if you haven't thought about any of this consciously at all, there's still a pretty good chance that something inside you will break open when Phoebe puts the hat on Holden at the end of the book, because it's such a small and kind and humane gesture. And maybe if you're heavily invested in the red hunting cap, that moment will hit you harder, but it will hit you regardless.

Yeah, The Price of Dawn series is interminable. I think this is one of the things we like about book series, and also about "tentpole franchises" like Spiderman and James Bond: The story is infinite, and survival guaranteed, in a way that is precisely the opposite of the actual world in which we find ourselves.

Your English is much better than my Spanish, so fear not.

I meant that I have felt in the past like I would never again write anything worth publishing. I do not feel that way now. (I will probably feel it at some point in the future, though.)

Well, I don't think these ideas are mutually exclusive. Van Houten imagines the Dutch Tulip Man as a metaphor for God, and the way Hazel and Gus talk about the Dutch Tulip Man reflects something about how the characters think about/imagine God: Is God (or the Dutch Tulip Man) a con man, a kind but powerless benevolence, a savior, a mirage, or what?

If this tumblr were any good, there'd be a sidebar with links to the answers of common questions, but there isn't, and I understand that it's a huge pain in the ass to scroll through hundreds of questions to get an answer. So I'll just paste this here and hope it stays on the front page for a while: 

Augustus is a big name. It’s the name of the first emperor of the Roman Empire, a name one associates with confidence and bravado and marble statues and stuff. Gus is a much shorter, smaller name—the kind of name that appears in children’s picture books, for instance. In some ways, they’re opposites: the one a big, strong man; the other, a fragile and endangered little boy.

I tend to believe that the hero's journey is the journey from strength to weakness, and I guess I wanted Gus's story to be the journey from Augustus Waters to Gus.

Hazel calls him Gus more as she knows him better, as the manic pixie dream boy falls away and she comes to know and grapple with and love this fragile, desperate, beautiful boy. 

Well, as she says, she wants to minimize the number of deaths for which she is responsible. (And more generally, Hazel's conception of a well-lived life is all about walking lightly upon the earth while she's here.)

I don't think the area of meaning is defined by the author--at least not exclusively--but otherwise I agree.

When i say books belong to their readers, I do not mean, "If you think Huck Finn is a novel that defends slavery, you are entitled to your opinion." That reading is wrong. It's as wrong as thinking that 2 + 3 = 7.

I mean that readers should not define reading as the act of divining an author's intents. Readers are co-creators of a fiction, and should be empowered.

As a thought experiment: Imagine that Huck Finn contained the exact same words that it currently contains, but that Mark Twain insisted it was a book about how slavery is a great idea. I would argue that Mark Twain would be every bit as wrong about the novel as anyone else who thinks that it is a pro-slavery novel.

The author defines the area of meaning through choosing the words in the novel. But beyond the words in the novel, the author is not in the defining-an-area-of-meaning game. Readers do that collectively.

Yeah, I reread "Illness as Metaphor" and also her brilliant Regarding the Suffering of Others while writing The Fault in Our Stars. In fact, there were a couple Sontag quotes as epigraphs in earlier drafts.

Yes. This is inevitable in translation. (Many other lines that are a big deal in English may also get lost in translation.)

But here's what is often overlooked: Just as there are inevitably losses in the translation process, there are also opportunities. There are ways in which a translation can become richer than the original text.