Guided by stars
Mega-selling author John Green on life-changing illness, the demands of readers and the limits of reviewing.
Mega-selling author John Green on lifechanging illness, the demands of readers and the limits of reviewing.
John Green has written eight books, which, for a mid-career author of fiction for young adults, is good going. The difference is his sixth novel, The Fault in Our Stars, sold 23 million copies and was made into a tearjerker movie that took US$300 million at the box office. Yet, despite being published in more than 55 languages, Green is not sure he will ever write a novel again.
“I like writing fiction and I really would like to write several more novels, if I can,” he tells the Listener from his home in Indianapolis, in the US Midwest. “But I don’t know if that will happen. It was five and a half relatively long years between The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it again.”
What precipitated such doubt was this: late in 2017, after a month-long publicity tour for Turtles,
Green was struck down by labyrinthitis. It’s an inflammation of the inner ear, which because it manages our sense of balance and motion, usually manifests as crippling vertigo, an unpleasant involuntary movement of the eyes and punishing nausea. He was confined to his bed for weeks, unable to read, write, watch TV or play with his children, stuck with his own morbid thoughts. After about six weeks, Green, who is 44 this month, had mostly recovered, but his life was permanently changed.
It’s tempting to see labyrinthitis as a metaphor, he says – his life lacked balance, so he suffered a balance disorder. But he rejects this. He hopes the ailments in his novels, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and cancer, are not portrayed as battles to be won “but as illnesses to be lived with as well as I could”. Green, who has spoken openly about having OCD and other mental-health issues, eventually went back to doing podcasts and YouTube videos with his younger brother, Hank.
One of the podcasts, The Anthropocene Reviewed, was a solo effort he began at the start of 2018. The podcasts, which review “facets of a human-centred planet on a five-star scale”, are investigations into diverse subjects that pique Green’s interest. They make thoughtful and personal connections between such things as Halley’s Comet and cholera, the paintings at the Lascaux caves and the Taco Bell breakfast menu, the velociraptors of Jurassic Park and the offbeat 1950 Jimmy Stewart movie Harvey. And rate their subject. The dinosaurs – which Green notes were actually about the size of turkeys rather than the terrifying and clever mini-T Rexes of the movie – get three stars while Harvey gets five.
Now, the podcast has turned into a book of the same name. In both, labyrinthitis gets one star. Green writes that the illness viscerally made him realise that consciousness is “temporary and precarious”.
“I definitely learnt something from the experience of not being able to open my eyes for two weeks,” he says. “I spent a lot of time worrying that my life was never going to be the same.”
The podcast also came about because Green found that after the labyrinthitis, he could not write. The months after falling ill were the longest time he had not written for an audience since he was 14, he says. He
“I don’t know anything about what it’s like to be a teenager, and I never did. I didn’t when I was a teenager.”