There was a time in the 2010s when many teen bibliophiles’ shelves would be incomplete without John Green’s books. The Fault in Our Stars had become a hit film, and the odds of finding a poster with the book’s iconic ‘Okay? Okay’ on a classmate’s wall or scribbled into the last pages of a notebook were astronomically high. He had a reputation among Bengaluru’s school-going readers for ‘making you bawl your eyes out,’ recalls 23-year-old MSc Clinical Psychology graduate and John Green fan Esha Karthi Raj. Now, with the Young Adult genre author set to return to fiction after nine years with Hollywood, Ending, a book for his now-adult audience, they are curious to see how the cards fall.
For many Gen Zs, Green’s books, including his debut Looking for Alaska, found them at a transitional period of life – when they were growing out of kids’ fantasies, but not yet reading books meant for adults. “It was the first time I read something that chose to end in reality, not a happy ending,” says Keshvi, an HR professional, adding, “Paper Towns could have easily ended with the main character getting the girl, but Green has never been scared to write about something you fear happening, actually coming true. It gives you a picture that nothing is ultimate.”
This dose of reality extended to difficult themes, with characters dealing with terminal illness, grief, mental illness and questions of death. For a teenage Madhvi Chandhavarkar, now a public policy analyst, Looking for Alaska came at a time when she was grappling with her cousin’s death. “The main character is obsessed with people’s last words, and what has stuck with me over the years is a part in which he says Karl Marx’s last words were along the lines of ‘last words are for fools who didn’t say enough when they were alive.’ I remember it just because it was pithy. But overall, the book grappled with questions like: what is our relationship with truth? How does it impact our relationships? I feel like those questions got me to learn about how you can approach some of the thorny questions that arise when you’re trying to figure things out.”
Mental health struggles, too, are a recurring theme in Green’s work. According to Meenakshi Visvanathan, a Literature student, this was best explored in Turtles All the Way Down, with its main character living with OCD. “At the time, I was also reading other YA writers like Meg Cabot who dealt with mental illness, but in them, mental illness was an event or moment that toppled your life. With Green, he put in so much of his own struggle with OCD. And you get to see what the main character’s OCD looks like both in moments when she’s struggling with it and in everyday moments where OCD is not the topic of conversation.”
In the nine years since his last novel, fans have kept up with Green through his YouTube channel, as he advocated for access to tuberculosis healthcare and wrote two non-fiction books, The Anthropocene Reviewed and Everything is Tuberculosis. As he returns to fiction, his audience is older, more discerning and curious to see how the gap and shift to adult literature will reflect in his style. “This might be strange to say about a 50-something writer, but he has a lot of untapped potential. Usually, the second or third book is worse for most writers, but he’s only gotten better as he has kept writing. I’m excited for him to break out of the YA box, which sometimes tended to venture into cheesiness,” notes Visvanathan.
Green captured the 2000s’ optimism, weaving it into high schoolers’ lives. Raj is now curious to see how today’s adults’ discomfort with it translates into Hollywood, Ending, promoted as a story about young people grappling with fame in a world that’s always watching. “We grew up optimistic about the internet; now we are seeing that growing up with social media can be rather damaging too. Green has some experience with the internet spotlight, so I’m curious to see how that comes through,” Raj says.