What a slut time is: another open letter to John Green

Dear John Green,

Here we are at the present, and your most recent book. And I can't help but see it through the lens of yoru first one. The characters are of a similar type: Hazel the Drizzle, (sixteen, thyroid cancer with mets in the lungs, and I'm okay) Isaac the best friend, and Augustus the Hurricane, who brings Hazel out of her shell and proves that dying is not all about dying.

And again our heroes live in the shadow of imminent death; and again, you show how three teenagers can encompass the entire world.

But TFiOS is something else beyond all this: it's a journey, on the epic scale of The Wizard of Oz. (This is, I think, what you tried to do but did not quite achieve in Paper Towns, Which ends after Q discovers his wizard is a Fraud, but Before she can give any Life-Affirming gifts.) Hazel makes the journey from her mundane yet doomed life to the magical city of Amsterdam, where she meets her own personal god and discovers that he's simply a crazy old man who no longer cares for the story he created, the myth that has sustained her. And she returns home by way of discovering love...and in the end, Peter van Houten is a good man, but a very bad god. Or, as Augustus said in his last letter, he's a bad man, and a good writer.

I suppose it's ironic that I'm reading this on Veterans Day. Or maybe it's just appropriate, because of Augustus's obsession with heroic sacrifices. I dare say that the people who fight cancer are veterans even more so than the people who fight wars, and I wonder what Augustus would say to that. And I suppose it's apt that I find Hazel drawing strength from the experiences of Anne Frank, reading as I am just after the anniversary of Kristallnacht, at which I wondered once again why it is important to be saturated with sad stories, and whether merely surviving is heroic. Augustus thinks not; I wonder what Hazel would say.

I was reluctant to read this for a long time because in the last few generations of my family there have been two cancer survivors, one of them my mother, and three victims. So I didn't think I needed another cancer story. But this was neither too much nor too soon. To be honest, I thought you were going to end the book mid-sentence; I'm glad that you chose the other sort of ending that this book needed, the ending that doesn't end.

John, your stories show us the universe within each of us that needs to be noticed. They give us forever within the numbered days, and for that I'm grateful.

Sincerely,
Mara