John Green: 2012 National Book Festival

from the Library of Congress in Washington DC good morning we're gonna start a little bit early I'm in that Martel I'm so levels I don't know maybe those two so well John Green writes books for sure we know that complicated stories with wordplay and heartbreak and mysterious deaths but he also creates communities so many writers have the social media tools at their fingertips to promote their next offering but Green seizes them to promote connections so the feelings and problems that surface in the book can be explored more fully it helps it that helps readers talk about the topics he raises whether it's a missing person or a lost love about with alcoholism or even a prank war between day's students and boarders that dangerously escalates today he's talking about his latest offering The Fault in Our Stars now what could what could serve more emotion and connection than kids with cancer finding friendship and love among each other in his hands we see possibilities rather than the limits how confronting death speeds choices of how each wanna live Jody Pico I bet you are familiar with called it an electric portrait of young people who learn to live with one foot in the grave I'm at read by all the aliases ingredients book I bet you guys have noticed them two miles becomes Pudge chip becomes the kernel mr. star mr. Starnes becomes the Eagle Marcos becomes radar their two will Grayson's a pair of Collins and many many Catherine's feel free to ask him about his box set that's about to come out uh we're gonna find it online next month and whether he had any nicknames when he was growing up and please join me now in welcoming John Green a long wind-up I could see wave to him we tell him to come one more time let's welcome John Green hi so my camcorder is broken first off I need to acknowledge something which is that there are a lot of people here who thought that they were coming to like just a regular book signing and so for those people particularly the adults who have just started reading my books I can't explain to you everything that's involved in this but I can I can't explain to you that I have a video blog with my brother and all of those videos start out good morning Hank it's Tuesday or whatever day it is but it's usually Tuesday so I'm going to ask you to say good morning Hank it's Tuesday into my heart yeah we're both experiencing anxiety from the screaming so on three one yeah you say good morning Hank it's Tuesday on three well then we make sure this is working it is one two three thank you guys very much thank you so now we have to be reasonably quiet just for the benefit of the rest of the National Book Festival I wonder I want to read you just a little bit from my new book The Fault in Our Stars talk a little bit about the book but mostly I just want to answer your questions I'm more interested in what you're interested in than what I'm interested in and I generally think that what I love about books both reading them and writing them is that it's a conversation between a reader and writer and this is a chance for us to have that conversation IRL which is very exciting to me so does anyone have a copy of my book that I can borrow sorry I'm very unprepared I already signed this for you Julian I'm not signing it again thank you for coming to the event and in was it in Maryland it was that leakycon okay it's nice to see you again regardless so I'm just gonna read I'm just gonna read a little bit of the book to try to give a sense of the voice I guess but I'm gonna give me give me but I'm I'm gonna begin by reading the author's note which is the only time in the book when I am directly speaking to you so it feels like something that I can read to you and still sound like myself maybe this is not so much an author's note as an author's reminder of what was printed in small type a few pages ago this book is a work of fiction I made it up neither novels nor their readers I see this is a first printing because it says neither novels or their readers but that's been fixed neither novels nor their readers benefit from attempts to Devine whether any facts hide inside a story such efforts attack the very idea that made-up stories can matter which is sort of the foundational assumption of our species I appreciate your cooperation in this matter and this is the beginning of chapter one late in the winter of my 17th year my mother decided I was depressed presumably because I rarely left the house spent quite a lot of time in bed read the same book over and over ate infrequently and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death whenever you read a cancer booklet or website or whatever they always list depression among the side effects of cancer but in fact depression is not a side effect of cancer depression is a side effect of dying cancer is also a side effect of dying almost everything is really but my mom believed I required treatment so she took me to see my regular doctor Jim who agreed that I was very swimming and a paralyzing and totally clinical depression and that therefore my meds should be adjusted and also I should attend a weekly support group so that's what I'm gonna read I'm gonna return this to Julia so I get a lot of questions about that very beginning of the novel I wanted I wanted to answer that question while also may be saying something else about the book and why I wrote it the question that I get most often is that cancer is not a side effect of dying dying is a side effect of cancer which is true in like a very narrow sense but in the broader sense cancer is a side effect of dying because cancer is a disease that is born of mutation the reason cancer happens is because cells inside of our bodies mutate and then the the whatever is supposed to turn off their replication ceases to turn it off and there's out-of-control growth of this tumor that is a side effect of dying because the whole reason that mutation happens is because cells are always in the business of dying every cell in our body is constantly well with very few exceptions and even those are dying in the broadest sense all all cells are dying more generally all organic matter at all times is is dying is in this process of sort of falling apart in the broadest sense but it's also often in the process of coming together so I have a two and a half year old son and I've watched his body go from this thing I could hold in my you know in my forearm to being this like squiggly thing capable of talking and asking me questions and making unreasonable requests of my time and all sorts of stuff that process of coming from nothing into something and then slowly falling apart is the process of life and I wanted to write about that well as I could and as honestly as I could and in a way that reflected the experience of the people I'd known and and loved who lived with chronic illness and and in many cases had died of it and my experience was that all of these things are a side effect of dying and that our sort of cultural inability to acknowledge the reality and omnipresence of this falling apart represented a real sort of failure on our part to grapple with one of the most interesting parts of life so I had that idea initially in like 2000 I was working as a student chaplain at a Children's Hospital and I really wanted to write this story that was said in a Children's Hospital and it started this like super-handsome hospital chaplain kind of an alcoholic and had a lot of troubles but he was really cool and so all of his like bad qualities were made up for his like chiseled good looks and everything and we're all these like hot lady doctors we had shot lady doctor will he choose sort of the central question of this original manuscript and I worked on that book in one form or another for eight years just kept going back to it over and over again I'd write it sort of fail at writing it and then I'd write a different book and then I'd fail I try and fail again and then I'd write a different book and I did this continued but this was always the book I wanted to write and in some ways the Fault in Our Stars is my first novel this is the novel that I wanted to write first I just didn't figure it out I figured it out in 2009 or 2010 I guess I had all this stuff I'd written you know hundred thousand two hundred thousand words which is maybe like six hundred pages but it was all crap was all about this mostly about this chaplain and so I I finally found a way into it through my friendship with a young woman who was a fan of our videos and a fan of my my books named Esther really more a fan of our videos I have to say I was but I was reading Esther's Diaries recently and you know I always say like she was a fan of my books but it's not really true and Esther Esther had cancer from the time that I knew her and she died in August of 2010 when she was just 16 and knowing Esther and knowing her family and and being friends with a lot of her friends it pulled me out of the story you know it took me out of the story and it will allowed me to Center myself in this question of why are we falling apart and why do we fall apart at different rates so why is it that like my grandfather who was a very nice guy lived to be 93 years old and spent you know saw all seven continents and had this great full life and Esther who was also a very nice person only lived to be 16 and for much of her life her life was circumscribed by by this illness by this chronic illness and and can we make sense of that world can we find a way to be hopeful in that world or are we best off just ignoring the reality because I think ultimately that's why we ignore this process of death that is constantly occurring inside of not just us but inside but but in the planet itself that the planet itself is a kind of organism that is constantly you know being born and falling apart and and experiencing this same cycle do we ignore that because it is so the reality of it the reality of illness in children the reality that not all lives are long lives is so unacceptable to us that we just can't even look at it and was there a way for me to write a story that that that made it okay to look at because my experience with being friends not just with Esther but with the other young sick people I've known is that it is not hard to look at them and it is not hard to love them it is not hard to love that reality and that was but but but you have to be brought in to the place where it's okay and not scary to to love and to look at the world as it is and you know the sentimental maudlin cancer stories that I have read when I was a young person and like make fun of a lot in this book don't do that for me like they don't take me into that place of love and respect they take me and they're really about the well people in the novels not the sick ones because they're really what they're about is they're about that attempt to try to that whole idea that like people with cancer particularly young people with cancer exists so that the rest of us can learn important life lessons right so like the rest of us can be like grateful for every day no that is not why sick people exist and that dehumanizes them and D personalizes them and makes the story not about them but about the well and I didn't want to do that I wanted to argue that a short life can also be a full life and can also be a good life and a rich life and that the definition of a rich full life is not about whether it's long although certainly it's easier and better if it is long but it's about different kinds of good and so I wanted to present in hazel and Augustus different kinds of good different kinds of good lives different ways of imagining what constitutes a good life what constitutes a heroic life and now you know nine months after the book has come out I haven't read it but lots of people have been very nice about it and the main thing that I want to say is that all the time that I was fighting that story I was terrified I was terrified that I wasn't doing justice to to a story that was in many ways you know not mine I was terrified that I wasn't being I that you weren't gonna like it I was terrified that people would say Oh a book about cancer that sounds horrible because that's what I say when people say Oh a book about cancer I've you know I'm not the kind of person who's like ooh really can I read a book about cancer how lucky am I now and you know there are a lot of people in this room who read the book very early and and recommended it to their friends and to their family and in many cases to their parents and that that means a lot to me and that has brought that has in the end like writing the book did not bring me the peace I was after but living with the book today has in many ways brought me that sense of peace and that that conviction that there are many kinds of good and full lives so I want to thank you and I think I think I'll take some questions if that's all right and then yeah I can just call on you and you can you can shout that's fine I'm gonna call on people who are standing because they're standing they have it hard yes ma'am well obviously if that is if you're about to say a spoiler do not say um I don't the question is about the middle of looking for Alaska and if it came from personal experience I don't like to answer that question because I wish I had the copy of the book The Fault in Our Stars so I could read to you the part about how I don't want people to look for facts inside my books but only because only only in the interest of protecting people I know in real life who would maybe rather not be personally connected in their own lives with my work I didn't think about that much when I was writing Looking for Alaska which is a very autobiographical novel in many ways I mean I the book is about a kid who memorized his last words who goes to a boarding school in Alabama and I memorized last words and went to a boarding school in Alabama and it's a very autobiographical book in a lot of ways but when I was writing it you know on some level you never think anybody outside of your family is gonna read your books like or at least I did in and I think because of that I wasn't at least initially and maybe wasn't as respectful of people's privacy as I should have been and so yeah I feel like I can't answer it directly because it wouldn't be respectful of the people yes how do I feel about the giraffe I'm use daring I mean I guess neutral yes Holden Caufield thinks you're a phony oh you could if you want to walk her to the microphone then everyone can hear you or if you could change anything about the Fault in Our Stars would you and what would it be um that's an interesting question because writers so the reason I don't reread my books after they come out is because of course there are many insufficiencies in my work and I am keenly aware of them and I don't particularly enjoy being reminded of them so there are two kinds of like negative reviews right there are the negative reviews that you disagree with and that you think are stupid like for instance when people say I don't believe that teenagers are that smart well that doesn't bother me because I think that's I just disagree you know like it's always adults who say that - it's funny like you could be go through the Amazon reviews and you read which people said like teenagers don't actually talk like that it's a lot of people who then go on to be like not that I read all of the reviews of my books neither there's 24,000 Goodreads reviews if The Fault in Our Stars and I've read every one of them but it's always people who are like I mean I'm in my 20s and I don't talk like that and I'm like well that's not my fault like I shouldn't be held accountable for your failure to like grapple with the interesting questions of the human species but yeah of course there are lots of things that I would change in The Fault in Our Stars but they're things that I don't know how to change or I would have changed them um you know there are lots of there are lots of places look all I can see when I when I read read one of my books is the things that don't work or the things that I think will stop make readers stop for a second or the things that I think will make them conscious that the book is written and not like a story that's alive in their minds you know and that all that stuff is difficult and if I tortured myself with it you know for as I could for the next you know however many years I would never write another book I would just sit around and try to rewrite the Fault in Our Stars over and over and over again and in the end like I had to give you guys the book and I did the best I could and I have to trust that that you'll read it generously I think like the relationship between reader and writer ultimately is one of kind of mutual generosity and it's me giving you a gift and and you giving me a gift back and the gift that I give you is that I try very hard to write the best best thing I can possibly make and then you give me sort of two gifts one is money which I appreciate I mean even if you get the book out of the library on some level you know somebody paid for that book and I encourage you to get the book out of the library but but the reason libraries work so well in that they encourage they you know they encourage our entire you know civic well-being is because there there is some level of financial connection between the reader and the library which is why it's very different I'm asked this all the time why is it why is it white I could check your book out of the library but instead I just stole it on the internet why is that different and I'm like well because I control the means of distribution and I don't want you to steal it so it stops there really but there are lots of other reasons too so we can talk about that if anyone's interested but so in my opinion like there's that gift obviously that's sort of but that's sort of the obvious gift the bigger and more important gift is the gift of your your attention and your generous reading like there are lots of ways to read a novel and we've all had this experience of going into a novel and being like I'm going to hate this and then hating it and then being like I did it I hated it in fact I think a lot of people like who read the sort of like whatever the big phenomenon book of the time is whether it's Fifty Shades of Grey or Twilight or whatever you go into that book reading it frankly with a lack of generosity and like maybe it was also written with a lack of generosity or maybe or or maybe it wasn't but like our responsibility as readers is to try to try to give to try to give the stories the best chance that we can give them the best life that we can give them because each story is going to be different for each reader yes yeah that'd be great thank you how do I go from an idea to like a book how much time do you have I'm obviously not very good at it because I only publish a book like every three or four years I don't get big ideas to be honest with you I've never had a big idea I've never had an idea like wizard school I never had I want that idea like I I'm ready for it but I haven't had it yet I have little ideas like why do we suffer or or what if my friend John had been a girl I was sort of the initial idea for Paper Towns so I was thinking a lot about my friend John Malden and I was like man if John Malden had been a girl he would have been much more interesting see what about a whole different set of problems and he would have had this sort of the all these gender expectations and it would have been really cool and interesting so I mean that's how Paper Towns began for me Looking for Alaska began for me by thinking about my own high school experience is I think and wanting to process them but as for how you go from those little ideas to the business of actually writing a book like to me it's more about the interconnection of very small ideas linking them together into a chain there's a lot of ways to imagine shapes of novels so one of the first ways I imagine a book is usually as a spiral like there's this point for hazel and in The Fault in Our Stars the point is hazel has to go to a support group and this point leads to another point hazel meets Augustus which leads to another point which leads to this ever-widening circle until whoa they're there they're there have this crazy life together and whoa they're in love and whoa this happens and like it spirals out from that point so if you think about the novel or your story as a spiral then you can think you can sort of think about what should happen in order for it to keep that shape and I find that quite useful this is very abstract and I apologize to people who aren't interested in writing but there are lots of other ways to imagine shapes of stories too so in Will Grayson Will Grayson which I wrote with my friend David Levithan we imagine the novel as an ex don't cheer for David now David's new book by the way I have to say I never I never I never promote the work of other authors because it's very bad for me but no I do but David's new book is just beautiful it's just really brilliant it's called every day and it's about a kid who wakes up every day in someone else's body every day a different body and in love with the same girl so every day this person who doesn't have a gender or a physical body of any kind wakes up in a new body within about four hours drive of wherever he or she woke up yesterday and he's all or she I'm trying to see I'm trying as we do I'm trying to gender binary it when it is a brilliant novel that does not allow for that this individual wakes up every day in a different body and is and and then like has to try to get to this girl this individual loves we really need a non-agenda neutral pronoun that's very hard to say in sign language about gender-neutral pronouns isn't it yeah well they've solved this problem to a great extent where we haven't so yeah but but it's a really fascinating book and and it's one of those books that has a brilliant premise but that's also really brilliantly executed but anyway in Will Grayson Will Grayson we imagine the novel as an ex these two characters start out in very different places they come together their life sort of intertwine and then they go their separate ways and in imagining that novel as an ex that also sort of fuels where your ideas go because you think like well I have to put them one step closer to each other or add to put them one step further away from each other and so that was that was very helpful so imagining these things as shapes and as like sort of forms not to get all that contemporary art theory on you but like thinking about thinking about the importance of forms in the centrality of the form of the novel is very helpful to me Pizza John it's always an advantage if you're wearing my face on your torso imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia how often do you find yourself divulging into nostalgia and your writing and your personal life so I should imagine the future is kind of nostalgia how often do I find myself indulging that in my writing and in my personal life I didn't write that line my what my wife wrote it we were on our first date it's funny story I'll tell the story if that's ok so we we I really liked erm I went to high school with Sara but we did not know each other in high school at all she was a couple years behind me and we ran in very different circles and but we met again in Chicago and she was this like really talented artist and she was managing a really cool contemporary art gallery and she's fascinating really intelligent we had brunch I was really impressed with her I heard that she was not dating anyone and so I did my due diligence and everything and then I am so I emailed like seven of my friends and I said do you want to see the movie walleston translation tonight and I see seed Sara and then I emailed my other six friends and I said not you right but no no no but it's a terrible actually no this is turns out is a terrible strategy never started a relationship on a lie it will end and indeed she broke up with me after a few days because I was so because I was so like performed like that you know because I was so like I was trying so so hard and I was so far removed from like whatever authentic self I might have somewhere inside of me that she wasn't you know that interested so yes so that did not work out however we then got back together and got married now we have a kid and everything's fine so she said that to me on our first date though because before lost in translation we went to this this bagel deli and she said we're I was talking about high school and how I imagined my life I was always we were talking about high school and I've said I was always imagining my life after high school and thinking about what adulthood would be like and and how like you can't indulge that impulse if you write the kind of novels that I write and she said imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia and I was like I try not to indulge it at all in my novels I try not to take my novels anywhere past the present I try not to like send my characters to tell you what like I I don't want to prescribe that for you I don't want to give you an order about where my characters end up or where the story ends up or anything like that because I want that to be yours not mine so it's very important to me hey they're digital bookmobile oh yeah turning it down so um right so lots of people ask me like what happens after the end of The Fault in Our Stars or what happens the end after the end of looking for Alaska but to do that would be to imagine the future which is a kind of nostalgia like right like these characters aren't writing it from the future aren't a Matt they aren't telling their stories from the future they're telling their stories from the present and they're like to take them far into the future into adulthood or whatever to me would just be that sort of reverse nostalgia oh geez yes with the scarf the mord's you scream the less likely I am to call on you have to tell I'm sorry but it's true because then I get nervous that you're gonna ask just ask me who the eff is Hank or something that like will make no sense to anyone in the audience yes that's a really interesting question I mean from a postmodernist perspective like I I tend to agree that the author is dead and that the author is irrelevant or to the extent that the author is a character in a novel the author is the least important and least genuinely least interesting character in the novel and should be ignored whenever possible like a truly successful book is a book in which you are not frequently conscious of the author I don't want you to be reading The Fault in Our Stars and to be thinking about my biography and I don't particularly want you to be reading Shakespeare and thinking about his biography I think most of what's interesting about Hamlet or even I mean The Tempest is a better example because in The Tempest it's supposed to be Shakespeare's last play and Prospero throws his Wizarding books into the ocean and gives it all up in yadda yadda yadda and like this is always read from certain certain you know sort of new more recent literary critical readings as Shakespeare throwing in his own tools of magic that he used to transform the the Elizabethan stage and yeah whatever like that's fine I just don't think it's that interesting right like maybe that tells us something about Shakespeare and like I'm sure that Shakespeare liked putting in little jokes that pleased him about his own life and to his novels as do or at into his plays as do i as do most writers because it's pretty self-indulgent trade but I don't think it's what's interesting about The Tempest like to me everything that's interesting about the tempest is this weird idea of savageness and the weird relationship between the civilized and the savage and like that's that's interesting I'm not interested that like Shakespeare was quitting yeah I feel bad you know you know like it's not the biggest thing in the book for me or in the story or I guess it's it's a in the story so I want the same to be true in my work but it's completely impossible because I have put so much of my life on the internet and so so many of you know so much about me that there is no way to separate it out right and like we live in this personality-driven culture a particularly personality-driven literary culture and there's nothing I can do about that but I also happen to really like like making stuff with you on the internet and books are great but they are not a good way to make stuff like books are a terrible way to raise money for charity and books are a terrible way to like work together to to do all the projects that we've done in our online community and so I want to do that stuff so I have this these contradictory desires right here I on the first page of the book I say don't don't think about anything that might be related to me in this book or anything in my life just don't think about it just read the novel as a novel I'm ordering you to do this and then I'm like hey everybody it's me John Green um you know like look at the sandwich I had for lunch that's a completely unfair thing to ask of my readers to be both to both look at my sandwiches and to like disconnect me from the novel all of which is to say that I have absolutely no idea how to answer your question because I have absolutely I do not have a solution to this problem I am conscious of the problem I spend like I keep Smee up at night I worry about it I just don't know how to solve it like I first became conscious of this in 2008 when our community was much much smaller but all these people would email me and they would say I read Paper Towns in your voice like they would hear my voice reading it to them and when I read a book written by a friend like when I read a Maureen Johnson novel or I read it David Levithan novel I often hear their voices when I'm reading like I actually hear them as if they were reading it to me and they're you know Maureen's like weird little voice hi Maureen and I don't want that you know I don't want you to read my story that way but I also know that there's no way around it if we're also going to do all of this fun interesting stuff together that we can do and furthermore to be completely Frank with you before I told people about my like what like I showed pictures of my sandwiches my readings were not this well attended so there's that to consider as well it's a very interesting question that I don't have a solution to yes yes what book am i reading right now I'm reading uh I can't even remember the title of it but it's very long but it's a DT Max is that his name DT Max's biography of David Foster Wallace it's one of my favorite writers does anyone remember what it's called no okay okay whatever it's good so far I'm like 40 pages in it could get worse yes I like you sure thanks yeah sure it's a large yeah sure older videos that weren't on the blog for this channel there's like I don't I don't know what they were but um there's one where you went urban exploring oh yeah and I was wondering if that was something that inspired yes probably I was guessing but yeah um so I went to one time I was in Detroit and with MT Anderson who's like probably the greatest American young adult fiction writer he said resentfully ah he is real he's the best though he's a true he's the he's the he's a true genius like it's very rare in your life that you meet a true genius and and he really is I mean if you read the astonishing life of Octavian nothing traitor to the nation it is a it is an actual work of genius which is a very strange thing to come across and then it's even stranger to meet the creator of this work and to have him be you know mostly normal um but anyway he's not that normal and I guess he was going to Detroit and he had heard that it was possible to break into all these abandoned buildings and so he like walked up to the post office which is a bands been abandoned for like 40 years and he was like walking around the circumference trying to find a way over the fence and he saw this little like head pop-up and he was like hey you and this like 16 year old kid comes out and and Tobin that's what he calls himself not MT Anderson token said can you get me in and the kid said for $40 and then like he had this crazy experience exploring the ruins of Detroit with this kid then he comes to Kalamazoo where we're speaking together we speak together and then we we drive back to Detroit to take an airplane home whereupon there is some massive snowstorm on the East Coast and we can't get home for four days so I ended up going or been exploring with Tobin and this 15 year old kid who charged me as well and he was amazing I mean he was like this savant of Detroit architecture who also happened to have just massive courage which I don't have so I I'm a very anxious person and I really struggle with my anxiety problems and so being in a you know large long abandoned spaces was very nervous for me which made me think about about Quentin I'd already said I'd already written some of the urban exploring sections in Paper Towns but but being in that those places definitely affected it definitely like reshaped my feelings about that what it's like yes okay I'm older than a lot of the people here and I know you said that you'd like to write for young people because old people aren't as interesting which is true but as a former English teacher and a current high school librarian I'm one of yours I'm a big pusher of you and I just wanted to tell you that I think you're great and I push you a lot I'm your street pusher so thank you for what you do yep thank you you are not alone at all in your old nest you got here about 23 so oh wow Wow my mom does sell goats Oh from her goat farm in Western North Carolina farmer Jane soap not afraid to plug her so yeah there are a lot of us adults who read young adult fiction and like it and who've read The Fault in Our Stars and liked it we aren't as loud you know we tend not to make as much noise but in fact like most of my most of the readers at The Fault in Our Stars now like the new readers are adults that's been a very odd transition for me to go to get it like to get like you know emails from 82 year old grandmother's about my book or whatever they're all they're very nice usually but it's an interesting transition for me because I am used to both having and preferring young adult readers now I have to slightly recalibrate my message I guess to pretend that I do like adults so yes you're my favorite all right I think we have time for perhaps one more question I apologize to all the people whose questions I won't be asking but yes you sir mr. green mr. green I adore crash course the crash course that you and Hank are doing right there plans to continue it and in what fashion sure your weeks are up so my brother and I are teaching we have this show that's funded by Google called crash course that teaches I teach AP level world history my brother teaches ap level biology in a series of videos that are about 10 to 12 minutes long yeah it's very very expensive man to be honest with you it's not something that like will ever earn money on an advertising model because it just costs educators are expensive curriculum advisors are expensive editors and animators are expensive and it's a very big undertaking I don't know that we'll have Google's support again in which case we will have to figure out what we want to do we would love to keep doing it I've never been so passionate about anything I've never had as much fun making stuff so hopefully we'll find a way to do it all right last this is truly the last question thank you I was just wondering so many of them about this awkward stage of life where you're trying to figure out how to make friends and what to do with your life and what high school to go to what career to pick what advice would you have for young people what advice to have for young people about going through all that stuff I mean the the great poet Robert Frost once said the only way out is through people will tell you that this is like the supposed to be the best years of your life or whatever but that's a dirty dirty lie so it's an evil pernicious lie adulthood is wonderful there is a there is a stability to adulthood that may seem like lame and boring to you when you're a teenager but oh gosh is it nice to not have to wonder like Who am I gonna make out with next week just it's that same person it's been for many years that's nice too to have the background to know what it's like to have to have been in love to know what it's like to experience loss to be able to contextualize these feelings that are always welling up inside of us I mean adulthood doesn't stop being exciting by any stretch of the imagination but you're able to contextualize the excitement a little bit better which makes it much easier to survive so my advice to you would be to I guess I would say two things first off do listen to adults that you trust in your life they know something it's hard to do sometimes because you want because sometimes they're wrong and sometimes they give you advice that's also not just the exact opposite of what you want to hear and it's difficult to do things you don't want to do it's difficult to do things that just sort of seem wrong even if you know in the broadest sense that they're right so I would encourage you to listen to the find adults that you trust and listen to them the most important thing to me is to understand that like this will end in both like the best ways and the worst ways like it things will go on and and you will go on and and you as I think Augustus says to Isaac in the middle of the Fault in Our Stars you are going to have a big and wonderful life and do all kinds of wonderful things that you you can't possibly imagine now and so trust in that thank you this has been a presentation of the Library of Congress visit us at loc.gov

Channel: Library of Congress

Views: 16,504

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Keywords: \library of congress\, \national, book, festival\

Id: 61LSveQ-Skg

Length: 49min 36sec (2976 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 07 2012