John Green Talks Turtles All the Way Down on The Interview Show With Mark Bazer

my first guess is the best-selling author of The Fault in Our Stars and the brand-new Turtles all the way down here is John Green so let's talk about the book start off sure Turtles all the way down yeah and the protagonist yeah is a girl named ASA she's 16 years old yeah so she's in high school getting ready to think about college and in many ways she's a smart cool kid she's got friends but she also has something in which she cannot control many of the thoughts that go into her brain yeah specifically she thinks that she has a fatal bacterial infection or that she's about to get one right and that's an obsession yes it's funny and also the most tragic thing I mean yeah it's funny unless you personally have your thoughts hijacked for months or years at a time and then it's not so funny because if you can't choose what you think about over a long period of time that really sort of destabilizes what exactly people mean when they talk about you sure like if you're not responsible for or being able to choose your thoughts then like are you not possibly a passenger in this consciousness that you are stuck inside of which is like for me at least somewhat terrifying she has the name for it is OCD yeah she has obsessions which is this idea that there's a fatal or at any moment fatal bacteria that could enter her and she has the compulsion and I don't want to interrupt you but think about the thing about c-diff is that it's not like it could about your ailment interrupts you couldn't at all it's already inside and it and it so like there's that to deal with there is there is yeah so your patience okay sorry I don't want to interrupt you I just it's just like you made it out to be like oh she's being so irrational and she is like her response to the furry bunny has it that she is a skin and case bacterial colony is somewhat irrational but like on the other hand like I it's weird it's weird it's weird that half of the cells inside of your body are not you absolutely yeah let's just let's just let's just get it on the table yeah the book meant a lot to me and and I've loved all your books but I I have OCD I believe you have OCD as well yeah you talked about it yeah unless I'm on TV but one man or woman's OCD obsession is not another man or woman so you could you're I get c-diff a bacteria that could cause death that's in all of us that I am cool with that but radon in my house that's another story entire if you want to go down well aware of the radon in your house issue because I yeah I know more about it than anyone other than your spouse but do you know more than the guy at the hotline the thing what are the things about OCD is that like and I make fun of it too and like this is something we have together and that we've made fun of together for 15 years I mean certainly the initial point of connection yeah meeting somebody else who gets their thoughts hijacked for long periods of time and and and and you feel less alone in that and that's really why I wrote the book like it was because I wanted to I wanted to feel less alone in it and also I wanted other people that maybe feel that way but but you're one of yours no so I mean yeah you're right you can't read it I can't write about mine I'm too they're too close to me so you know when I set out to write the novel I knew that I was gonna be writing a novel I wanted to be kind of like aggressively fictional I wanted it to be very obviously not real both to me and to the reader and I as part of that I knew that I couldn't I can't write directly I can't even to be honest I came and talked directly like I'm very impressed into your ability to talk about the raid on the eye because I'm hearing I'm going so cashews in my head I can't I can't talk directly about my obsessive thoughts spirals because it feels too dangerous it feels it's just yeah it feels dangerous it's also worth noting that radon is a real problem yeah and one of the one of the embarrassments for me of my obsessional thinking is that you know like and in a way I'm trivializing real problems that real people go through and that's something that Aiza struggles with as well c-diff is also a real problem and people who live with see diff infections you know can have chronic health problems that are very serious and very difficult and in a way like her obsessive worry about this stuff it feels as if she's trivializing other people's experience that said like when you're inside of that thought spiral there is literally for me at least nothing that you can do about it like it is not something that you choose or that anyone would choose one of the classic ones is I have AIDS right when you don't have AIDS right AIDS is a tragedy that has killed many many many many people yeah and yet you're not you're not trying to trivialize it you think you do in that OCD way right right and there's a there's a lot of like sexual obsessions that are that are similar that or you know and it is a very one of the things that makes it a difficult thing to live with is that it's a difficult thing to talk about because it is for me like I have worked really hard not to feel stigmatized or embarrassed about the brain disorder that I have but I still do I still feel embarrassed about it I still feel a little ashamed about it and in the end like I felt I you know initially I didn't want to write this book I wanted to write a bunch of different books and they kept not working and not working and not working and I think one of the main reasons for that is that this this was the this was this the only true story that I could tell right now if that makes any sense like this is the this was the only story that felt real to me in that time because for a lot of the period of writing the book I was pretty sick or emerging out of one of the worst periods of of it that I've had from a writing standpoint one of the most brilliant things about it which I I just can't believe you pulled it off is that writing about it from a character's perspective who is happily the thing with OCD is you could be talking to me and having a conversation but at the same time you're having a totally different set of thoughts going on that are your obsessions that would be and there are moments in the book where that that is going on but overall that would drive the reader nuts if every single page were but somehow you you pulled it off where it was fully believable that she has that she suffers from what she suffers from without making it unreadable yeah I mean that was something I thought a lot about like to what extent do you make this a difficult like physically difficult book to read and like I I appreciate it if somebody is willing to spend eight or ten hours with my story and I don't want to be mean to them I don't like I don't wanna I want to try to I mean III desperately for personal reasons and also for other reasons I desperately wanted to try some to find some kind of form or expression for this way of thinking for what it feels like to have the notion of yourself so undermined as if it's all built upon sand and but at the same time I wanted it to be a fun like a foot as fun a book as you can have when it's about that well it is it is actually a fun book and but is there something also that's you mentioned this idea also when we when we first started talking about if these thoughts aren't mine yeah then am i real but isn't that in some ways the eternal question that certainly teenagers ask who am i what am i yeah and and is there a me that exists independent of circumstances am i nothing but a response to the circumstances that I've encountered am I the same exact person that anybody else who went through my life would be and maybe that is a question primarily of adolescence but it is one that in middle age I find myself asking quite a lot like ultimately like am I just doing exactly what I would be doing you know if I weren't the so-called captain of my consciousness like am I am i more of a sort of prisoner inside of this self or am i the actor that the protagonist somehow of myself I still don't I still don't have a good answer for me yeah we're not gonna settle it on this episode probably not yeah I mean maybe have you seen the movie sliding doors this is a good segue let's talk about the title the title of the book yeah Turtles all the way down yeah it's in its I'm not this is not a spoiler it's a real thing it's this idea that the earth is not in the earth it's not round that it's flat and that it rests upon the back of a turtle where is on top of another turtle on top of another turtle on top of another all the way down right what does that where does that come from the story goes that this lecture gets a long lecture about how the history of the earth and then this at the end of it this old woman raises her hand and says that's all very well and good but the truth is that the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant tortoise and the the the lecturer thinking himself very smarts as what is that turtle standing on and then the woman says really you don't understand it's Turtles all the way down and it's very helpful to me when you when you think recursively when you think in spirals or in loops the in a way like when I first heard the Turtles all the way down story it almost felt like almost like a spiritual revelation of oh my oh my god Mike it's it's true obviously that the world is you know X billion of your years old and life evolved on it very slowly and it became more complex it crawled out of the oceans whatever whatever but it is also true that the earth is the stories we tell about it like the world is the stories that we tell and and so much of my thinking was trying to get to some bottom turtle and that there is no bottom turtle it is Turtles all the way down and so now like it doesn't really help except that it helps give like former expression to my thinking problem like now when I am having that thinking problem I can at least say to myself hold up Green yeah like you're looking for the bottom turtle there is no bottom turtle it's Turtles all the way down so how do you after you've done that how do you get out obviously it's not easy yeah I mean the weird thing about a spiral right like Aiza talks about this in the book is that if you follow it in words it doesn't ever end it just gets tighter and tighter and tighter forever like it gets infinitely tighter and I remember like trying to express this to my psychologist and my psychologist said you realize that if you just turn around the spiral also goes infinitely outward and I was like oh god that's very metaphorically resonant but it's not true we all know spirals go in one direction tighter and tighter and tighter until you die inside of the prison of yourself and then and then she said times up yeah that's a great session I think we're close to a breakthrough but next week next week we're gonna get there for sure she's great at shot book is wonderful thanks for reading oh thank you it's [Applause] funding for the interview show is provided by field notes vintage styled made in the USA pocket journals and stationery products learn more at field notes brand pom

Channel: Mark Bazer

Views: 2,051

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: John Green, Fault in Our Stars, YA Fiction, Talk Show

Id: irfn1VaK4XM

Length: 13min 5sec (785 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 16 2019