It was the boozing and the smoking that John Green thought he’d get in trouble for. Touring the country in March to promote his new young-adult novel, Looking for Alaska, he expected booksellers to complain about the rampant substance abuse–buying cigarettes by the carton, swilling vodka and cheap wine–practiced by the teenagers in the book. But no one seemed to mind those things. The paragraph that bothered people was the one about the blow job. He clarifies: “One aborted blow job.”
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Looking for Alaska, set outside Birmingham, Alabama, is narrated by Miles Halter, a 16-year-old misfit and junior transfer to Culver Creek Preparatory School who’s obsessed with historical figures’ final words. He eventually finds his footing and a new crew of friends at Culver; by the middle of the book, exams and a desperate crush on a girl are the greatest sources of tension in Miles’s life. Then the death of a classmate–some of her friends call it a suicide–throws everything off kilter, and Miles and his companions spend the second half of the novel wading through various stages of grief. “It’s about the importance of forgiveness,” says Green. “It’s about how we tease meaning out of suffering.”
The winter before he started div school, Green got a job as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital in Columbus, Ohio, counseling the families of sick and dying kids. That’s where he came up with the idea for Looking for Alaska. “I ended up seeing a number of kids who died because of careless, stupid mistakes,” he says. “The kinds of mistakes that we all make all the time, except sometimes your kid dies. Like someone is smoking a cigarette and the house catches on fire, and then the kid dies. So I was thinking a lot about how do you get over something like that? How do you deal with it? Is there a way to come to terms with it?”
“I felt like there was a place for me writing stories about teens,” he says. “Writing for kids in high school allows you to lay bare your hope and try to be helpful. . . . There are really good books for teenagers that are unabashedly hopeful. There are not all that many for adults. They’re hopeful, but there’s this ironic distance to disguise the hopefulness. But I like being hopeful, and I don’t like creating ironic distance between me and my hope.”
