The John Green Collection (34 page)

I listened to a lot of old country and bluegrass music: Hank
Williams, Bill Monroe, and Doc Watson. I also listened to Neutral Milk Hotel and The Mountain Goats. (These days, I often listen to songs ABOUT
Looking for Alaska
while writing. This book, astonishingly, has inspired a lot of beautiful music.)

W
HY DID YOU CHOOSE THE NAME
A
LASKA
?

For the first couple years I was working on
Looking for Alaska
, it had no title and I used a placeholder name instead of Alaska. One day, my friend Levin and I watched the movie
The Royal
Tenenbaums
, which includes in its soundtrack a cover of the great Velvet Underground song “Stephanie Says,” which refers to a girl called Alaska. I loved that song in high school, and I loved the name, but it wasn’t until I went home and looked up the original meaning of Alyeska, “that which the sea breaks against,” that I realized it would be Alaska’s name.

H
AVE YOU BEEN AT ALL SURPRISED ABOUT THE SUCCESS OF
L
OOKING FOR
A
LASKA
?

I have been entirely surprised.
Alaska
has been published all over the world, from Japan to Mexico to Lithuania, and it has enjoyed an uncommonly generous reception from readers. It has won awards that I never dared to hope for, and most importantly, people still read it and like it enough to share it with their friends. Honestly, I never thought this book would even still be in print seven years after its publication, let alone that I would be answering questions about it in a New and Expanded Discussion Guide.

A
RE THERE ANY LAST WORDS YOU LIKED THAT DIDN’T MAKE THE BOOK
?

Tons! I love Emily Dickinson’s last words: “I must go in. The fog is rising.” Winston Churchill said, “I’m bored with it all.” British MP Lady Astor awoke from a stupor to find her family surrounding her and asked, “Am I dying or is it my birthday?” (It wasn’t her birthday.) The Irish playwright Brendan Behan turned to a nun who was drawing his blood and said, “Bless you, Sister. May all your sons be bishops.” And the great short story writer O. Henry, who knew a thing or two about endings, said, “Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.”

SOME INTENTIONALLY VAGUE AND BROAD

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1.
Is forgiveness universal? I mean, is forgiveness really available to all people, no matter the circumstances? Is it, for instance, possible for the dead to forgive the living, and for the living to forgive the dead?

2.
I would argue that both in fiction and in real life, teenage smoking is a symbolic action. What do you think it’s intended to symbolize, and what does it actually end up symbolizing? To phrase this question differently: Why would anyone ever pay money in exchange for the opportunity to acquire lung cancer and/or emphysema?

3.
Do you like Alaska? Do you think it’s important to like people you read about?

4.
By the end of this novel, Pudge has a lot to say about immortality and what the point of being alive is (if there is a point). To what extent do your thoughts on mortality shape your understanding of life’s meaning?

5.
How would you answer the old man’s final question for his students? What would your version of Pudge’s essay look like?

p.s. The great and terrible beauty of the Internet now makes it possible for us to continue the strange conversation between reader and writer indefinitely. Here are some of the places you can catch me online:

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

Version_1

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Epilogue, or the Lindsey Lee Wells Chapter

Author’s Note

The Appendix

Acknowledgments

Q & A

The morning after
noted child prodigy Colin Singleton graduated from high school and got dumped for the nineteenth time by a girl named Katherine, he took a bath. Colin had always preferred baths; one of his general policies in life was never to do anything standing up that could just as easily be done lying down. He climbed into the tub as soon as the water got hot, and he sat and watched with a curiously blank look on his face as the water overtook him. The water inched up his legs, which were crossed and folded into the tub. He did recognize, albeit faintly, that he was too long, and too big, for this bathtub—he looked like a mostly grown person playing at being a kid.

As the water began to splash over his skinny but unmuscled stomach, he thought of Archimedes. When Colin was about four, he read a book about Archimedes, the Greek philosopher who’d discovered that volume could be measured by water displacement when he sat down in the bathtub. Upon making this discovery, Archimedes supposedly shouted “Eureka!”
¹
and then ran naked through the streets. The book said that many important discoveries contained a “Eureka moment.” And even then, Colin very much wanted to have some important discoveries, so he asked his mom about it when she got home that evening.

“Mommy, am I ever going to have a Eureka moment?”

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, taking his hand. “What’s wrong?”

“I wanna have a
Eureka moment
,” he said, the way another kid might have expressed longing for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle.

She pressed the back of her hand to his cheek and smiled, her face so close to his that he could smell coffee and makeup. “Of course, Colin baby. Of course you will.”

But mothers lie. It’s in the job description.

•  •  •

Colin took a deep breath and slid down, immersing his head.
I am crying
, he thought, opening his eyes to stare through the soapy, stinging water.
I feel like crying, so I must be crying, but it’s impossible to tell because I’m underwater.
But he wasn’t crying. Curiously, he felt too depressed to cry. Too hurt. It felt as if she’d taken the part of him that cried.

He opened the drain in the tub, stood up, toweled off, and got dressed. When he exited the bathroom, his parents were sitting together on his bed. It was never a good sign when both his parents were in his room at the same time. Over the years it had meant:

It never meant:

But even so, Colin couldn’t help but hope that his parents were in the room to provide news of the Number 4 variety. He was a generally pessimistic person, but he seemed to make an exception for Katherines: he always felt they would come back to him. The feeling of loving her and being loved by her welled up in him, and he could taste the adrenaline in the back of his throat, and maybe it wasn’t over, and maybe he could feel her hand in his again and hear her loud, brash voice contort itself into a whisper to say I-love-you in the very quick and quiet way that she had always said it. She said
I love you
as if it were a secret, and an immense one.

His dad stood up and stepped toward him. “Katherine called my cell,” he said. “She’s worried about you.” Colin felt his dad’s hand on his shoulder, and then they both moved forward, and then they were hugging.

“We’re very concerned,” his mom said. She was a small woman with curly brown hair that had one single shock of white toward the front. “And stunned,” she added. “What happened?”

“I don’t know,” Colin said softly into his dad’s shoulder. “She’s just—she’d had enough of me. She got tired. That’s what she said.” And then his mom got up and there was a lot of hugging, arms everywhere, and his mom was crying. Colin extricated himself from the hugs and sat down on his bed. He felt a tremendous need to get them out of his room immediately, like if they didn’t leave he would blow up. Literally. Guts on the walls; his prodigious brain emptied out onto his bedspread.