The New Yorker profiles John Green

Margaret Talbot from the New Yorker spent a few days with John in Indianapolis and wrote an amazing profile on him. 

Here is an excerpt:

On June 6th, Twentieth Century Fox releases “The Fault in Our Stars,” the movie version of John Green’s wildly successful 2012 novel about teen-agers with cancer. “T.F.I.O.S.,” as fans call it, has been on a Times best-seller list for a hundred and twenty-four consecutive weeks, and has spent forty-three weeks as the No. 1 Y.A. book. The trailer for the movie, which stars Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, has been viewed nearly twenty million times.

Publishing executives talk about successful books as if they were lightning strikes, but the popularity of “The Fault in Our Stars” was no accident. Nerdfighters, who by then numbered in the millions, were evangelical about it, tucking notes into copies of the book and encouraging readers to join their movement. In fact, “The Fault in Our Stars” reached the No. 1 position on Amazon six months before it was published, when Green announced its title online. Many authors do pre-publication publicity, but Green did extra credit: he signed the entire first printing—a hundred and fifty thousand copies—which took ten weeks and necessitated physical therapy for his shoulder.

In recent years, whenever Green has appeared at a book signing he has been greeted by hundreds, often thousands, of screaming fans, mostly teen-age girls. The weirdness of this is hard to overstate. Green is a writer, and his books are not about sexy vampires. “Stars” is a novel about young people with a deadly disease; its title is taken from Shakespeare, and it has an uncompromising ending. In the movie, as in the book, the lead character, Hazel Lancaster, wears an oxygen tube in her nose. Green did not write the film’s script, but he was an informal consultant, and it was important to him that the film retain this detail: “It flies in the face of the notion that romance, particularly about teen-agers, has to be straightforwardly ‘aspirational,’ as they always say.”

We really encourage you to read the whole piece. It is an amazing profile that will make you smile and maybe even cry a little.