Author John Green knows a thing or two about fame. Green, who spent part of his childhood in Birmingham, had a best seller with his young adult novel The Fault in our Stars. Several of his works have been made into movies. On Tuesday, his first novel for adults was published – Hollywood, Ending. The story follows two young actors, Kai and Juniper, who are cast in an Andy Warhol biopic as they navigate the complexities of fame and celebrity.
Green will speak at the Alabama Theatre Wednesday evening as part of his book tour. In advance of that, he spoke with WBHM’s Andrew Gelderman about the novel, the event, and his personal relationship with fame and the content machine.
Hear the extended conversation
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You've mentioned before that fiction is inherently more intimate than nonfiction. What's it like coming back to publishing fiction for the first time in over eight years? I have to imagine that it's a change.
It's a huge change. I mean, my last two books were both nonfiction and I was writing as myself, which in some ways is quite intimate. But there's something about writing a novel that's even more intimate, where you have to go into the depths of yourself and ask the reader to go into the depth of themselves. That's a big ask on both counts. So I tried to bring my deepest self to the story. As a result, I'm good and nervous.
I was also wondering how the story you set out to tell has changed over those eight years. What's that sort of been like?
The great thing about spending eight years writing a novel is that you have plenty of time to get happy with it. I started out thinking that I was just writing from one character's perspective, from the young man's perspective, Kai. Then a couple of years in, I realized that I wanted to turn the camera around and see Kai as Juniper sees him and see Juniper as she sees herself. So I needed to write from Juniper's perspective as well. That was probably the biggest challenge in the eight years of writing, was writing from two different people's perspectives. A lot of times in writing, the things that are the hardest are also the most fun and the most interesting. And so while I found that very challenging, it was also quite rewarding.
I'd like to stick on the changing of perspectives that you just brought up. Kai, obviously, is the character who's stepping into the industry, whereas Juniper has been there. She's the former child actress who, it's all she's really ever known. Could you talk to me about inhabiting those different perspectives with your relationship with celebrity?
My own relationship with celebrity is quite complicated. I both experienced overnight celebrity and the kind of long-burn celebrity that Juniper is after. I had overnight success in the sense that my book, The Fault in Our Stars, was vastly more successful than anything I'd written before. But I had the experience of writing previous novels, which Kai doesn't have. The other thing is that Kai is much more naturally charismatic, and less formally educated, whereas Juniper is someone who is really thoughtful about what she wants and very careful and cautious and ambitious. And so they just have different character traits that I wanted to bring out in the prose. I think that you need a point of connection with your characters, and I had points of connection with both of them to be sure.
To stick on Kai for one more moment, Kai at some points in the novel struggles with this idea of being good at something and if that's enough justification to do something. And that, as I was reading it, sounded rather personal. I was wondering if you could sort of dive into that a little bit for me.
I remember Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay about his sister and how his sister was a really brilliant artist, and he always wanted her to make art and sell art. Her response was just because you're good at something doesn't mean you have to do it. That felt quite radical to me when I read it when I was in my early 20s because I'd always been taught that you have to pursue your talents as far as you can pursue them and sacrifice everything for them.
As I've gotten older, I've started to think a little differently about that. I think now that maybe there are some things that aren't worth sacrificing in your life, in your personal life. The thing about sharing something online or sharing something in general – and this is not just a problem for celebrities these days, everybody does this – but once you share something, it's not yours anymore. That can be freeing. That can be liberating. It can also be very costly. I wanted to explore some of the costs as well as the benefits.
That leads into the idea of consumption that's in the book. You're taking parts of yourself, as you mentioned earlier, sacrificing bits of your private life to feed the machine. I was wondering if you could sort of just talk about that in relation to your own experiences. What has it been like having to make those sacrifices as your career grows?
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I mean, there are bigger problems in the world than press junkets. But as a friend of mine once said, “Of all the good things that ever happened to me, fame was the worst.” Not the worst thing that ever happened to them, but the worst of the good things. Tony Hawk once said, “I've done all the drugs and fame is the worst one.” Even Mr. Rogers said that fame is a four letter word and then paused for a long time before saying “like love.”
I think that my own experience of it has been that the relationship between myself and the content machine is a very complicated one. I have to exchange pieces of myself to get attention for my books. That's something that is just inherent to the deal that we've made, the deal that we struck. We're doing it right now, frankly. You and I are talking about my private life in a way that's going to be publicly consumed. That's something that Kai and Juniper are doing nonstop for day after day, week after week in the lead up to the release of the movie. I think it is very destabilizing for them and they lose a lot of themselves.
The hardest thing is when you don't choose what you're giving up. The hardest is when you don't choose whether something comes out or whether something is revealed, which is what Kai and Juniper have to deal with on one level or another, both of them. That's happened to me a few times and it's really difficult and painful because I think we would all like to keep aspects of our private life private.
I do want to add, the phrase, in spite of it all, comes up a whole lot in the book. It's even in your acknowledgments, where you're thanking everybody who makes art in spite of and because of it all. We're talking about the sacrifices. We're talking feeding the machine. Could you tell me a little bit why you keep coming back to the phrase in spite of it all?
Well, because I do think art is worth it in spite of it all. I think there are real costs to making art. There's private costs. There's public costs. There's loss of aspects of self in the commercialization of experience, turning private experience into movie tickets or book sales or whatever. There is loss there, but I think it's worth it. I wanted this book to be a love letter to movies as much as I wanted to be honest about the way the sausage gets made. I also love movies. I find them absolutely transportive. I love the fact that when you watch a movie with someone, you're not looking at the person but because your attention and care is oriented in the same way, it's like you're entwined around this other thing, this work of art. And whether I'm looking at visual art with my wife or watching a movie with my kids, I always feel that magic. So I do think that it's worth it, but I think we have to be honest about the cost.
Now this is a little bit of a different line of questions than I have been asking, but I do want to ask. There are two points in the book Kai is listening to an audiobook to prepare for a possible upcoming role. The first time it's referenced, you take a clear stance on whether or not listening to an audiobook is reading. This is actually a really contentious topic here in our local newsroom. While I have you, and I do consider you an authority on the subject, obviously you've narrated your own audiobooks and you've written books, could you go on the record and say whether or not listening to an audiobook is really reading for me?
I strongly believe that listening to an audiobook is reading. I think whether you're reading with your eyes or your ears, you're still reading and many people struggle with visual decoding for whatever reason and they find it easier to process information through sound and I would argue those people are reading just as much as anyone is reading. I also think there's a growing body of evidence that we retain more information from audiobooks than we do from books that we read with our eyes. I think that there are different kinds of reading, for sure, and I use them differently, but they are both reading to me.
In the first chapter, you introduce Matthew Malone using WikiFeet, which I then had to look up and then have a conversation with my editor where I explained what WikiFeet was. But I was wondering, why? Why WikiFeet?
Well, that's a great question. It just shows the way that celebrities are treated like literal objects, like they become objects for us to be fascinated by, for us to be titillated by, for us to think of as sort of non-human entities, as mere bodies or as mere objects for us to look at, impose our desires upon, whatever. That felt like the funniest and most intimate way to introduce that theme in the novel. But there are so many occasions in the novel where these characters must deal with the fact that the world wants them to be objects, not people.
More big picture, what are you hoping readers take away from this book? What are you hoping they leave the novel feeling or thinking?
Well, I wanted to write about how art has the power to transform us. It really does change us. It is not optional for humans. We've been making art for tens of thousands of years. We made it before we had a caloric surplus. We have made it the whole time. I also wanted to write about how love sustains us, how we survive all that we have to survive and how key relationships are to that survival, how essential it is to find the kind of love that you can hold on to even in a difficult storm.
There's a few times in the book characters reference not wanting to want what they want. What's something that you want to not want that you want?
Oh, success, for sure. I don't want to want to be successful, but I still want it. And I don't even know what success looks like. I don't even have a firm definition for that anymore. And yet, I still want whatever abstract idea there is. I still feel like everyone does – that if I can put one more link in the chain, I'll finally be fulfilled and happy.
There's a great moment where. Jim Carrey in a Golden Globe acceptance speech says that he's not going to bed anymore as Jim Carrey. He's going to bed as Golden Globe winner Jim Carrey. And that he is now only one accomplishment away from being truly happy, which is being two time Golden Globe award winner Jim Carey. And that's so real. I mean, I feel that so deeply. Like I should be in the garden with my mother right now, picking peppers, but I still want that worldly success, even though I know I shouldn't.
Is there anything that you would want to go back and tell yourself when you were first sort of breaking in, when you were more in the position of Kai?
I would tell myself that your core relationships are all that matters. How you feel in those relationships is going to define how you feel in your life. What you do to support and sustain those relationships is going to be overwhelmingly the most important thing. What you do with your life is important, but it's not as important as who you do life with. I wish I'd known that when I was younger. I've been really fortunate that a lot of the foundational relationships in my life existed before there was a lot of public attention around my work. So I haven't had to forge an identity separate from that or after that.
It's very different for Kai and Juniper. And I think for a lot of young YouTubers, for a lot of young actors, for a lot of young influencers of every kind, so much of their identity is wrapped up in what they do. So much of it is easily defined versions of success – how many followers you have, how many likes your post gets. Those easily defined metrics, while they're very compelling, they aren't real. The real metrics are not how widely you are viewed, but how deeply you are loved. I wish I could tell that to Kai and Juniper for sure.
You've got your book tour going across the nation. September 23 you're coming here to Birmingham. You're coming to the Alabama Theater. What can people expect from an evening with John Green? It's gonna be a lovely evening. What's that conversation gonna look like?
Well, it'll be a really special conversation because my wife, in addition to being my first reader and the reader I care the most about and the person who shaped the book as much as anybody did, is also a Warhol scholar. And so I wrote about Warhol partly for all the reasons I talked about earlier in our conversation, but partly as a love letter to Sarah. And so Sarah can explore some of the Andy Warhol aspects with me in a way that few people could. I also think that it'll just be lovely. It'll be lovely to be back in the town where I grew up, be with a lot of my family, be with Thank You Books, which is a great bookstore there in Birmingham, and be with the folks I went to high school with. I'm really looking forward to being in Birmingham again.
And as I understand it, each ticket also comes with a signed copy of your book. I know when pre-orders were first announced, I think you said you were shooting to sign 82,000 copies of the book. I was wondering where you sat with that. How many copies have you signed? How many are you going to sign?
I ended up signing more than that. I ended signing about 106,000 copies because I spent a few days at the warehouse, the Penguin Random House warehouse in Crawfordsville, Indiana, working with a great team of people signing books so that we could make sure that every book was signed on tour and also that there were lots of signed books available at independent bookstores around the country. So I signed a lot. There are worse hobbies than signing your name over and over again. It's pretty easy. I can watch Netflix while I do it. I've got no complaints.
