introductions by author and editor
Hi. John Green here, author of Looking for Alaska. Below, you’ll get a
glimpse into the revision process of the book from my editor and publisher Julie Strauss-Gabel, without whom the book you just read would be much worse.
Looking for Alaska had two fairy godmothers—first, Ilene Cooper, my mentor and boss at Booklist magazine, who encouraged me to write and offered endless editorial guidance to get the story into good enough shape to submit to publishers. And then came Julie. From the time I turned in my first major revision, Julie really believed that Alaska could be a book people would respond to (although I don’t think either of us ever imagined a ten- year anniversary edition). Her faith in the book proved vital—as it has with all of my books—in part because it pushed me to work harder, and while I certainly found her twenty-page editorial letters intimidating (and still do!), she made the novel much better by refusing to give up on it even when I wanted to. You’ll get a hint below of just how much changed during revision, which I hope will help to show all the ways in which a book is not created by one person. Books, like most of my favorite things, are collaborations.
—JG
Looking for Alaska came into my life on August 21, 2003, attached to this email:
Hi, Julie,
Thanks again for the phone call. It was wonderful to make your acquaintance. I’ve attached a copy of LOOKING FOR ALASKA (for what it’s worth, I don’t know about the title. I am partial to lengthy, full-sentence titles, like, EVERYTHING TOGETHER FALLS APART, but I understand that such titles have limited teen appeal, so I went with LOOKING FOR ALASKA).
I’m really excited to be working with you. Thanks, and take care,
John Green
There were so many things to come that no one could have predicted.
Authors and editors dream of readers and longevity. But no matter how big that dream, John and I could never have imagined that more than ten years, and millions of readers, later we would have this opportunity to look back in a new edition.
Looking for Alaska is the book that changed my life. My urgency to share the book with everyone forced me to become a better editor and a relentless advocate. Working with John has left an indelible mark, one shaped by moments of extraordinary editorial revelation and deep friendship.
I am so grateful for the passion of readers that makes Alaska as urgent today as it was for me then, and for the chance to share a small piece of that early journey. I hope the power and potential of story can change your life, and make your voice loud, as it did mine.
—JSG
opening scenes
Many landmarks of John’s award-winning debut—its central cast of characters, its Alabama boarding school setting, its “Before” and “After” countdown—were in the draft the first time I read it. But so much also changed in the revisions that followed, including an evolving focus on
religious studies, the escalating use of pranks, and a major expansion of Pudge’s fascination with famous last words, including François Rabelais’s Great Perhaps and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s labyrinth.
The samples that follow are from the earliest pages of that manuscript, introducing readers for the first time to Pudge (its original opening pages) and, soon after, introducing Pudge and the reader to Alaska. The earliest revision priority was better discovering who both Pudge and Alaska were as characters and bringing them fully to the page. For Pudge, this meant finding him more clearly, hearing his voice. How could he be more than the observer of everyone else’s story? Especially when narrative momentum would stop so suddenly once the countdown ended with Alaska’s death, finding the voice in Pudge’s narration and allowing him to live even without Alaska’s borrowed sunshine was critically important.
Though Pudge—and the voice of the manuscript—would evolve throughout, the change began with the book’s opening. Last words would eventually come to shape those first pages, as would a sense of the family and (lack of) friends Pudge left behind to go to Culver Creek.
Finding the real Alaska within the layers of energy, moodiness, and bravado was an equally large and important task of revision. There’s much
of the Alaska readers would soon know on the page in this early version, but just as Pudge was not yet fully realized, there was still a lot of character development needed. In this draft Pudge is looking at Alaska, but not yet seeing her; we are introduced to her in a very manic and sexualized way. Of course, in the final book Pudge still struggles to see Alaska completely— necessary to watching them both grow as characters throughout the novel— but so much is visible just under the surface. Elements of this early version survived to the final book, but John would add several new elements that brought new focus to Alaska’s magnetic and fragile personality, helping us to see all the characters with greater clarity and complexity.
—JSG
Julie is being, I fear, too kind here. It was important to me that Pudge’s misimagining of Alaska be at the center of the book—in fact, one of my first titles to the story was Misremembering Alaska. (In retrospect, I like that better, but it’s probably too late to change the title now.) Anyway, their first meeting is the reader’s first chance to see how Pudge looks at Alaska, how his gaze shapes his (mis)understanding of her. But in this draft, his
response to her is so over-the-top that it reveals nothing about Alaska. Through the rounds of revision, Julie showed me that by making Pudge more sympathetic and a better friend, the reader could understand Alaska
and her pain in ways that Pudge never quite could. And that was central to the job of the novel.
As for the first scene that follows, the original beginning of the novel: One of the biggest challenges for me with Alaska was seeing past my own experience and memories into what might be useful or interesting for readers. My mom gave me a cicada skin when I went off to boarding school, so I structured the whole opening of the novel around it. But in the end Julie and I felt that last words were a much better through-line than the cicada skin, which is how the book came to start with Rabelais’s Great Perhaps, which in turn led to Bolívar’s labyrinth.
—JG
ORIGINAL DRAFT OPENING, August 2003
FOUR MONTHS, THREE DAYS BEFORE
I got rid of my parents as quickly as I could that first day. My mother was a crying mess.
“I’m a bad mother,” she said. “You should come home.”
“You’re not a bad mother,” my dad and I responded in unison. “This is good for me,” I said. “I’s a gonna learn how t’talk right
Southern.”
She laughed. My dad and I—it’s how we deal with my mom. The only way to shut her up is to make her laugh. She is always talking, the same way that normal people are always breathing. In a minute, she can talk herself into crying, and in another, she can talk herself out of it. The only way to slow down the incessant talking is to make her laugh. There is no such thing as silence with my mom.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” my dad said. “Okay.”
“No drugs. No drinking. No cigarettes.” An alumnus of Culver Creek, he had done the things I had only heard about: the secret parties, streaking through hay fields (it was all boys back then, my dad laments), and the drugs, drinking, and cigarettes. It took him a while to kick smoking, but his
badass days are well behind him. Good people, my parents, but to tell the truth, I was damned glad to be rid of them.
“I love you,” they both blurted out simultaneously. Those words made the whole thing horribly uncomfortable, like watching your grandparents kiss, but I guess they needed to be said.
“I love you, too. I’ll call every Sunday.”
Culver Creek has two pay phones, which are shared by the 150 boarders.
This is a good thing, the administration insists, because it gives us separation from our home lives. Generally, people do not end up at boarding school, even an academically prestigious one like Culver Creek, if their home lives are shining examples of the American Nuclear Family. My family isn’t dysfunctional, actually. But attending Culver Creek is a family tradition for us—I am the ninth Halter to attend the Creek, and the third
Miles Halter. Besides, I liked my parents okay, but I’d lived with them for sixteen years—longer than your average marriage—and a trial separation seemed long overdue.
My mom handed me a box, wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper, and smiled. “Going away present,” she said. My family has always used
inappropriate wrapping paper—my favorite is the “World’s Greatest
Grandpa” paper my mom wrapped my birthday presents in one year. The memory almost made me sad, but not quite. Mom hugged me, and then Dad, and it was over. I felt such tremendous relief as they drove away that I couldn’t bring myself to open the gift for a while. I didn’t want anything to remind me of my old life, back in Florida. I took off my shirt, lay down on the hot vinyl of the lower bunk mattress, and closed my eyes. I’ve never been born again with the baptism and weeping and all that, but I can’t
imagine it feels much better than being born again as a guy with no past at a boarding school with few rules.
I knew from my dad that Culver Creek believed in a minimal amount of adult supervision. All of the teachers lived on campus, but only one, Mr.
Starnes, lived in the dorm circle, which was not a circle at all, but a pentagram of one-story buildings, each with eighteen rooms. It looked like an enlarged version of some seedy roadside motels, and my room certainly smelled like one. Like dog pee and mold.
My ex-school (for which I have all the contempt typically associated with ex-girlfriends) had smelled somewhat better, but I hated it. Hated
every single miserable, lonely day. I had no friends worth missing and no memories worth remembering. I’ve never thought much of Florida. All the light in Florida is either neon or fluorescent, and the people I knew there were similarly fake. And here’s the wonderful thing: I never had to think about my old school ever again.
After a while, I unpeeled myself from the vinyl air mattress and started to unpack, to build a room of my own, the very first space that was entirely mine to decorate. The place didn’t look like much. Two desks, two chairs, a bunk bed, linoleum floors, and a bathroom with a shower that felt like standing beneath a dripping faucet.
First came the fan. We didn’t have AC, and on that late August morning, it was so hot and humid that even the walls were sweating. I clipped a small fan to a wooden plank above the bottom bunk and put a box fan in the
window, but it didn’t help much. Hot air moving isn’t much cooler than hot air standing still.
I taped a map of the world to the wall and then started to feel overwhelmed. I almost wished I had asked my parents to help me unpack. So I sat in my school-provided wooden desk chair and opened my present. Inside the box, there was what appeared to be a used tissue.
Some present. I pulled the tissue apart, a bit nervous I’d find snot, and found an intact cicada skin. Also inside the tissue was a note from my mom. I was like a cicada, she said, leaving an old skin behind for a new one. She said she wanted me to remember the cicada, that my whole life I would be shedding skins and growing new ones. Then she wrote, “This is a metaphor, by the way.” Just like my mom to ruin a perfectly good letter by condescending to me. As if I don’t know a metaphor when I see one. In fact, me being like a cicada isn’t a metaphor, Mom. It’s a simile. I think her
cicada bit was a little cliché, frankly, but what can you do? Old people get sentimental.
ORIGINAL FIRST MEETING, August 2003
FOUR MONTHS, ONE DAY BEFORE
I met her when she pulled down my pants. It was my second day at the Creek, the day before classes started. I was blinking sweat from my eyes
while taping a van Gogh poster to the back of the door while the Colonel sat on the couch and judged whether it was level. There was a knock at the door. I thought perhaps it was one of Chip’s friends. It was, in fact, his best friend. They had met in ninth grade, the only two kids at Culver Creek on full scholarships, and automatically bonded. She was a girl. And, oh, Lord, what a girl. If girls were gross domestic product, she was the United States. If girls were sugar, she was the cane fields of the Florida Keys.
She had long, straight brown hair (she always called it mahogany) pulled back in a ponytail, olive skin, and big blue eyes, the soft but fierce blue of
the Carolina Tarheels and cold, cloudless skies. She was smiling as I opened the door, her small teeth straight on the top and a little crooked on the bottom. But it was her curves that left me shyly staring. If curves were salvation, she would have made a hard-hearted sinner desperate to repent.
Her body was like the foothills of the Appalachians, with large breasts pushing out her thrift store T-shirt and wide hips to complement a magnificently round (some would say large, but I’ll just say round) butt. I
couldn’t quite see her butt as she stood facing me, but the soft curve from her waist to her hips made it easy to imagine. Right then, at that moment, was the first time in my life I ever noticed the importance of curves. I’d noticed hips and breasts before, of course, but she made me suddenly comprehend their significance. These were the curves for which men fight and die, but I barely even had time to notice them before she pulled down my pants.
“Those are the biggest pants in the state of Alabama!”
“I like them baggy,” I said, embarrassed, and pulled them up. The pants had been cool back home in Florida. And I always wear pants, even when it’s 110 degrees outside and 105 inside with the fans blasting on high,
because my skinny chicken legs are a source of constant embarrassment. “Tighty whities, eh?” the Colonel said. He was sitting on the couch,
looking at me with a bemused smirk. “Bad for your balls.” Note to self: switch to boxers.
“Come outside,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
Actually, it wasn’t. The stifling heat had been replaced by miserable rain, and it had been raining all day. Back home, it rained pretty much every afternoon in the summertime, but never for entire days. Only three hundred miles away from Orlando, and somehow I was in a whole different ecosystem. But she was so beautiful, I couldn’t say no. We walked outside, and she grabbed my hand and pulled me into the rain, and she started dancing around in circles, her arms outstretched, palms turned up to the sky, catching water drops between her fingers.
“Dance with me,” she said sweetly. “I can’t. I don’t like dancing.”
“Okay. Then you can just watch me dance.” Suddenly, she jumped forward, landing her feet in a puddle and splashed water all over my just- pulled-up pants.
“I’m Alaska,” she said, and she was: larger than life and prettier than poems. She was Alaska, except warmer. “I live in Room 23.”
“I’m M—”
“Miles Halter the Fifth. I know who you are, dumb-ass. Everyone knows who you are. You’re like the seventeen thousandth Halter to go to this
school.” Actually, the ninth.
The Colonel joined me outside, standing beside me, the rain soaking us as we stood stock-still, watching Alaska. She was so beautiful in the rain, with her T-shirt sticking close to her breasts and her shorts hugging her hips. I suspect we could have watched her for as long as it rained, for as long as she could dance. I do not think we would have ever tired of her
circles in the rain, her bare feet on tiptoe as if reaching for something in the sky. I think we would have stood there, wet to the bone, until pneumonia killed us.
“Your cousin,” she said, stopping her dance, “says that you’ve only kissed one girl.”
My cousin, who had graduated the year before, told the sad truth.
Sixteen years old and I had only kissed one girl. And that was only if you counted January Morris, the summer after eighth grade. It was the last night of camp, and we had this big candlelight ceremony and when I was saying good-bye to January, we hugged, and then we kissed, our tongues sliding around awkwardly, and then I heard this sizzling and popping sound. I soon realized, from the stench, that my candle had caught her hair on fire. The only thing worse than that kiss was the smell of her hair afterward.
“How many boys have you kissed?” I asked.
“You don’t even want to know,” the Colonel laughed. “Computers have crashed trying to crunch those numbers.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Thirty, maybe? And two girls.”
I was clearly much less cool than Alaska Young, but it was love at first sight—for me, anyway. Maybe it was the way her brown hair, soaked with warm Alabama rain, hung down to the middle of her back, or maybe it was her smile. Or maybe it was that no girl had ever pulled down my pants before.
So that’s how it all started. She pulled down my pants. I fell in love with her. The Colonel watched, and he fell in love with her all over again.
the funeral
John and I faced distinctly different issues in editing the “Before” and
“After” sections of the manuscript. If the challenge of “Before” was to fully develop the characters, the challenge of “After” was to maintain momentum and character development in the aftermath of Alaska’s death—an event that devastated Pudge and removed the book’s most incandescent character from the story.
Developing Pudge and his friends “Before” was essential to finding the path forward in the “After.” But even as the pieces fell into place, one scene
—the funeral—would change again and again in revision, long after the rest of the manuscript was complete. For all of us, finding the right way to say
good-bye to Alaska Young was a near-impossible task.
In response to a reader’s question about what scene changed the most, John said:
I wrote the funeral probably fifteen or twenty times, and I would send it to Julie, and she’d be like, “Yeah, you have to write the funeral again.”
It was infuriating.
Then one day my roommates and I had a huge fight—I don’t even remember what it was about, but I think it involved a vacuum cleaner—and I really love my friend Shannon and I hate fighting with her and we almost never really fought, and it made me really sad.
So I went downstairs and I was crying and angry and I just wrote the funeral scene in about ten minutes.
What follows are three different versions of the funeral, beginning with the first draft in which Pudge doesn’t even attend personally. Through the
three versions, you can see the increasing connectivity of the characters and the examination of their shared loss. In making his friends more present, Pudge’s own deep, unfathomable loss comes into even greater focus.
—JSG
ORIGINAL FUNERAL, August 2003
SEVEN DAYS AFTER
Lara came by in the afternoon. I had only seen her once since Alaska died. I have barely left our room. It’s been a week, and I only recently realized I haven’t been eating much. One box of Cheerios in seven days. Oh, and the Maui-Wowie twins very kindly and unexpectedly brought McDonald’s by a couple days ago. But that’s about it.
Lara came by in the afternoon and I knew that tentative knock could only be her. I didn’t want to see her, but I said, “Come in,” anyway. The Colonel was still sleeping, and would sleep another twelve hours, for a grand total of nearly a full day.
We didn’t talk about us or kiss or even hug. She sat down on one side of the couch and I sat down on the other and she sobbed out the story of Alaska’s funeral to me. To begin with, the preacher didn’t even call her Alaska. He called her by her middle name, Lauren, because apparently Alaska’s father called her Lauren. Alaska’s father, apparently, didn’t say a word the entire time, just looked blankly forward at the closed casket, crying noiselessly. He looked like a ghost, Lara said. Like a man who has lost his life but can’t stop breathing.
The preacher gave some speech about how she’s in heaven now.
Apparently he didn’t know what she thought of church. Lara told me that most everyone at school but the Colonel and me and Takumi were at the funeral. She told me about walking up to the coffin—it was closed, she told me, and mahogany brown like Alaska’s hair—and putting her hand on it.
“What do I say,” she told me. “What do I say to the box? So I said notheeng.”
I didn’t say anything. She sobbed, and I didn’t reach for her. I couldn’t hold her, and she was too shy to ask. Too shy to ever do anything for herself, I thought, and then hated myself for thinking it. It’s not Lara’s fault that she isn’t Alaska. She told me about following the coffin—I think she meant hearse, not coffin, but maybe I’m wrong—to a field where they put Alaska into the ground next to a bunch of other dead people. “I threw deert on her grave,” Lara told me. “Four heaps”—one for me, one for you, one for the Colonel, and one for Takumi—then I threw four roses on the grave.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“I’m sorry,” she said, like she thought it was her fault. It was quiet for a long time, then. There is always so much quiet now. Finally, Lara asked me, “Do you want to talk?” I just shook my head and stared away from her, at
the bathroom door, until the quiet got too much for her and she left.
I guess maybe it’s not Lara who can’t talk. Maybe it’s been me all along.
FUNERAL, revision delivered January 2004
Vine Station, Alabama, was a straight shot north from school via I-65, past Birmingham and Warrior and Cullman and Good Hope, a traffic-free hour and a half up the spine of Alabama. The suburban sprawl surrounding
Birmingham—roadside motels and waffle houses and cookie-cutter subdivisions—slowly faded into the slow-sloping hills and farm fields of
the north, patches of kudzu climbing up pine trees and telephone poles. Just after we exited, the Colonel pointed out the window at a swarm of kudzu in a small patch of roadside trees.
“The poor man’s ivy,” he said. We drove down a narrow highway with no dividing stripe to Vine Station’s decrepit downtown, where a dollar store, a souvenir shop (a hand-lettered sign in the window read, “Civil War Memorabilia! Postcards! Ice-Cold Beer!”), and a fabric store clung to life.
“God, this is depressing,” Takumi said.
“Like a ghost town,” Lara added, and I thought of the Brady Bunch in the ghost town and the TV room and the blow job that wasn’t, and I wondered how to explain everything to her without actually having to say everything—without actually saying first I kissed her and then I killed her
and now I just can’t look at you or even think to care about anything but her
—but I just said, “Well, it’s Sunday. Maybe it’s better on the weekdays,” although the cracked sidewalks and the dusty storefront windows implied that it wasn’t.
We beat the buses to the funeral home and hustled through the cold into the funeral parlor, which smelled of mold and cheap disinfectant and struck me as entirely too bright with its yellow wallpaper and harsh fluorescent lights. A man with a pot belly pushing through his too-tight gray suit walked up to us and said, “Y’all must be some of Alaska’s friends from school. I’m her father, Michael.” All four of us shook hands with him. Though his eyes
were the same glittery green as Alaska’s, they were sunk deep into dark sockets, and he looked not unlike a corpse, like a dead man who can’t stop breathing. “She loved it there so much,” he said, crying.
This poor old man, who’d grown fat since he last bought a suit, who’d lost his wife and his daughter. I wanted to be near him, so even when the others fell away, moving toward the coffee machine in the corner of that ghastly well-lit entryway, I stayed by him, not saying anything. After a while, he spoke to me.
“Were you good friends, then?” he asked me. “Yes sir.”
He leaned in toward me, then, speaking softly. “Let me ask you something, son. Did she ever talk with you about her mother?”
“Yes sir. Once.” I felt his arm on my shoulder, and he turned me around slowly so that we were facing away from the Colonel and everyone else.
“Do you remember what she said?”
“Just that she’d died,” I said, staring at the yellow wallpaper long enough to notice that it was peeling near the floor. “That she had an aneurism when Alaska was eight.”
“I don’t suppose Alaska and me weren’t terribly close,” he snorted, and I felt the weight of his arm against me increase, realizing that he was leaning on me. “It wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t. She’s the only family I had, ’side from my sister, and Lord God all I hope is that she knew it weren’t her fault.”
“I’m sure she did,” I lied. There was something about death that brought out the liars in us all.
“Well,” he said, as if recovering. Behind me, students were piling in from the buses. “I’m awful glad you come up. To see so many of her friends here means a lot.”
The casket—mahogany brown like her hair—was closed, mercifully, and set atop a faux-marble table at the entrance of the chapel, so that we all walked past it as we filed in. There was a bench for kneeling in front of the coffin, and so I knelt and tried to think of how to say good-bye. It was hard to imagine her inside that coffin, and yet it was not hard enough. Although people were kneeling on either side of me, we were alone together for that moment, she and I, and she could say nothing to me because she was dead and I could say nothing to her because I knew a great deal about how other people have said good-bye over the years but had no idea how to do it myself, and the only thing I could say and feel was, “I’m sorry.” I said it, too loud perhaps. And I put my hand on the coffin to stand and in the next moment, Alaska and I were no longer alone together, for I felt Lara’s hand on mine, her fingers wet with tears she’d just wiped away, and I pulled away again, pushed myself up, and sat down next to the Colonel. Lara sat in a different pew.
Most of the students and teachers from the Creek were there, and the chapel room was so full that kids sat on the radiators and stood in the aisles, but Jake was not among the mourners, and I wondered if she’d told him, if he was too pissed off even to bury her.
The preacher said she was in heaven. He said she was with her mother, and it seemed an odd thing to be sure of, since at the opening of his sermon, he acknowledged that he’d “never had the pleasure of meeting Alaska
Young.” I thought of Henry Ward Beecher, the nineteenth-century preacher whose last words were, “Now comes the mystery.” To me, there did not seem to be much mystery. What kind of God builds a heaven and then
populates it with the wife and daughter of a nice man? I wondered if all of Alaska was contained within that coffin at the back of the chapel, whether something of her went to heaven or hell or got reincarnated. I wondered, but I could not believe that death was anything other than final and complete. A flame, extinguished.
After the sermon, Alaska’s aunt—her father’s sister—got up and sang an a cappella version of an old Southern hymn, “Will the Circle Be
Unbroken.” The woman was short and stout, and her eyeliner dripped down her face as if she were crying dark blood. Her voice, so high and lonely, sang without respect for key, rising too sharp and then falling too flat, but
her breaking voice revealed the deeper crack, and as she sang loud and unabashedly off-key, I began to cry for the first time since the day I’d heard.
Well, I told the undertaker Undertaker, please drive slow. For the body you are hauling Lord, I hate to see her go.
And then in the chorus, her voice grew louder, so that it no longer even seemed possible that one woman could raise such a holy clatter. She sang with such power that I thought for a moment God might swoop in on a chariot and answer her when she asked with furious passion:
And will the circle be unbroken By and by, Lord, by and by?
Is there a better home a-waitin’ In the sky, Lord, in the sky?
This was how Alaska found her way out of the labyrinth of suffering: Halfway up a minor hill on a day in which the gray clouds hung so low that you could taste their moisture, six men carried her a short distance from the hearse to the grave, where a pulley system lowered her into the freezing ground as each of the mourners threw one white tulip into the hole. “Her
favorite flowers,” her father told me, just before he started screaming sobs. As they lowered her down, our world seemed to collapse upon itself, and if heaven can hear, it could hear the cacophony of wailing that erupted from Vine Station, Alabama. I cried, too, but quietly, staring out at the view she’d have—the crumbling downtown faced her headstone; to its right, an auto
parts store. For seventeen years, she read all sorts of literature that featured epic tragedy and picturesque funerals, and they buried her within plain sight of an auto parts store.
FUNERAL, revision delivered March 2004
SIX DAYS AFTER
Three hours later, I got up, showered for the first time in a long while, and put on my only suit. I almost hadn’t brought it, but my mom insisted that you never know when you’re going to need a suit, and sure enough.
The Colonel did not own a suit, and by virtue of his stature could not borrow one from anyone at the Creek, so he wore black slacks and a gray button-down.
“I don’t suppose I can wear the flamingo tie,” he said as he pulled on black socks.
“It’s a bit festive, given the occasion,” I responded.
“Can’t wear it to the opera,” said the Colonel, almost smiling. “Can’t wear it to a funeral. Can’t use it to hang myself. It’s a bit useless, as ties go.” I gave him a tie.
The school had chartered buses to ferry students north to Alaska’s hometown of Vine Station, but Lara, the Colonel, Takumi, and I drove in Takumi’s SUV, taking the back roads so we didn’t have to drive past the spot on the highway. I stared out the window, watching as the suburban
sprawl surrounding Birmingham faded into the slow-sloping hills and fields of northern Alabama.
Up front, Takumi told Lara about the time Alaska got her boob honked over the summer, and Lara laughed, and that was the first time I had seen her, and now we were coming to the last, and more than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can’t due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi’s headrest, and I cried, whimpering, and I didn’t even feel sadness so much as pain. It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.
Meriwether Lewis’s last words were, “I am not a coward, but I am so strong. It is hard to die.” I don’t doubt that it is, but it cannot be much harder than being left behind, and I thought of Lewis as I followed Lara into the A-frame chapel attached to the single-story funeral home in Vine Station, Alabama, a town every bit as depressed and depressing as Alaska had always made it out to be. The place smelled of mildew and disinfectant, and the yellow wallpaper in the foyer was peeling at the corners.
“Are y’all here for Ms. Young?” a guy asked the Colonel, and the Colonel nodded. We were led to a large room with rows of folding chairs populated by only one man. He knelt before a coffin at the front of the chapel. The coffin was closed. Closed. Never going to see her again. Can’t kiss her forehead. Can’t see her one last time. But I needed to, I needed to see her, and much too loud, I said, “Why is it closed?” and the man, whose potbelly pushed out from his too-tight suit, turned around and walked toward me.
“Her mother,” he said. “Her mother had an open casket, and Alaska told me don’t ever let them see me dead, Daddy, and so that’s that. Anyway, son, she’s not in there. She’s with the Lord.”
And he put his hands on my shoulders, this man who had grown fat since he’d last had to wear a suit, and I couldn’t believe what I had done to him,
his eyes glittering green like Alaska’s but sunk deep into dark sockets, like a green-eyed, still-breathing ghost, and don’t no don’t don’t die, Alaska.
Don’t die. And I walked out of his embrace and past Lara and Takumi to her casket and knelt before it and placed my hands on the finished wood, the dark mahogany, the color of her hair, and I felt the Colonel’s small hands on my shoulders, and a tear dripped onto my head, and for a few moments, it
was just the three of us—the buses of students hadn’t arrived, and Takumi and Lara had faded away, and it was just the three of us—three bodies and two people—the three who knew what had happened and too many layers between all of us, too much keeping us from one another, and the Colonel said, “I just want to save her so bad,” and I said, “Chip, she’s gone,” and he said, “I thought I’d feel her looking down on us, but you’re right. She’s just gone,” and I said, “Oh God, Alaska, I love you. I love you,” and the Colonel whispered, “I’m so sorry, Pudge. I know you did. I know you did,” and I said, “No. Not past tense,” and she wasn’t even a person anymore, just flesh rotting, but I loved her present tense, and the Colonel knelt down beside me and put his lips to the coffin and whispered, “I am sorry, Alaska. You deserved a better friend,” and is it so hard to die, Mr. Lewis? Is that labyrinth really worse than this one?
“BEFORE & AFTER” COUNTING ALASKA’S DAYS
Looking for Alaska went through several rounds of revision, so it was not surprising that most of the dates (always loose in early drafts anyway) didn’t actually work in the near-final edit; scenes had been repeatedly moved, added, and deleted. But the entire book—every “before” and every “after”—had to fit together. Symmetry was also critical; the days before and after (136 days each) had to mirror each other, pivoting equally on Day Zero. It was a very complex puzzle.
John and I decided to align the book’s timeline to 2005, the year Alaska would be published. We pieced together critical dates (Alaska’s birth month and year, notable school holidays, Alaska’s best day, barn night) determining that the Last Day would be Monday, January 10, 2005.
Coincidentally, seven years later, January 10, 2012, would mark another milestone: the publication date of The Fault in Our Stars.
Following are three actual calendars I used to count and confirm all the “before” and “after” dates during my final edit.
—JSG
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This 1996 calendar was an early attempt to determine the date of eight-year-old Alaska’s school trip to the zoo with her mom. Later, after January 10, 2005, became the Last Day,
the zoo trip would be adjusted to Thursday, January 9, 1997. Attached to the calendar are a
handful of notes to myself made during edits, including calculations about the day Alaska’s mother dies (which had been January 15 in the near-final draft); the (purposeful) tense changes in the book, and a query about Alaska’s knock-knock joke.
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I used this 2004 calendar to calculate the days Before, for the first half of Culver Creek’s 2004–2005 school year. My small numbers counting backward are visible on the calendar
and Thanksgiving (November 25, 2004) is highlighted as it was a critical plot point with a definable date around which the timeline had to work.
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The 2005 calendar, complete with a single highlight on January 10, tracked Alaska’s final days and the days After. The calendar is covered with my notes piecing together Alaska’s
age, birthday, etc., to use as a reference sheet when counting backward and determining dates.
Q&A with JOHN GREEN
These questions were mostly drawn from Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook, although a few came in over email. Please note that this section contains huge massive spoilers, and you should not be reading it unless you’ve
finished the book. I understand the urge to flip to the back and find out what happened—I am an inveterate back-flipper—but if you’ve made it TEN YEARS since the publication of the book without being spoiled, I don’t want to ruin everything now.
Q. I am not a very good critical reader; I feel I can enjoy books but I don’t really see them that deeply. Any advice?
A. Here’s how J. D. Salinger dedicated one of his books: “If there is an amateur reader still left in the world—or anybody who just reads and runs
—I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.”
It’s okay to be a reader who reads and runs, to enjoy a book without trying to consciously read it critically. I think there are also many joys to critical reading, but I don’t think reading should be a metaphor hunt.
Metaphor and figurative language are so deeply ingrained into how we
imagine ourselves and our world that you don’t need to look for them in a text to be affected by them.
So if you like to read and run, that’s okay. Read and run. If you like to read and ponder, I think that’s okay, too. There are many right ways to read a novel!
Q. What questions do you feel were answered for yourself through the experience of writing Looking For Alaska?
A. There were many times writing this book that I felt it was my only hope. I would say to my family or friends, “This novel is my only chance.” I couldn’t articulate it further than that—my only chance to what? My only
hope of what? I didn’t know, and still don’t really. I just needed the story. I needed it to work. And that made me patient: I kept writing and kept revising. In the end, Alaska had to be pried out of my hands, basically.
Looking back, I was really struggling in the years after college. I felt lost and intensely alone. And for me Alaska was a way to write about the
feelings of abandonment and the challenges of living with ambiguity and regret. It was a very personal novel, written not only toward the me I was in high school, but also the me who was writing it.
Q: Why did you choose the name Alaska?
A: The idea initially came to me while watching the movie The Royal Tenenbaums, which features a cover of the Velvet Underground song,
“Stephanie Says,” part of which goes, “She’s not afraid to die / The people all call her Alaska.”
I liked the name Alaska because it’s grand and mysterious and far away, part of our country but a distant and mythologized part, in much the same way that Alaska herself is (disastrously) mythologized by her classmates.
I also liked it because of what it actually means. It is often translated “that which the sea breaks against,” and I think that is Alaska’s experience of herself: She feels that the sea is breaking against her, again and again, with all the incumbent turmoil, excitement, and pain.
Q: Alaska is portrayed to us as an extremely beautiful person. Does Pudge describe her so flawlessly because he is in love with her or is Alaska just incredibly beautiful?
A: One of the challenges of reading a novel that’s written in the first person is that you have to decide how much to trust the narrator. In Catcher in the
Rye, for instance, Holden Caulfield shows you over and over again that he is an inveterate liar, but for some reason you still kind of suspect that he is telling you the truth. In other novels (American Psycho comes to mind), the narrator is clearly unreliable.
You’re absolutely right that when you’re romantically enthralled with someone, you see that person as more beautiful than other people might. But there’s very little objectivity when it comes to beauty, and we learn little about Alaska’s physicality: We know she has green eyes and at one
point a “tan” body, and we know that she has mahogany hair. His attraction, like all attraction, is intensely subjective.
Q: Alaska wasn’t introduced as fully as the other characters even though the book largely centers around the effect she had on people (like the Colonel). Is that intentional?
A: The first time Pudge and Alaska have a real conversation, she’s sitting next to him in the dark and he can’t really see her. And throughout the story, there are times when he’s looking at her without seeing her, or there’s something between them that prevents him from seeing her whole face, or
he only sees the back of her head, etc., etc., etc.
That was all meant to indicate how incompletely he sees Alaska, something she mentions to him again and again. But in all his fascination with her, he can’t help but romanticize her, which makes it difficult for him to understand the reality and seriousness of her pain.
Q: Does Alaska have a mood disorder?
A: I’m not a psychiatrist, so I’m not going to take a guess at that. I think Alaska is clearly struggling and in a lot of pain, though. And I think it’s particularly difficult for her because she feels alone in that pain, which is what really (in my experience, anyway) makes suffering unbearable and makes one experience real despair.
But the weird thing about depression is that it tends to further isolate you from people, thereby making it ever harder for anyone to bridge the gap and really hear you in the way you need to be heard. So it becomes
progressively more difficult to feel that you aren’t alone with your pain, which can make the despair feel permanent and unsolvable.
This is the most insidious thing about depression, I think: It makes itself more powerful by dragging you away from the world outside of yourself.
So I don’t want to diagnose Alaska, but certainly she lives with terrible hurt, and I think she clearly feels isolated by it, and I wanted to try to reflect that in the story.
Q: Do you like Alaska as a person?
A: I love her as a person.
As for liking her: I’ve always sort of preferred people who are not entirely likable.
Q: Can you relate to the character of Alaska?
A: Sure. I was pretty reckless when I was in high school, and I have periodically lived with depression, and I really struggled against self- destructive impulses as a teenager.
But there are also, of course, a lot of ways in which I wasn’t like Alaska.
I wasn’t living with grief the way she was, and I had a better support network. Also, I wasn’t a girl.
And I never drove drunk. Driving drunk always seemed really crazy to me because you could hurt someone else. Of course, what I never thought through in high school was that when I hurt myself, I was also hurting other people, especially the people (like my parents) who loved me the most.
Q: What happened the night Alaska dies? Did she kill herself?
A: The questions I didn’t answer in the book are questions I either didn’t want to answer or didn’t feel like I should answer.
There are going to be questions in your life—big questions—that need to be answered and deserve to be answered but nonetheless go unanswered.
There will be mysteries around deaths and friendships and romances and religion that never get solved to your satisfaction. The interesting question
to me is: Can you go on and live a hopeful life in the face of intractable uncertainty? We must find a way to live with ambiguity without being consumed by the great unanswerables.
Q: Do you know what Alaska’s last words were?
A: No, I don’t know her last words. From the moment I began to think about the story, I knew I’d never be inside the car with her that night, and that my readers wouldn’t be, either.
I wanted Pudge to believe in the value of dying declarations as a way of closing the book on a human life, but then to be denied that closure when it comes to the death of someone he loves. He is denied that closure in one way by not knowing whether she committed suicide, and he is denied that
closure more abstractly by never knowing her last words. But people can go on living without closure. They do it all the time. Similarly, almost all of us will die without great last words.
Q: Did Alaska have to die?
A: Death is infuriatingly pointless. But it’s also, really, really common. (I am reminded of the Onion headline: Despite Efforts, World Death Rate Remains Steady at 100%.) To me, Alaska is about loss and grief and struggling against the nihilism that many of us feel when confronted with
death. So it could never have been about anything else, because I never had another story in mind. I wrote every word of the first half knowing the second half was coming, so I can’t imagine it any other way. If Pudge and
the Colonel and Alaska had gone on having a rip-roaring time, then the book would’ve been about . . . what?
Usually when characters die in books, it happens at the very end or the very beginning. I wanted it to happen in the middle, because I wanted
readers to meet and care about and empathize with Alaska, and then to lose her, and then to have to make the same journey that Pudge and the Colonel and the rest of them are making. I wanted the reader to have to battle against that feeling of pointlessness and to find some hope in a life that
includes unresolved and unresolvable grief.
Q. Why the switch from past to present tense around Alaska’s death? (And how come you haven’t used this in any book since, as far as I’m aware?)
A. I’m quite fond of tense changes. I used them in Paper Towns. I ALMOST used it in The Fault in Our Stars, but Julie encouraged me to cut it. (Originally, TFIOS moved between past and present tense almost every paragraph.)
So when I am telling a story, I switch a lot between past and present tense. I might be like, “So I was driving down the street and then BOOM a deer jumps out of the woods and almost hits my car, and I almost peed my pants.” That’s a grammatically disastrous sentence, but the reason I switch tenses there is because when describing the moment of crisis—the deer jumping onto the street—I feel as if it is still happening, and I want to
express to you that it was so intense that it is on some level not over.
We like to be very rigid in the way we imagine tense—some things are happening, other things have happened, etc. But one of the reasons we’ve created SO MANY tenses in English is that really, the way we experience
time is extremely complicated. When Pudge is talking about Alaska’s death, he is telling you a story that for him is still happening, a story that he hasn’t processed and put behind him. For me at least, that’s how trauma works. As Faulkner famously put it, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
Q: Looking for Alaska seems very personal. Is Alaska based on someone you knew?
A: I dislike answering this question honestly, because the dead cannot speak for themselves and because the novel is really and truly fictional. Also,
some of my classmates were understandably upset about the ways in which the novel reimagined and reinvented certain events that actually happened to us, and I want insofar as possible not to further that hurt.
That noted: When I was a student at Indian Springs School, a classmate of mine died, and her death was devastating to the entire community. My relationship with her was nothing like Pudge’s relationship with Alaska (I was much more like the fake mourners that Pudge rails against), but she
was someone I liked and admired a lot, and even now that it has been almost twenty years, I still don’t feel reconciled to what happened.
That’s all I’ll say about this, I think. I understand the urge to find the historical facts that may be hidden inside of novels, and I’m not going to deny that Alaska is in many ways an autobiographical novel, but in many ways it isn’t.
Q: Why did you decide to use the word “disintegrating” to describe the school after the Eagle told everyone about Alaska’s death?
A: Because I have this uncommonly brilliant and thoughtful editor in Julie Strauss-Gabel, she is always calling word choice to my attention, and wondering whether there might be a more interesting way to say something, etc.
What I like about the word disintegration is that it implies there had previously been an integration. Pudge had assimilated into the culture of Culver Creek, and although certainly not all the students like each other, there is a feeling of balance and unity and integration: Almost everything
that has occurred so far in the story has been either about people living on that campus or visiting it.
There are no outside events at Culver Creek. You only see Jake when he visits. The kids on other basketball teams are only relevant when they come to campus. There are trips to McDonald’s and Coosa Liquors, but they’re all about Pudge and his fellow students.
Q. Should Miles and Chip feel guilty about Alaska’s death ?
A. Yeah.
But it is possible to feel guilty and also to feel other things, and for me anyway there is a lot of hope in that: I still feel sad about sad things that
have happened to me. I still feel guilty about things I have done and things I have left undone. But I also feel other things—joy and silliness and love and so on—that I only get to feel because I’ve kept going.
Q: Alaska’s “I indirectly killed my mother” guilt seems gimmicky. How, if at all, would Alaska be different if her mother had still been alive?
A: Fair enough; it is a little gimmicky.
Bear in mind that Alaska didn’t kill her mother. Guilt is a very common response to the loss of a parent or loved one. One always feels that something should’ve been done, and the worst of it is when something actually should’ve been done but didn’t get done because you are just a regular human being and screw up a million times a day in a million little ways.
That’s really what I was trying to get at: The universe is very capricious in the way that it punishes negligence. Usually, you don’t die if texting
while driving. Occasionally, you do.
As to your question, it’s so hard to speculate, even with fictional characters, about how their lives would be different if you removed central experiences. From my perspective, Alaska had some pretty serious emotional problems that weren’t about her mother but instead were probably about the way her brain was wired.
But all that stuff is so interdependent. One of the reasons I find therapy so useful and interesting is that you can’t really separate nature from nurture.
Q: Throughout the whole book we never find out how Alaska truly feels about Pudge. Was your intention to make Alaska fall in love with Pudge, too?
A: My intention was for it to be a complicated mess that was totally
impossible to parse, just like real romantic interactions between teenagers in high school. (And also adults after high school.)
I don’t think we feel only one thing in our lives. I don’t think it’s as simple as either (a) being in love or (b) not being in love. I think our
feelings for each other are really complicated and motivated by an endless interconnected web of desires and fears.
I wanted to reflect that as best I could.
Q: Did Pudge choose to “seek a Great Perhaps” by going to Culver
Creek, or was he always going to be sent there because that’s where his dad went?
A: That’s an interesting question, and it gets into the subtle way that privilege functions throughout the entire novel.
If you’re like most American teenagers and you announce to your
parents that you wish to attend boarding school so that you can seek your Great Perhaps, your parents will say, “Yeah, no.” This may be because they don’t want you to leave the house yet; more likely it is because they don’t have 30,000 spare dollars to pay for a year’s tuition and board.
Pudge is privileged in many ways, and what he sees as “seeking a Great Perhaps” other people might see as an expensive lark where he wastes his opportunities by drinking too much wine and not studying enough. And I think it’s fair to assume that if Pudge hadn’t come from this relatively privileged background, he wouldn’t have found himself at the Creek. He would’ve had to find a different way to seek his Great Perhaps.
But at its core, your question gets to free will, and to what extent we are governed by our backgrounds and experiences. I can’t answer that question here. I will keep trying to write stories that poke at that question from
various angles, though, and hopefully together we’ll learn more about whether the fault is in our stars or in ourselves.
Q: Miles promises his dad he won’t smoke/drink and then starts doing those things practically the first day. Does that make him weak?
A: Oh, I think Miles is probably just lying to his father. You know, as one does. I don’t think he has any intention of clean living at Culver Creek.
But yeah, Miles is weak-willed. He engages in self-destructive behavior and fails to recognize the seriousness of the self-destructive behavior around him. He doesn’t take full advantage of his extraordinarily privileged opportunities. He gives money to tobacco companies, which do not deserve his money.
And he drinks horrible wine when he could afford to drink better wine, which is one of the worst sins of all.
But let me submit to you that we are all weak-willed, that we all
participate in destructive systems, that we all fail to use our opportunities as fully as we might, and that the whole business of being a reader (and also being a person) is empathizing with the flawed and uncertain people we meet in books and in life. Miles is not simply heroic, nor is anyone.
Q: Pudge seems to lack any agency over his actions. Every hang-out and prank is planned by others, and Pudge is simply told what to do. The Colonel gives him his nickname. Everything in his relationship with Lara is initiated by her. He doesn’t do anything with Alaska until she tells him to. Is this intentional?
A: He starts to affect the action in the second half of the novel, but he is very conscious of this passivity. (He calls himself drizzle to Alaska’s hurricane, and the tail to his friends’ comet.) This inability to act is part of what keeps him from following Alaska out to the pay phone, a decision that he’ll have to live with for the rest of his life.
It was important to me when writing the story that Pudge not be blameless. It’s natural to feel guilty in the wake of a friend’s death, but usually, you can eventually say to yourself, “You know what? This wasn’t actually my fault. There was really nothing I could’ve done.” But in Pudge’s case (arguably like Alaska’s case with her own mother), there is something he should’ve done. He should have followed her to the pay phone. He should’ve stopped her from leaving. He should have acted.
And that’s a much more complicated kind of guilt to live with. Alaska’s death still isn’t his fault, of course. But he will always know he could’ve— and should’ve—stopped her.
The question for me becomes whether you can find a way to live with yourself, whether forgiveness is still available to you even though the person you need to forgive you is gone. Alaska can never reconcile that question for herself with regards to her own mother. Pudge does eventually find an answer that brings him comfort, but along the way he has to become much more proactive about his life and his choices.
Q: Why is it called Looking for Alaska if Pudge, the Colonel, and Takumi know they’re never going to find Alaska, because she’s dead? Is it because they’re “looking” for her in a metaphorical sense?
A: Yes.
It is my experience that you don’t stop looking for your lost friends simply because they are dead. In some ways, you search even harder for every scrap of information you can find that will help you to understand the people they were and also help you to understand what led to their deaths.
But as Pudge and the Colonel find out, while the search can be informative, it can also be destructive. The core question— why did this person I love die—cannot be answered by reading their diaries or retracing their journeys.
It is a question that must be asked of the universe. And this is why the study of philosophy, religious traditions, and history, etc., is not some abstract boring intellectual enterprise: It is the very stuff that makes it
possible to go on and live an engaged, attentive, productive life even though the world contains so much suffering and injustice.
Q: Dr. Hyde tells Pudge to “be present.” What does that mean to you?
A: It means listening. Listening is a very rare skill, and in these noisy times, it is more and more valuable.
Q: Pudge writes, “Teenagers think they are invincible.” Did you when you were a teen? Do you, now, as an adult?
A: I was aware as a teenager of the fact that I might die, and it scared me a little. But I never felt like dying would affect my overall invincibility, if that makes sense. It’s a little like what Muhammad Ali said after his third fight with Joe Frazier. After the fight, which Ali won, Ali said that he thought at
times that Frazier might kill him. “If he had killed me,” Ali said, “I would have gotten back up and won the fight. I would have been the first dead heavyweight champion of the world.” I felt like that as a teenager. I feel a
little more fragile now. I still think people are invincible, but I’d rather not find out for sure.
Q: What were some of the working titles for Looking for Alaska?
Misremembering Alaska Misimagining Alaska
White Flowers and Warm Malt Liquor Alaska
The Great Perhaps
Searching for Alaska Waiting for Alaska
Famous Last Words
There were many others. Looking for Alaska was suggested by my friend Keir Graff (who had not read the book at the time).
Q: Did you know when you started writing that Alaska would die or did you realize along the way that that would be her natural conclusion (for lack of a better word)?
A: Initially the book was about the death of a boy as narrated by a girl, but that switched very early on. I would say that had switched as early as
maybe March of 2001.
Much of what readers have responded to about Alaska— last words, the labyrinth of suffering, the Great Perhaps—came out in revision after I’d started working with Julie Strauss-Gabel at Penguin. And the most important development in the history of the book, the thing that made it all possible, was my mentor Ilene Cooper proposing a linear time frame of the school year with XX-days before and XX-days after instead of what I was trying to do, which involved jumping around in time for all kind of Important Literary Reasons that in retrospect I find tremendously embarrassing.
Ilene told me to put it in chronological order for the sake of the reader’s sanity, and then I started thinking about structure differently. Julie further
refined the structure so that it would be mirrored (chronologically, Alaska’s death occurs at the exact midpoint of the novel) and still accurately reflect the calendar year of 2005, when the book is set.
Ilene’s insight about the structure of the novel probably came in late 2002. The revisions that changed so much of the rest of the book happened in 2003 and 2004. (Alaska was published in March of 2005.)
Q. The novel begins “one hundred thirty-six days before” and ends “one hundred thirty-six days after.” Is there any significance to this number?
A. Well, only that the school year is usually around 273 days, and I wanted Alaska’s death to occur in the exact temporal center of the book.
Q: When writing the first draft of the book, which scene/s were you most excited about writing? Which did you write first?
A: I wrote this book over so many years, and there were so many dozens of drafts between when it was a single-spaced forty-page blob to when it was a novel, and so it’s hard to remember the process.
I wrote the scene in the gym where they find out very early on, probably in 2001. I wrote a couple of the later scenes where the Colonel and Pudge
are playing video games early on, and the scene where the Colonel and Pudge meet survived in more or less its original form.
Also Barn Night. And Lara/Pudge’s watching of The Brady Bunch. I think those were the first scenes.
It was a lot of fun to write Barn Night. That was probably the most fun— Best Day/Worst Day, the rapping, the Strawberry Hill, all that stuff.
Q: Was there any one scene in Looking for Alaska that you had to rewrite time and time again?
A: The funeral. (See p. 301.)
Q: Many of the characters in Alaska and Paper Towns have nicknames. Why?
A: It’s a way of writing about the relationship between the identities we’re given (our names) and the ones we choose or adopt as we come of age (nicknames). Most of the nicknames in my books are nicknames that are given to, and accepted by, a character in his or her adolescence. Taking a nickname is a way of establishing identity and claiming some sovereignty over one’s self. So Miles will not only be Miles, the person named by his parents. He will also be Pudge, the person named by his peers.
The relationship between these identities—and the shifting between
them—is really interesting to me, because it’s a way of thinking about how in adolescence you go back and forth between identifying as part of your biological family and identifying as part of the social network you’re building separate from that family.
Q: The Colonel and Miles’s first meeting is interesting, especially the part where the Colonel calls him “Miles To Go Halter.” Is there any
significance in “Miles to go” being followed directly by the word “halt”?
A: Halt Her.
Q: Does it bother you that the drizzle/rain quote is used so often?
A: No, I am totally delighted that people/rain/drizzle/hurricane has become so widely quoted online that an extensive Tumblr (peopleraindrizzlehurricane.tumblr.com) is devoted to it.
The original line was “If people were precipitation, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane,” but then Julie stepped in and improved it, thank God. And then in the last big round of edits, I wanted to cut the line, and Julie was like, “Eh, I think we should keep it in,” and BOY, WAS SHE RIGHT.*
Of course, I hope lots of people read (and buy!) Alaska, and that the p/r/d/h quote is not their only interaction with it, but that little quote has
brought a lot of people to the book who otherwise might never have heard of it.
* Julie was also like, “You should really use the word deadpan a bit less often in this novel.” Sadly, I ignored that advice.
Q: Can you explain Alaska’s knock-knock joke?
A: Yeah, don’t feel stupid. No one gets the knock-knock joke. It was a bad joke, and Julie told me to cut it, and I should’ve listened. If they ever give me a chance to release like a “revised and updated” version of the novel, it will be the exact same book only without the goddamned knock-knock joke.
So the joke is: You say, “It’s a knock-knock joke. You start,” and then the person says “Knock Knock,” and then you say, “Who’s there?” and then the person realizes that they’ve been had, that one cannot start a knock-knock
joke without knowing the end of the knock-knock joke. So when you say “Who’s there?” the other person has a slight little self-deprecating chuckle over not having realized from the beginning that s/he was going to end up in this pickle.
I had all kinds of super symbolic reasons for this knock-knock joke about Alaska asking Pudge, “Who’s there?” and Pudge not being able to answer, about his failure to really know Alaska, about how her air of mystery was mostly about his just not being very perceptive, etc., etc., all of which was stupid and irrelevant because no one gets the joke.
Q: Were theological aspects of Looking for Alaska at all influenced by your background in religious studies?
A: Definitely. I could never have written this book without the religion
classes I took in college, and the theology/philosophy/ worldview/whatever at the core of the book comes directly from conversations I had with Don Rogan, my mentor and professor at Kenyon.
Even in private conversations, I was never quite sure what Rogan believed, but he was very interested in formulations of what is called radical
hope—the belief that hope is available to all people at all times—possibly even including the dead.
And the argument that Pudge makes at the very end of the book, that he believes Alaska forgives him is a pretty aggressively theistic thing for
Pudge to say. (Of course, this isn’t the only viewpoint presented in the novel. There is also the Colonel’s, “The labyrinth sucks but I choose it,” which is not necessarily a theistic point of view, although I’d argue it’s still a very hopeful thing to say.)
Basically, I wanted to think about all kinds of different ways that young people respond thoughtfully to loss and grief, and show a bunch of different ways that people can prove so resilient.
Q: You’ve previously described Looking for Alaska as “Christian
fiction” but more recently you seem to describe it as exploring multiple theistic (and nontheistic) responses to grief. Can you explain this?
A: Well, good Christian fiction can explore (and celebrate) multitheistic and nontheistic responses to grief, I would argue. I have a belief system and a
religious tradition, but that does not necessarily invalidate other belief systems.
Alaska certainly explores and arguably even extolls multi-theistic and nontheistic responses to the problem of suffering, but Pudge’s personal
response is quite a Christian one, insofar as the theological idea of radical hope (that hope and forgiveness are available to all, maybe even including the dead) is central to Pudge’s final conclusions. The idea he expresses at the very end of the novel—that he believes it is possible for he and Alaska both to attain mutual forgiveness—is certainly an idea that I got from Christianity.
This is why it has always seemed odd to me that all the people who want to ban Looking for Alaska from schools claim it is offensive to Christian values, when the core Christian values—radical hope, universal forgiveness
—are the core values of the book’s final chapter.
(For the record, I think the people who argue the opposite—that the end of the book is a bit didactic and heavy-handed—are not wrong. I just don’t really care that it’s a bit heavy-handed. I wanted Pudge to be able to write that essay. I wanted him to be able to give and receive the forgiveness he so
desperately needs, and I wanted him to be able to imagine a beautiful somewhere for Alaska.)
Q: Can you talk about the blow job scene?
A: Right, let’s talk about the blow job.
The oral sex scene in Looking for Alaska between Lara and Pudge takes place immediately before a far less sexually intimate but far more emotionally intimate encounter between Pudge and Alaska.
The language in the oral sex scene is extremely clinical and distant and unsensual. The word “penis” is used rather than member or hot rod or whatever else you’ll find in romance novels. The adverbs and adjectives that appear in that scene include weird, nervous, and quizzically.
This is in very stark contrast to the scene where Pudge and Alaska kiss a few pages later: “Our tongues dancing back and forth in each other’s mouth until there was no her mouth and my mouth but only our mouths intertwined. She tasted like cigarettes and Mountain Dew and wine and ChapStick. Her hand came to my face and I felt her soft fingers tracing the line of my jaw.” There’s a lot of evoking of senses in that paragraph (some might argue too much), and it’s much sexier and more passionate than the
language used to describe the blow job.
I wanted these two scenes to present a dramatic contrast because I wanted it to be clear (1) that Pudge and Lara were curious about each other, and interested in exploring, but not really that passionate about each other, whereas (2) Alaska and Pudge were clearly very passionate and caring and attentive in the way they kiss, and most importantly that (3) physical intimacy isn’t and can never be an effective substitute for emotional intimacy.
It seemed to me pretty obvious that I was arguing against vapid sexual encounters in which no one has any fun and celebrating the
underappreciated virtues of super-hot kissing in which everyone keeps their clothes on. (Some censors, clearly, feel otherwise, although most of them never read the blow job scene in context.)
Q: If you could go back, would you take out the blow job scene?
A: No. I stand by that massively unerotic blow job ( . . . if for no other reason that it allowed me to write that sentence).
Q: How much is Culver Creek based on your own boarding school, Indian Springs?
A: Bufriedos WERE real, although the dining hall at Indian Springs is now much better (and much healthier) than it was in my day. The dorms, too, are vastly different, and the barn where Alaska and Pudge and Takumi and
everyone spend the night is no longer there.
The physical campus of Indian Springs is very similar to the physical
campus of Culver Creek, and I do think it’s a great place to seek your Great Perhaps. The novel is fictional—although it was inspired in uncountable
ways by my high school experiences—but this isn’t: Indian Springs really is a magical place to go to high school. And I continue to be impressed and inspired by the students there.
Q: How did you come up with the pranks in Looking for Alaska?
A: Mostly from my high school classmates, to be totally honest with you.
Q: Why Strawberry Hill wine?
A: . . . It is what I drank in high school. (Trying to think of some metaphor . . . ) Yeah. It’s just what we drank in high school.
Q. Who are Tori and Ani?
A. Oh God I am so old and this book is so old. (Tori Amos and Ani Difranco.)
Q: Where did you get the fox hat idea from?
A: In high school, I had a friend who would wear a fox hat when breaking rules, and when asked why he was wearing a fox hat, he would always say, “Because no one can catch the motherfucking fox.”
That is the only true answer.
Q: When and how did you realize you had found your Great Perhaps?
A: Oh, I think the pleasure is in the seeking. That’s what I eventually realized.
Q: Can you please explain the significance of the last few sentences? The quote of Edison’s last words?
A: It is an invocation of hope in the life of the world to come.
Q: What would you say, today, to a girl like Alaska?
A: You are helpful, and you are loved, and you are forgiven, and you are not alone
alaska, ten years later: a literary retrospective
by Michael Cart
With the publication of his brilliant first novel Looking for Alaska, author John Green hit the ground running, becoming, virtually overnight, a literary phenomenon to be reckoned with. Consider that Alaska was not only greeted with universal praise by the critics, but also went on to win the Michael L. Printz Award, presented annually by ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association to the author of the best YA book of the year, “best” being defined solely in terms of literary merit. To place Alaska in this context, it’s important to note that the Printz is the most prestigious award in the entire field of young adult literature and is only rarely presented to a first novelist. While the award committee’s deliberations are kept secret, the committee members, in announcing their hugely popular choice, called Alaska, an “extraordinary first novel” written with “intimacy, humor and
insight.”
In the years since the award’s presentation, John Green has become a household name and Looking for Alaska, a contemporary classic with appeal to both young adult and adult readers. It clearly belongs on any short list of the best of the best young adult novels published since the beginnings of the genre in 1967. Thus, it commands a place in the company of such
books as S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders, Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender, Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat, Walter Dean Myers’s Monster, and other paradigmatic works in the field.
What is it that makes this novel so memorable and how has it held up
these ten years since its first publication? The answer to the second question is the simpler of the two, so let’s start by stipulating that this book about a boy who leaves his Florida home to attend Culver Creek Preparatory School in Alabama has held up splendidly, thank you very much. It remains as fresh, intriguing, and wonderfully original as it was in 2005.
Now, as to that first question: It is no exaggeration to say that Looking for Alaska is a tour de force, a marvel of readability but also of characterization, plot, structure, voice, tone, style, and setting. All the things, that is, which constitute the literary merit honored by the Printz Award. Without being too literary, let’s briefly consider some of these
aspects of the novel, beginning with characterization, one of Alaska’s greatest strengths.
Imagine, for starters, an intriguing girl “who had eyes that predisposed you to supporting her every endeavor” and you have beautiful Alaska, perfectly epitomized by these few words. Imagine then a skinny, self- deprecating boy whose talent is knowing the last words of a lot of people and you have Miles, our protagonist, who falls in love with Alaska, as who wouldn’t; she is, after all, “the hottest girl in all of human history.” Thinking further of this reckless, fascinating girl, Miles muses, “If people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”
It is Miles’s always smart, often diffident but increasingly passionate
voice that tells the story, and it’s a voice that is filled with fascinating simile and metaphor. Consider just a few of Miles’s memorable figures of speech: “The words made the whole thing horribly uncomfortable, like watching your grandparents kiss.” Or: “Sunlight feels warm and rough against your skin like a kiss on the cheek from your dad.” Or: A shirt “was wrinkled like an old woman who’d spent her youth sunbathing.” Clearly Miles’s voice is stylish without once being self-consciously “artistic” as it sets a tone and
atmosphere that range from the insouciant to the serious.
Alaska aside, Miles soon meets other intriguing characters, starting with his roommate, Chip, a short muscular guy who hates “being careful” and is called, by everyone, “The Colonel.” Then there’s Takumi, the slyly funny
Japanese American rapper, and, finally, Romanian-born Lara, who has
trouble pronouncing the letter “i.” Yes, each is a multidimensional, fully realized and engaging presence as together the new friends find they have,
as Alaska says, “a shared interest in booze and mischief.” And, oh, yes, cigarettes. Lots of cigarettes. All the enticing, tempting things, in short, that are against the rules of the school but help drive the plot of the novel.
Truth to tell, the booze and cigarettes excited some controversy when the book was first published as did a scene of sexual intimacy between Miles and Lara, but such brouhaha is surely ill-advised. These are realistically realized teenagers, after all, who behave and talk like the authentic teens they are. To pretend otherwise would be to compromise the salutary integrity of the story. Besides, there is an intrinsic innocence about the
actions of these merry pranksters, especially the sweetly realized—and, frankly, funny—scene between Miles and Lara.
As for the plot: it’s a classic coming-of-age story set in a boarding school. Think John Knowles’s A Separate Peace with a sense of humor and authenticity. Its structure is another of its long suits, divided, as it is, into two halves: the first chronicles the one hundred thirty-six days “before” and the second, the one hundred thirty-six days “after.” Before and after what,
the reader coming to it for the first time will wonder? As a result this structural strategy builds suspense, enhanced by the fact that the school itself is “a place where you never know what’s going to happen or when.”
What happens, of course, is that Alaska dies in a car crash, which might have been an accident or might have been the unthinkable, a suicide. The surviving friends struggle to determine which it was, but the clues are few and fugitive and, accordingly, the determined, sometimes frustrating search helps to make the second half of the book as suspenseful as the first—no mean feat. Adding to the richness of this part of the plot is the friends’
struggle to come to terms with a loss of this magnitude while finding a way to suitably memorialize Alaska with “the crown jewel of pranks,” one intriguingly entitled “Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm.”
Despite the welcome relief of the humor endemic to the prank, Alaska’s death invites sober, soul-searching reflection for both Miles and his friends. Much of that reflection focuses on two examples of enigmatic last words.
First is French author Rabelais’s “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.” And, second, South American revolutionary Simón Bolívar’s “How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?”
What do the words signify and how do they apply to Miles’s life and
experience? They seem as mysterious and perplexing as Alaska herself, but
surely they recall what Miles’s venerated religion teacher Dr. Hyde refers to as “the most important pursuit in history, the search for meaning. What are
the rules of this game” (life) “and how might we best play it?” Well, how do Miles and his friends play it? With excitement, energy, affection, bravado,
panache and, yes, even pain and heartbreak.
Do they find the Great Perhaps? Do they discover a way out of the
labyrinth? With no easy answers, these questions will invite serious thought and discussion, as good literature should. But until then, it’s only fair that author Green should have the last words here: “I believe in hope,” he has said, “in what is sometimes called ‘radical hope.’ I believe there is hope for us all, even amid the suffering and maybe even inside the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probably. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to build a fire in the darkness.”
MICHAEL CART, columnist and reviewer for Booklist magazine, is a past president of the Young Adult Library Services Association and chaired the 2006 Printz Award Committee.
