ARTS
6

Wednesday, July 3, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

“You can never publish my love,” 
Rogue Wave chants, in the song that 
the title of this series riffs on. Maybe 
that’s true, and we can never quite 
account for our love on paper or in 
print, but we sure can try. That’s what 
this series is devoted to: publishing our 
love. Us, the Arts section of The Michi-
gan Daily, talking about artists, some 
of the people we love the most. Perhaps 
these are futile approximations of love 
for the poet who told us we deserve to 
be heard, the director who changed the 
way we see the world, the singer we 
see as an old friend. But who ever said 
futile can’t still be beautiful? 
In John Green’s 2012 novel “The 
Fault in Our Stars,” protagonist 
Hazel Grace Lancaster thinks to her-
self: “Sometimes, you read a book and 
it fills you with this weird evangeli-
cal zeal, and you become convinced 
that the shattered world will never 
be put back together unless and until 
all living humans read the book. And 
then there are books like ‘An Imperial 
Affliction,’ which you can’t tell people 
about, books so special and rare and 
yours that advertising your affection 
feels like betrayal.”
Like Hazel Grace with “An Impe-
rial Affliction,” John Green’s work 
feels intensely personal to me. It’s 
evangelical-zeal-inducing and for-
mative in every sense of the word, 
not only emotionally or intellectually, 

but also in terms of real relationships 
Green’s work has impacted my life. 
I’m pretty sure I can credit his You-
Tube channel, “Vlogbrothers,” as the 
catalyst for one of my very closest 
friendships from high school. He’s 
inspired, frustrated and taught me 
endlessly. I think I would have turned 
out a lot differently if his books had 
never been in my life, for better or for 
worse. 
Let’s go back to the start. John 
Green, for the three people still unini-
tiated, is the massively famous author 
of young adult books like “Looking 
for Alaska,” “The Fault in Our Stars,” 
“Paper Towns” and many more. He’s 
also one of the original YouTube 
stars, beginning with “Vlogbroth-
ers” in 2007, which he shares with 
his brother Hank. His online success 
has since expanded to developing and 
hosting the educational series “Crash 
Course,” as well as several popular 
podcasts.
John Green has been a public fig-
ure for almost two decades now, but 
I found him about 7 years ago. My big 
sister Eden pressed a library copy of 
“Looking for Alaska” into my hands 
and told me, “This book is really 
important, you should read it.” Eden 
had just graduated high school and I 
was a few weeks away from starting 
my freshman year, so it felt less like 
a recommendation and more like an 
induction. Welcome to adolescence, 
the book seemed to tell me. Good luck. 
It caught hold almost immediately. 
There’s something raw and exposed 
about “Looking for Alaska”, nearly 

intrusive in how intimate reading it 
feels. It tells the story of 15-year-old 
Miles Halter as he attends boarding 
school in Alabama and encounters his 
first friendships, first teenage hijinks, 
first love, first tragedy. “Looking For 
Alaska” centers on the relationship 
between Miles and the mysterious 
Alaska, a troubled teenage girl who 
seems equally interested in soaking 
in as much joy and excitement as she 
can as she is in destroying herself. 
The book is split into two parts, 
simply titled “Before” and “After,” 
but throughout both sections, Alas-
ka as a character never quite makes 
sense. One minute, she’s warm and 
thrilling, the next she’s withdrawn 
and acerbic. We see her in fragments, 
never learn her full backstory and 
very rarely hear what she actually 
wants and needs from her life. As a 
result, she never feels quite like a real 
person, which is a point on which a 
lot of critics have taken issue with 
the novel. But to me, that’s always 
felt exactly right, because the way 
we see her is decidedly a product 
of Miles’ perceptions and imagina-
tions. From their very first moments 
together, Miles is too busy marveling 
at the shape of her lips to listen to the 
words she’s actually saying. Alaska 
dies horrifically midway through 
the book, leaving Miles and the rest 
of the friends around her to muddle 
through trying to understand why. 
(Spoiler: They never do. Prediction: 
They never will.) 
No matter how many times I read 
it, the book leaves me with a sort of 

hollow feeling in my stomach. Not 
only because of the precision with 
which love, obsession, grief and trau-
ma are rendered by Green’s prose, but 
because “Looking For Alaska,” and 
really all his work, always immedi-
ately rips me back to who I was when 
I first read it. Each character in his 
novels is unique and specific, and yet 
I can’t help but think of my group of 
friends in high school and see each of 
them in the Colonel, Takumi, Miles 
and Alaska. I start remembering 
some of the awful things that hap-
pened when we were 15, our version 
of the “Before” and “After,” and the 
hollow feeling in my gut expands, 
twists into hurt. 
When I’m thinking about why this 
is, why Green’s work hits me so hard, 
I like to imagine he treats memory 
as if it’s a coin. Flip it to one face and 
you get nostalgia; flip it to the other 
and you get a darker, mournful side. 
Green’s writing registers emotion-
ally like a series of those coin tosses, 
equal parts regretful and wistful. 
Sometimes he writes stories like a 
rosy memory of a better time, and 
it’s only because of how sharply and 
precisely he renders those memories 
that he can use them like a weapon. 
In Green’s hands, something joyful 
like a first love, or a happy road trip 
between friends, can take a sharp 
turn into tragedy and heartbreak 
as quickly as it does in real life. The 
sweet side of the coin has flipped 
without the reader even realizing, 
and it leaves you breathless. 
If “Looking for Alaska” were the 
only book Green had ever written, I’d 
probably still count him as one of the 
most important authors in my life, 
but Green has written six books. Even 
though I don’t think he’s ever been 
quite as raw as “Alaska,” that sense of 
longing permeates through all of his 
books. Even the cringier parts of his 
books resonate — I find that actually, 
their imperfection is exactly what 
makes them feel so real to me. 
Green has gained a bit of a reputa-
tion in recent years for tending toward 
the overwrought. He uses a lot of 
extended metaphors and often gives 
his characters long soliloquies about 
the meaning of life. He (like many 
other YA authors) also likes picking 
a classic piece of literature to weave 
admittedly pretty heavy-handedly 
throughout his novels as a motif. But 
none of that has ever bothered me, 
mostly because none of it ever regis-
ters as false or insincere, but rather an 
earnest expression of the story he’s 
trying to tell and the way his teenage 
characters feel. Teenagers tend to get 
a little overwrought sometimes. They 
mix their metaphors. They latch real-
ly hard onto classic literature they at 
times don’t fully understand. Some-

times I read the emails my friends 
and I would send each other in high 
school and I cringe so hard I actually 
feel my soul exit my body for a minute 
because it’s so eager to distance itself 
from the kind of pretentious buffoon 
who would write that shit. 
But John Green never attempts 
any kind of distance between 
16-year-old buffoonery and the nar-
rative writ large — instead, he leans 
into it. He captures so accurately the 
way everything feels epic and cin-
ematic, almost embarrassingly so, 
when you’re that age. When I was in 
high school, a fight with a friend was 
absolutely apocalyptic, while a drive 
with the windows down meant we 
had just been crowned queens of our 
hometown streets. It didn’t just feel 
that way; it was that way in my eyes. 
Green knows that, he gets it and most 
importantly, he respects it. 
Green also crucially understands 
that a lot of the things that happen to 
teenagers aren’t small and overblown. 
Teenagers deal with heartbreak, 
death, grief, betrayal and awful pain 
the same exact way everyone else 
does. I went through some really real 
shit in high school. My friends did too, 
often way worse. Sometimes we were 
there for each other and sometimes 
we weren’t. Sometimes we hurt each 
other. Sometimes we fundamentally 
misimagined each other. Through 
every moment, though, I had a ref-
erence to understand what was hap-
pening to me, because I had John 
Green’s books. I knew I was never 
alone. It’s like Miles says in “Looking 
for Alaska”: “It always shocked me 
when I realized that I wasn’t the only 
person in the world who thought and 
felt such strange and awful things.” 
Green’s books often finish on an 
open-ended note, with his protago-
nists pondering all the life they have 
left to live and accepting the ambigu-
ity of whatever conflict they’ve been 
struggling with. As a teenager, that 
was always the one part I wasn’t fully 
able to relate to. I didn’t know how to 
zoom out, so to speak, to see anything 
beyond my very singular experience 
and think about possibility as some-
thing more than an abstract concept.
I think I’m a little better at that 
now. Maybe it’s time, maybe it’s 
growing up, maybe it’s years of train-
ing kicking in after so much time 
spent reading John Green books 
about kids exploring all the possibili-
ties in their futures. But either way, 
I can contemplate that a little better 
now. Not fully or perfectly, mind you, 
but I’m at least starting to wrap my 
head around how young I actually 
am and how many choices I have.

A once-teen’s ode to Green

BOOKS NOTEBOOK

DESIGN BY KATHRYN HALVERSON

ASIF BECHER 
Daily Arts Writer

Read more at michigandaily.com

