It’s fascinating how quickly someone can fall out of favor.
Take John Green, for example. The young adult author experienced a huge upshoot in popularity after his novel “The Fault in Our Stars” was a smash hit, selling over 10.7 million copies in its first year of publication. Unfortunately his fall from grace was just as hard. He went from being loved on the internet to being absolutely reviled in a very short span of time.
The interesting thing is that John Green didn’t really do anything. Nobody dug out an old tweet of him being racist, a high school friend didn’t reveal he was secretly a nazi, nobody accused him of sexual assault or the like. When you ask the internet to describe what John Green did that was so bad and unlikable, usually the answer boils down to some form or another of not liking his books. There are some valid reasons to not like his books, but none, I think, are valid enough to hate the man behind them.
Although I’m mostly concerned with the villainization of Green’s books (which occurred for no other reason I will argue, then that they are meant for teenagers), I think the villainization of the author goes hand in hand. The absolute vitriol people throw at this man is so ironic considering many of his stories are in some way or another about humanizing people. It’s also really ironic considering lots of the people who now hate his books used to like them quite a lot.
The thing about Green’s books is that they are earnest and heady and philosophical, and most of all they are aimed very specifically at the age group of 14 to 18 year olds. They’re for teenagers. High schoolers, more specifically. They capture what it feels like to be a teenager and a high schooler in a very visceral way, one that I think is kind of off putting once you yourself are no longer a teenager. I am very close to not being a teenager anymore, and when I went on a mission this past week to reread all of Green’s books, I found them good, but I also found that the characters that I had once loved I now didn’t quite understand or even really like.
My first re-read was “An Abundance of Katherines,” a novel which I am almost positive I only read once, but that I enjoyed pretty okay when I was 14. I remember thinking that it was very funny, and that’s pretty much it. But god, on my reread, I almost couldn’t get through it. The narrator was just so astonishingly unbearable in a way that I hadn’t found him to be when I was 14. And when I reread “The Fault In Our Stars” it didn’t quite click the same way it had the first time I read it. I remember admiring Hazel and Gus in a way that I don’t really anymore. Their lives and issues and relationships and feelings all felt very real and valid to me, but their personalities were no longer aspirational. In fact, they felt a little bit childish in a way I wasn’t expecting.
I saw a thread on twitter which more or less sparked me writing this whole piece, wherein a bunch of 20+ year olds were railing on Green’s books for more or less the same reason as I described above. While some of their criticisms were valid (their main hangup seemed to be with the kissing in the Anne Frank house scene, from “The Fault in Our Stars,” which I’ll admit didn't quite work the way Green wanted it to and made a lot of people rightly very uncomfortable) most of them, in my opinion, were not (for example, one person found issue with the blowjob scene in “Looking For Alaska,” citing that they read it in the 7th grade and in hindsight that felt weird and gross. Which is a valid thing to feel, except that it is not the book's fault that you read it when you were too young to do so. The book is for high school age, not middle school.)
What I found most interesting is that they not only bashed on Green’s books, but they also bashed on their teenaged selves who had liked Green’s books. One person said that “The Fault in Our Stars” had been their favorite book as a teenager, which made sense considering their whole personality was based around being “not like other girls”. They said this with the implication that this personality was a bad thing, and that by extension, “The Fault in Our Stars” was also bad because it had validated that feeling. And while yes, the whole idea of being “not like other girls” is inherently kind of misogynistic and gross, the book’s only real support of that idea is that Hazel feels isolated and different from her peers, because she literally was dying of cancer. I think it is fair to say that Hazel was “not like other girls” not in a misogynistic way, but in a sad way that Hazel acknowledges is sad. I don’t think a book validating people who feel different from their peers (for whatever reason, be it cancer or something less extreme) should be reviled just because people find solace in the idea that it’s okay to be different from other people; even if they one day realized that their differences were manufactured. I think you’d be hard pressed to find a teenager who doesn’t feel different from everyone else in some way or another. Most of the time these teenagers grow up and are relieved to find out that they were just like everyone else all along, because everyone felt that way. But in the meantime, it’s okay to feel out of place.
This is sort of a long-winded way of saying that people who connected to Green’s characters in the way described above now think of their past selves as sort of cringy. Which is kind of fair. The thing is, the only people who really like teenagers are other teenagers, because teenagers are generally pretty self absorbed and think they know everything and are frankly kind of annoying and hormonal. There’s a special brand of teenagers who are semantic, obnoxiously philosophical, and argumentative, which Green specializes in (he also makes them a lot more charming than they would be in real life). But all teens are kind of unbearable in some way. Teenagers think they’re special. Teenagers think they’re invincible. Teenagers think that the world revolves around them. And most of the time, teenagers barely even realize that they feel these things.
So when you read Green’s books as a teen, you’re absolutely enthralled, because wow, look at all these characters who think the way I think and feel the way I feel. Augustus is so charming when he talks about nihilism, I must be equally charming when I do the same! And then when you’re a fresh new adult and you reread the same book that once brought you a lot of comfort and joy, you find yourself almost disgusted that you ever connected to these characters because they’re so semantic and self absorbed and think the whole damn world revolves around them. It’s a lot easier to rail on characters in a book and the man who wrote them then reconcile the fact that you probably acted a lot like that as a teenager, and worse, reconcile the fact that that’s honestly not even that bad a thing. Yeah, teenagers act Like That, and yeah it’s humiliating to think that you once acted Like That, but acting Like That is just a part of growing up! It’s just the way your brain chemistry works! There’s a great line in the hit serial killer catching TV show “Criminal Minds” which runs off of premises of dubious scientific merit, where one of the dubious science practitioners says “all teenagers profile as sociopaths, that’s why you can’t diagnose sociopathy until adulthood.” And I feel like that sums up the issue pretty well.
Your early adulthood is a very fragile time, because in all likelihood you’ve just shed a very embarrassing teenage identity wherein you were very self-absorbed and thought you were right all the time and whatnot. I think this is why people in their later teens and early 20s find Green’s books so horrifying, because they’re too close to the whole thing. Nobody wants to admit they were like that, so we all hate people who act like that. Most adults seem to like his books just fine. They don’t rave over them like a teenager would, but they’ve had enough space between their teen years to look back at them with relative fondness, compared to the early-20-something at least. And the early-20-something who read his books for the first time as an early-20-something doesn’t find them half as unbearable either, because they didn’t have the experience of relating to them so heavily in the first place.
Of course, I’m only 19 and 10 and a half months, so take everything that I’m saying with a really, really big grain of salt. This is just me guessing and kind of psychoanalysing people and probably just projecting a lot of my own feelings into the issue. I just wish people had more empathy for teenagers, because frankly most of the time they’re really not that bad (again, I'm saying this as someone who is still barely a teen), and even more of the time they’ll grow out of it. Why deny them the joy of reading books that were made specifically for them? Just leave them alone. None of those books have actively hurtful messages (I would argue that lots of them have a lot of great messages that teenagers specifically need to hear!) so there’s really no reason to be as upset about it as some people are. Hating on John Green has become cool, because it’s just another extension of hating on teenagers. But please. Just let them live.
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