If you were a teenager 15 years ago, you couldn’t go anywhere – not Hot Topic, not the movie theatre and certainly not on Tumblr – without encountering John Green. For much of the early 2010s, it felt as if the author was mayor of the internet, or at least the brainy corner of it reserved for the YouTube vlog channel he ran with his brother, Hank. It was, as they say, a simpler time.
Author John Green: ‘I wanted to write about both the gifts that come with sharing our private lives in public, and the costs of that sharing.’Marina Waters/Supplied
But unlike plenty of his YouTube contemporaries – the commentators and musicians who have since struggled to distance themselves from the DIY fame of early social media – Green has produced a lasting oeuvre of creative work, including a pivot to non-fiction with 2021’s The Anthropocene Reviewed and last year’s Everything Is Tuberculosis. The 2014 film adaptation of his 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars grossed more than US$307-million worldwide; his novels Looking for Alaska, Turtles All the Way Down and Paper Towns each received similarly glossy screen treatments. What started as a YouTube channel between brothers is now a YouTube empire, with more than 18 million subscribers across multiple shows and projects.
Author John Green became obsessed with tuberculosis – so he wrote a book about it
Indeed, if Green’s fame has wavered – a big if – it’s only because his core fan base has grown up.
Perhaps it makes sense, then, that Hollywood, Ending, Green’s latest project, chronicles the peaks and depths of life in the public eye. Packaged as a novel for adults – its protagonists are in their early 20s rather than teens, as in Green’s earlier fiction – the book follows young stars Kai and Juniper as they navigate a capricious film industry in which their every move is tracked, catalogued and monetized.
JOBFlocks spoke with Green, 49, about the novel – and the symbiotic nature of the fame-obsessed culture that inspired it.
Given we’re discussing a book about the extractive qualities of fame, I should tell you we’ve met before.
Oh?
I ran into you at VidCon, the YouTube conference you founded with your brother. I was 15.
Oh my god. Was I not nice?
Not particularly. You were annoyed that my camera wasn’t working.
Oh, man. I always think, whenever somebody comes up to me, that this is probably the only time I’ll meet that person, and that I have to make it right. Clearly, in that moment, I was stressed out and didn’t do that. But I’m glad we’re doing this interview.
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Me too! In Hollywood, Ending, you look at fame as a machine. Your experience of that machine, however, was largely self-made – your rise to prominence came as much from YouTube as from writing. How did that inform this book?
Yeah, at least at first, I entered the machine on my own terms. I wanted to participate – I wanted attention for my books, and for my work in general. It was only years later, when I got a lot of that attention, that I realized I maybe wanted it less than I thought.
The machine is what turns human experience into a commodity. It’s very dangerous. But it also gives us a lot – it’s given me a lot. And yet, at the same time, it can be very harmful. I wanted to write about both the gifts that come with sharing our private lives in public, and the costs of that sharing.
In the book, we see actors Kai and Juniper wrestling with Instagram. Using social media to promote their movie, a biopic about Andy Warhol, is as much a part of their jobs as acting in it. Where is your own relationship with social media these days, and how did that shape Hollywood, Ending?
In a macro sense, I think social media as it is currently structured is bad for the social order. By extension, I think my participation in it is not healthy.
Is it worth it? I don’t have an easy answer for that question. And I think Kai and Juniper would answer that question differently from me. But I think we have to wrestle with the cost while still acknowledging the benefit of it. I sometimes worry that social media, like a lot of technology, solves problems that it creates. It solves loneliness while ultimately making us more lonely.
How does that paradox proliferate in the book?
As Kai and Juniper become more successful, they also become more isolated. That’s the case for a lot of successful people I know. It was certainly the case for me when The Fault in Our Stars became really successful.
Juniper is an ambitious, clear-eyed person who sees that Instagram is good for her career, so she uses it. Kai has the luxury of not using it because he’s extremely charismatic and can get away with a lot of things that most of us can’t get away with. That would bug me if I were Juniper, but she’s nicer than I am.
You grapple in the book with the idea that Juniper is hard to work with.
She’s professional and ambitious and determined, the way you have to be to succeed. But those are often seen as negative qualities, especially in young women.
As someone whose books are regularly adapted into films, would you cast Juniper in one of your projects?
Hell yeah. She’s a great actor who works incredibly hard. I think a reputation of being difficult to work with because you’re a perfectionist is a negative mark on the machine. You should want to make the best movie you can possibly make.
You make clear in the book that fame and privacy are fundamentally incompatible with each other. In your estimation as someone in the public eye, what is the Hollywood industry’s obligation to maintain privacy when the unloading of personal trauma – as we see happen in the book – can open up a story to more people?
I don’t think there’s one right answer. My book Turtles All the Way Down is about a young woman with OCD, and when I was promoting that book, I talked a lot about having OCD, and there was a profound benefit to that – I felt less alone, and people would tell me I had made them feel less alone, too.
But there was a really intense cost to that, too. I felt overexposed and extremely vulnerable. I realized once you talk about something like that, you can’t take it back. You have to be careful about what parts of your private life you share, because once you share them, they aren’t yours anymore.
Spoken like someone who’s shared much of their life on YouTube for close to two decades.
Yeah. I’ve gotten a lot more intentional over the years. At one point I had my address in the background of a video. I don’t do that anymore.
An older actor in the book memorably quips that young people “inspire and exhaust” him. Is he speaking on your behalf, and does that sentiment align with your move from young adult to adult fiction?
No. Young people don’t exhaust me at all. I’m invigorated by spending time with young people, and I’m encouraged by spending time with them. A lot of the problems that I can’t solve for myself – social media, the internet, the quality of our political discourse – young people really seem to be starting to solve them. I’m really encouraged when I talk with college students.
The reason I ended up publishing this book for adults is that the young people in it have adult problems. They’re trying to figure out what their career is going to look like, and they want stable relationships that will provide a lifetime of security – that’s not really at the centre of a 17-year-old’s experience.
A lot of adults read The Fault in Our Stars; a lot of kids will read Hollywood, Ending. I think it’s partly a marketing distinction, but also, when you’re writing for teenagers, there shouldn’t be any distance between the story and how it’s told. The story of being a teenager unfolds as you live it. Without spoilers, there’s a little more narrative distance in Hollywood, Ending than in my other novels.
This interview has been edited and condensed.