Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. I am hopefully emerging from a length bout with the flu. It's not COVID; it's the flu, such an old school virus. I feel like I'm in the 1990s with my acid-wash jeans and my cassette tapes and my influenza.

In other news, The Fault in Our Stars was first published 10 years ago yesterday. I still don't know how to make sense of being the author of that book, except to say that I am extremely grateful that it is still in print and still finding new readers, but yeah, 10 years. It occurs to me, perhaps because I am sick, that I spent my first three books trying to understand the consequences of misimagining one another and my most recent three books trying to understand the consequences of misimagining what happens to us.

Like, my first three books were about failing to imagine other people as full persons, seeing them simplistically as more or less than human, and this was an interesting theme to me partly because, when I was a teenager, I often failed to imagine other people complexly, but also because I saw it a lot in the culture. I saw us dehumanizing people and also hero-izing or romanticizing individuals and often acting as if romanticizing someone was generous or benevolent, when in fact it can be really disruptive.

But after writing Paper Towns, I felt like I'd explored that as fully as I could. Like, the whole plot hinges upon the narrator realizing, as he puts it, that "Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl."

I felt like I'd said what I wanted to say as clearly as I knew how to say it, and so, for a while, I was a writer without a theme, which meant a lot of, like, aimless wandering. Like, I wrote about 60,000 words of two different novels, and they just never worked. They weren't bad, exactly; they just didn't have a reason to be. At it's best, language gives form and sense to the formless and senseless, and these stories weren't doing that.

But I eventually found a theme by returning to something that I started writing way back in 2000. The theme was, how do we make sense of the stuff that happens to us, the stuff that we don't control, and what are the consequences of misimagining that stuff? Like, as Susan Sontag points out in Illness as Metaphor, it was commonly believed as late as the 1970s that cancer was caused by not being loved enough or else by, like, immoral behavior.

The same is true for cholera and epilepsy, and disease is still often constructed as part of some divine retribution scheme. Like, I remember, as a kid, people on TV saying that HIV was sent by God to punish gay people. These ways of imagining illness are tremendously harmful, because they create a kind of double horror. Not only does the person who's sick suffer from the illness itself, they may also suffer from a social order that marginalizes or dehumanizes them for being ill.

Really, even metaphors that seem benign - that illness is a battle to be won or a mountain to be climbed - can complicate the experience the experience of that illness, because what if you don't climb the mountain? It's not your fault. My dad had cancer twice when I was a kid, and so I'd seen some of this stuff up close - the way people keep their distance from you even though you're not contagious, the way they construct stories about why your dad got cancer to reassure themselves that their dad won't, like, "Oh, he had a lot of stress in his life," or "Oh, he did this or didn't do that." The fault always in the self, never in the stars.

Also, I really dislike the convention of the genre where sick people get sick so that healthy people can learn lessons. It just- That drives me bonkers, and so I wanted to write a book with no healthy kids in it. And I've continued that theme since, writing about what happens when we misunderstand mental illness in Turtles All the Way Down and writing about historical responses to disease, especially infectious disease, in The Anthropocene Reviewed.

Now, of course, there are other themes in those books. Turtles is about what we talk about when we talk about free will. The Anthropocene Reviewed is about, like, what's even the point? Oh, wait, I just had a thought. Maybe I'm always writing about how we can make meaning in our lives without minimizing or denying the meaning in other people's lives, although maybe not. I don't know. I do have a slight fever, so don't take anything I'm saying too seriously.

Regardless, thank you for keeping Hazel and Gus around all these years. It means a lot to me. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.