Good morning, Hank. It's Tuesday. As I prepare to publish my new book, Hollywood Ending, this September, I've been thinking a lot about the place of an author in a novel. Because, like, one of the reasons I haven't written a novel in nine years is because I've become very uncomfortable with the presence of the non-fictional author in a fictional story.

Now, admittedly, I've been thinking about this ever since my book The Fault in Our Stars, where I wrote in a preface, "Neither novels nor their readers benefit from any attempts to divine whether facts hide inside a story." But, of course, readers have gone on divining, and for that, I think I mostly have myself to blame.

To understand what I mean, I need to take you back to two places in time: 1992 and 1967. First, it's 1992. I'm in high school, it's been a hard year, and a friend recommends a book to me called The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. And this book lights me up.

I love it. I've never read a book with a queer character before. I've never read a book that I just- I felt like the people in it were, like, glimpses of my own deepest self. I love that book ferociously, because it reveals truths to me about myself and about the world, and God, I love it. What do I know about the book's author? Literally nothing, except what's printed on the About the Author page at the end of the book.

Now, I think this is significant for two reasons. First, authors had total and complete control over what the reader knew about them. Admittedly, this wasn't the case for really famous authors. Like, even in the 1990s, people like Stephen King would be covered by the news when important things happened to them. But for most authors, your entire knowledge of them came from that one paragraph at the back of the book. So secondly, this meant that the author couldn't really make the book better by being, like, a great person, but also couldn't make it worse by being a terrible one. 

I didn't start making YouTube videos until after I was an author, and part of what I thought I was doing was, like, demystifying the world of authors, so that it didn't feel like they were writing from ivory towers but instead felt like they were just regular people like anyone else, which I am, and all authors are. Except Toni Morrison. She was different. But everyone else, you know, just regular people who like to write stories.

What I didn't realize I was also doing was that I was inserting myself into the novel in a way that was kind of unprecedented. I mean, back in 1992, you didn't know authors. It didn't even occur to you that you could know authors. I mean, you couldn't Google the author of Mysteries of Pittsburgh, because Google wouldn't be invented for six more years.

The critical thing to understand here is that, to me, authors were somewhat magical creatures who made up stories. But, of course, they didn't make up those stories, not entirely. It's not like writers are writing from outside themselves. There's no angel sitting on their shoulders, whispering which words to write.

But it seemed that way to me, because I could only glimpse the author through that one paragraph at the end of the book. And so authors were both, like, mysterious and a little irrelevant.

Alright, then there's 1967, the year the famous literary critic Roland Barthes published his essay "The Death of the Author." The essay argues that the job of a reader is not to try to understand the author's intention or to understand the book through the lens of the author's biography. Instead, the reader needs to bring their deepest selves, their memories, their experiences to the novel, and in doing so, it creates a- uh, I can't remember the phrase he used- a multi-dimensional space, which belongs not to its author, whom he called a mere "scriptor," but instead to everyone who reads the book.

And so, we're not supposed to situate a novel inside the author's life, but instead within our lives, and to look at it through our own social and political and economic lenses. This was probably the most important essay I read in college, and anyone who's followed me over the years knows that I like to say that books belong to their readers, because I really believe that they do.

I believe the author's intention should not be privileged over a reader's interpretation, and that, in fact, it's not really the job of an author to comment on matters outside of the text. I believe, in short, that the author is dead and that their life should not be read into a text, etc. etc.

But also, I simply will not shut up. How can the author be dead when the author is also asking you to subscribe to his YouTube channel? It's all fine and good to say that readers shouldn't read the life of an author into their novels, but, like, how practically can they do that when they know that the author has OCD and also know that the main character of the novel has OCD? How can readers even begin to read a work of fiction as fiction when they know so damn much about the author?

Over the years, I've tried to deal with this in many ways. In The Fault in Our Stars, I tried to deal with it by inventing Peter van Houten, an author who meets a young reader of his who's dying of cancer. I knew that many people who were gonna read the book knew that the book was partly inspired by my own experience meeting a young reader, Esther Earl, who was dying of cancer.

In Turtles All the Way Down, I tried to just accept it and talked about my OCD in the context of this character's OCD, even though doing that made me feel, at best, pretty squeamish. And then I tried to deal with it by writing nonfiction, by writing as myself. But I missed writing fiction. It's just that I'm extremely flummoxed by this author problem.

Of course, there are ways I could deal with this. I could, for a start, shut up -- stop making YouTube videos and Instagram posts and so on. And I guess I have, over the years, become more careful about what I share online so that a bigger slice of my private life actually belongs to me. But even so, there's a lot of me in these videos and a lot of me in my fiction, and how can I ask readers to separate those two when I don't know how to separate them myself?

And even if I were to shut up, we simply can't go back to a world where the only thing readers know about an author is what's printed on the back page of the book. Plus, I like making videos. I don't really like the rest of the internet anymore, but I still love Nerdfighteria, and, like, I wanna be here.

Now, like all of my books, and indeed all books ever written by anyone, Hollywood Ending is coded autobiography. It's about making movies and press junkets and trauma and sudden fame, and I have known something about making movies and press junkets and trauma and sudden fame. But still, it's a made-up novel.

It is, I hope, not about me or my experiences, but instead about you and your experiences. It's not about what I've survived. If I did my job, it's about what you've survived.

I don't want novels to be riddles of intention and biography to be solved. I want them to be windows and doors that help you visit rooms in your mind that are hard to visit without art. So I don't know what Hollywood Ending will be about for you, but when I was writing it, I was thinking a lot about art and why we make it and what it means to commodify it.

My friend Kaveh Akbar once wrote, "Art is where what we survive survives." And I've tried to write about what we survive and how we survive it and how art becomes a record of our survival. If a novel works, it ultimately works not because of the author's intention or the author's biography, but instead because the author and the reader managed to co-create something that neither of them could have created alone.

It's not an exaggeration to say that the same sunset viewed 632 times is 632 sunsets, and it's not an exaggeration to say that the same novel read 632 is 632 novels. Because only you can bring your deepest self to a story. Only you, through your generosity and openness, can turn a good novel into a great one.

No story can achieve its potential without a generous reader, and much has changed in the last 60 years, but that was true in 1967 and 1992, and it is true today. Hank, I'll see you on Friday.