Good morning Hank its Tuesday!

Thank you to Toronto for welcoming Hollywood, Ending into the world. It is officially out as of today.

Yesterday, I did a long press junket with my brilliant friend and publicist Elise Marshall Pfeifer, to whom the book is dedicated. And now I am in a hotel room in New York City. Hank, I am so excited for people to finally be reading this book.

But I also really want everyone who's doing that on day one to be able to do so without spoilers. So, for the record, this is a video with no spoilers and also please no spoilers in comments.

In the last week, though, I've been thinking a lot about book reading and book criticism in the context of spoilers because there have been many lovely reviews of Hollywood Ending so far. Like, the New York Times was very kind saying that I write with radiant empathy and devastatingly apt metaphors and that kind of stuff.

My literal all-time favorite book reviewer is Laura seconds Miller, who works at Slate, and she called the book hilariously frank and profane in an exceptionally generous review. Another of my all-time favorite reviewers, Donna Seaman, called it spellbinding and tender and funny and compassionate. But all of those reviews contain what are to me at least spoilers.

In fact, the only review I've seen that doesn't contain spoilers is from Goodreads. John Green, you bastard. This book got my heart in a vice grip that just got tighter and tighter.

My favorite John Green by a long shot. How did Bro level up like this? Bro, I appreciate your review.

The truth is, Hank, it's almost impossible to review a book without spoiling at least some facets of it. And yet book criticism and art criticism more generally are absolutely essential to the creation of art. Like the conversations we have around art are literally more important than the art, which kind of doesn't matter in a vacuum.

It needs a reader or a viewer to become real. So before I wrote novels, I reviewed them. Over six years working at the American Library Association, I reviewed hundreds and hundreds of books. And I tried very hard to introduce the book to the reader and recommend it to appropriate audiences without spoiling the reading experience.

But I was conscious as a reviewer, just as I'm conscious as a novelist, of how challenging that is. Because ultimately, as a reviewer, you're trying to consider the potential audience for a work, but you're also trying to consider how slashweather it achieves its ambitions. And it's almost impossible to analyze that without talking about at least portions of the plot. And yet, from a writer's perspective, I want as many people as possible to go into a reading experience cold.

I mean, I only want you to know that the book is called Hollywood, ending, and so it's probably about Hollywood or endings or else commas. But I know that's not realistic if you're lucky enough to have a book recommended to you by a friend. They're not going to say nothing about the book. And book critics cannot very well analyze a book without analyzing the book, right?

And so I do hope you'll read reviews of Hollywood Ending, but I kind of hope at least for day one readers that you read them after you read the book because I can't help but dream of a reader who encounters the novel with minimal preconceptions. Now, of course, that's unrealistic. Not only because there are reviews out there, but also because critically, you know, like me, you know that some of my books have been turned into movies, that I was on the set of those movies, that for years, I've been thinking about the ways that private experience is packaged up for public consumption online.

There's no such thing as reading a book cold. You're affected by the cover. You're affected by what you've heard and even what you haven't heard. I know that my dream, like so many dreams, is folly. And yet, I do still hope you can read the book with minimal spoilers.

I remember when The Fault in Our Stars came out 14 years ago, a few hundred people got the book a month early, and I was absolutely devastated. I was sick to my stomach because I was like, everything about the plot is going to leak online and the vast majority of day one readers will already have been spoiled. But instead, Hank, something else happened, which is that those few hundred people decided not to share the book.

Many of them wouldn't even read it until the day it came out. and the book remained unspoiled through its release, which was one of the most generous acts of collective reading I've ever encountered up close. Somewhat miraculously, Hollywood Ending has stayed mostly under wraps until today. Meaning that on some level, My Dream is going to be real. Tens of thousands of people can read it together, whether they do that alone or in community at the Discord link in the doobly-doo.

And they can encounter the story for themselves, bringing their deepest selves to it, their own memories and hopes and fears, just as I tried very hard to bring my deepest self to it. Thank you to everyone who's going to read it. Thank you for pre-ordering it. Thank you again to Toronto for welcoming the book so generously. And thank you to everyone who's going to see me on tour over the next month.

I am so excited to finally finally have this book out in the world. Finally, Hank, thank you to you for reading the book with such kindness and generosity and offering input that was really transformational for it. You're the best.

I'm so excited. My excitement is tinged a bit with dread. But isn't excitement always tinged a bit with dread? Or maybe that's just me.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.