Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday.

So according to Penn, the second most banned book in the United States is a novel called Looking for Alaska, which is weird because I wrote that book. But especially in the last few years, the book has been removed from hundreds of classrooms and libraries, and both my work and me have been accused of all kinds of horrible things including that I groom children, which is hard not to take personally.

Now, Looking for Alaska is still taught in a lot of high school English classes which is amazing—that's like the coolest thing that can happen to a book—but it's taught in fewer high school English classes because groups like Moms for Liberty have been extremely successful at challenging the book out of curricula, and in many cases out of libraries entirely.

So let's talk about it! Now, in the novel teenagers smoke cigarettes and drink alcohol and engage in other self-destructive behaviors because books don't exist to be, like, moral screeds—they exist to be tellers of truths, and those things are real! They're true! But anyway, that's not why the book is banned. The book is banned because of one one-page scene in which two teenagers engage in oral sex.

And what generally happens is that a concerned parent prints out a copy of this page and hands it around, and then everyone is duly horrified that children are being allowed to read pornography and etc. etc. Except of course it isn't pornography because pornography is designed to arouse, and this scene is awkward and uncomfortable and funny and definitely unsexy. I know because I wrote it that way. Like, the language is cold and clinical. There is exactly one descriptive adjective in the entire scene, and that adjective is "nervous."

So this awkward, fumbling, unsexy scene is meant to contrast with the very next scene in the book. But of course school boards often don't find this out because they read only the page that's been printed out for them, not the text in context.

In the next scene two teenagers have a romantic experience that's much less physically intimate—it's just kissing, really—but the language used to describe it is much more, like, sensorially evocative. There's a lot of talk about how everything feels and smells and the thrill of their kiss and the wonder of her hand on his face and so on. The whole point of the botched oral sex scene is to contrast with this much less physically intimate but much more romantically and emotionally fulfilling kiss. Intimacy is more fulfilling when you're connected and communicative and all the other things that botched oral sex scene isn't.

In short, the novel is making the somewhat old-fashioned argument that romantic entanglements are more fun and fulfilling when you actually like someone and communicate clearly. Also, that you don't have to be like super intimate for a romantic encounter to be meaningful. And all of this is especially important given what's about to happen to one of the main characters in the book. Without those scenes the book wouldn't have its core theme which is how you live with grief and how you live with guilt knowing that you catastrophically failed someone you truly love.

Now, what I often hear in response is that teenagers don't understand any of this, and they just lap up and are corrupted by this sexy sexy sex sex. Except of course one, as noted, the sex is not sexy, it's super uncomfortable. Also two, more importantly, this is a huge insult to teenagers who of course are perfectly capable of reading critically. It's not like teenagers read the book Animal Farm and are like "Oh my God we need to watch out for these pigs with their porcine lust for power" because they understand that Animal Farm is not actually about an animal farm. It's about people!

All right so listen. In general, I am inclined to trust the expertise of teachers, but if some teacher printed out that decontextualized single page and handed it out to the classroom and said, "This is your reading assignment," I would question their pedagogical strategy.

But of course that's not what's happening! They're reading Looking for Alaska as an entire body of work, which is of course how I
intended for it to be read, and indeed how all novels are supposed to be read. And when read as a novel it's very obvious that Looking for Alaska is not about sexual arousal or prurience. It's about grief and loss and the idea of radical hope: that hope and forgiveness are available to all people at all times. It's about whether and how we go on when those we love cannot go on, and it's about how we navigate the labyrinth of human suffering.

Hank, in general, I believe that we should allow teachers and librarians to teach and curate information because they are our experts in doing those jobs. And so I don't think it's up to me to decide which books to teach or share in the library. If teachers or librarians don't think that Looking for Alaska is appropriate for their collections or their classrooms, that's fine. They're the experts we train and employ to do this work, and if we don't want them to do it, why are we training and employing them?

But in the particular case of Looking for Alaska, I think there's an extra irony to the book being so widely banned, which is that it is almost universally challenged in the name of Christianity. And that idea of radical hope that's at the center of the book is a Christian idea that I wrote about because of my own Christian faith.

This just goes to show that there is no way to appease book banners because even if you agree with their professed value system, any attempt to portray the world as it actually exists will inevitably lead to censorship. Ultimately, what these folks are opposed to is not books, it's reality. It's not books they find obscene, it's reality they find obscene. They feel that the existence of LGBTQ people is obscene, which is why they disproportionately ban books about them. And they feel that racial and ethnic diversity are obscene which is why they disproportionately ban books by and about people of color.

This isn't just about what kind of stories we're allowed to read. It's also about what kind of people and realities we acknowledge as full parts of the human story. And in that sense, I'm quite proud to be the author of a book so widely banned.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.