Good morning, Hank, it's Tuesday.

So, a bit of publishing lingo for you. This is first pass. It's the first time I see my new book, Everything is Tuberculosis, laid out as a book. It's very exciting, but I also feel a little bit of grief because in some ways, it's last pass. It's last pass in the sense that I don't get to change it after this pass. It's just a strange thing–I have to stop reading the book so that other people can start reading it, you know?

I just turned in first pass last night, which means that the book no longer really belongs to me. It belongs to its readers, who will make whatever use they can of it for however long the book is read. Now, this is a very different kind of book for me than, say, Looking for Alaska or The Fault in Our Stars. Nobody falls in love. I was gonna say nobody dies, but in fact, a lot of people die. But point being, it's nonfiction instead of fiction. And when I was younger, I would have deeply disapproved of me writing this book because I thought nonfiction was kind of a waste of time. Like, whenever one of my fiction-writing friends would tell me they were working on a nonfiction book, I would be like, ugh, that's disappointing. I thought fiction was, like, the way to write. And I also thought you should write in pursuit of forever.

I was super ambitious. I wanted my books to last a very long time, I wanted them to be read critically, I wanted them to be read in schools, and in a lot of ways, that dream has come true. Like, 20 years after its first publication, Looking for Alaska is still in print. Lots of my books are read in schools. But just to be clear to my younger self, they're not going to last forever or anywhere close to it, because forever is an incorrect concept, at least on this side of the veil. And I would argue that's actually great news. Like, someday The Fault in Our Stars will be read for the last time, but humanity will go on. Great! That's a lovely thing, that my books will give way to other works of art that will speak to people's “now” in a way that I simply can't.

The truth is, when making any kind of art, one can imagine an audience, but one certainly can't imagine a future audience with any clarity. I don't even know what it's like to be other people now. The only person I can claim to know at all well is myself, and I don't even know him that well. Writing is an attempt to reach across the infinite divide between me and you to make something from within me that might matter within you.  And I used to think that only made-up stories could really do that job, but now I believe, and hope anyway, that nonfictional ones can too.

Everything is Tuberculosis is very much not written for forever, it is written for right now. For one thing, I hope that someday the title will be irrelevant because people will be like “everything WAS tuberculosis, maybe.” And it is a very different kind of book for me. As I said, there's not much romance, except for the romanticization of tuberculosis in 19th-century northern Europe. But in reading this first/last pass, I've realized that, in many ways, it is a continuation of the work I've been doing for the last 20 years. It is, for instance, an extension of my fascination with illness, the most underutilized of life's great universalities. I mean, I wrote about cancer in The Fault in Our Stars and OCD in Turtles All the Way Down and infectious plagues in The Anthropocene Reviewed. Now I'm writing about our deadliest contemporary plague, and one that I think speaks to another theme that I've found interesting over the years, which is the importance of how we imagine and mis-imagine each other.

We essentialize each other. We understand our own lives to be complex and multitudinous, but then imagine other people's lives simplistically. In the case of TB, this has led to romanticization of the illness, but also to intense stigmatization of it. So I actually don't think it's different from my other books. I mean, like most of my books, it stars a smart teenager who loves poetry, in this case, Henry Reider, a young man who lived with tuberculosis for most of his childhood. Also, like most of my books, it contains the word “deadpanned” precisely once. Reading it this last time has helped me to understand that even though I'm not writing fiction at the moment, I am still pursuing the same goal that started me out wanting to write. I am trying to understand and speak from my deepest self to the deepest self of someone else.

Now, whether I succeed at that is not for me to decide, of course. Starting now, this book truly belongs to its readers, and it's not for me to determine whether or not it’s successful or useful. It's time for me to let it go now, to say, for the seventh time in 20 years, this story is yours now. I hope you like it.

Hank, I'll see you on Friday.