By his mid-30s, John Green had done pretty well for himself. His debut novel, Looking for Alaska, had won a prestigious award for young adult literature. He and his brother, Hank, had launched a popular YouTube channel, where they regularly posted videos about their lives.
With their combined incomes, Green and his wife were able to cobble together a living, buying a house and starting a family in Indianapolis. And then, in 2012, he published The Fault In Our Stars. People started coming to our house, sometimes quite late at night.
We had young kids – babies – back then. People don’t always have the best boundaries.” The Fault In Our Stars follows the story of Hazel, a 16-year-old living with cancer, who falls in love with a fellow cancer patient. Powered in part by Green’s online fandom, the book sold more than 20m copies – enough for every person in the state of New York to have a copy, and then some.
In 2014, Hollywood adapted it into a movie starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort. After the film became a blockbuster, raking in more than $300m at the global box office, Hollywood started adapting Green’s other books, too. Today, Green is as famous as an author can probably get.
He has published another young adult novel and two nonfiction books – all of which also became bestsellers. His YouTube channel with Hank, Vlogbrothers, now has north of 4m subscribers. The brothers have posted about practically every topic imaginable, from giraffe mating to presidential tax platforms to what it feels like to spend 15 hours in a Target.
But he remains decidedly ambivalent about his popularity. It doesn’t feel nourishing, he said. It feels like empty calories.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
