Photographed on Sept. 6,
2017, in New York City
OCTOBER 20/27, 2017 EW.COM 95Plot TwistLiterature fans were stunned when
Margaret Atwood and Haruki Murakami—tipped as
Nobel Prize favorites—were bypassed by Kazuo Ishiguro,
author of the fantasy novelNever Let Me Go.BETWEEN
THE
LINESJohn Green smiles as he hands
over a hot-off-the-presses edi-
tion ofTurtles All the Way Down.
“I have the first copy! I got it
today. It’s so beautiful,” he says,
running his fingers over the
orange spiral that curls down
the cover. Like his other nov-
els,Turtles is funny, clever, and
populated with endearing char-
acters. It’s also suffused with
a dark sadness that’s very dif-
ferent from the tissue-soaking
melancholy ofThe Fault in Our
Stars. That’sbecause the book’s
main character, Aza, struggles
with a mental illness that
Green understands all too well.
The author, 40, has been candid
with his fans—a fiercely loyal
crew who call themselves
Nerdfighters and number in the
millions—about what it’s like
to suffer from obsessive-
compulsive disorder. Sitting
in a café in lower Manhattan,
Green opened up about his
illness and his writing—and
how the two are intertwined.What made you decide
to write such an intensely
personal novel?
I didn’t start out thinking I was
even writing a book. I started by
thinking, “I need to try and find
expression for this way-down
terror that controls so much ofJOHN
GREEN
The Fault in Our Stars author has mined
his own struggles for his most deeply
personal novel yet,Turtles All
the Way Down.BY SARA VILKOMERSONI wouldn’t notice when my best
friend dyes her hair.Has writing always been a way
for you to cope?
Yes. It’s a way to not be me for
a while. To not feel the stress
of being stuck inside this slowly
decaying and deeply contami-
nated meat locker that is myself.
It’s been a way to imagine what
it was like to be someone
else for a while and be free from
that. But that [relief] went away
afterThe Fault in Our Stars.It
stopped working. I had a pretty
bad...somewhat bad...let’s say,
medium-bad-level mental-health
crisis in 2015. That was the worst
it’s ever been, and it was very
scary for a few months.Coming
out of the months of long misery,
I felt like if I looked more directly
at it that I could find some
comfort in writing again. I started
with an email and I thought, “Oh,
this is fun. This is great.”And that was the beginning of
TurtlesAlltheWayDown?
Yes. I wrote and I wrote and
I wrote things that I’d abandon,
and then I’d salvage them for
parts. I wrote 30,000 words
of a novel about kids exploring
tunnels underneath Indianapolis,
and I think I was able to
save a couple of sentences for
Turtles All the Way Down.During this period, did you
ever worry you wouldn’t write
another novel?
I didn’t panic. I have a great fam-
ily and great friends and work
I find incredibly fulfilling in
educational online video [see
sidebar]. Sometimes people
stop writing, and there’s all kinds
of reasons for it. But I did love
when it started to become funmy daily life.” Part of what’s terri-
fying about pain is that it’s diffi-
cult to access or describe via
sentences. It’s what’s so frustrat-
ing for me and what’s scary
about my own mental-health
problems. I wanted to be able to
show people what it is really like.Do you think there aren’t
enough true-to-life portrayals
of what suffering from mental
illness looks like?
Mental illness is hugely stigma-
tized in our culture. It’s also
heavily romanticized. You see
in pop culture all these detec-
tives whose obsessive nature
makes them good detectives.
I think that’s true to some peo-
ple’s experiences. But my experi-
ence is much closer to Aza’s—my
mental illness makes it so thatPHOTOGRAPHS BYDUSTIN AKSLAND