Dear John,
A little over 9 years ago, you received an email from a 15-year-old girl who’d happened upon Looking for Alaska on the new release shelf of the YA section in Barnes and Noble. The book had been published a month or two earlier. There was no Michael L. Printz award sticker on the cover yet, and no one knew your name. But she liked the candle picture, and the jacket summary said it was about students at a boarding school (for which she had something of an obsession), so she bought it. She read the book, then wanted simultaneously to share it with everyone in the world, and to hide it. For a long time she hoarded it, feeling like it was a secret that belonged only to her. She wrote you an email – a nervous 15-year-old’s attempt at telling you what your book meant to her. (She will spare the the details of said email now, as it’s rather humiliating and probably should have been discarded immediately.) You didn’t discard it. You graciously wrote her back, telling her that she made your day. She treasures the response, still.
At 15-years-old, she’d read many books that had impacted her, a handful of which even changed the way she thought about the world. She’d read books that even now, at 24-years-old, are still the works of literature that influenced her the most. But when she read Looking for Alaska, she didn’t know how to articulate that this was the first time she’d ever read a book that made her feel desperate to have written it herself, a book that said all of the things she hadn’t even realized she wanted to say. Because she was 15, and she didn’t write words for strangers to read, and she didn’t know that wanting to be a writer was even a valid aspiration.
She gradually started sharing the book with her closest friends, but only the ones she felt deserved it, still selfishly hoarding it while she could, until her friends started recommending it to their friends, and they recommended it to their friends, and all of a sudden, there were a handful of students at her high school who had read the book without her having been the one to recommend it. And you wrote other books, and then you started the vlog with your brother, and your words started to no longer feel like they belonged to her.
During her senior year of high school, she applied to many colleges she knew would not accept her. In her personal statement, she used the Rabelais quote she first read in your book, “I go to seek a great perhaps,” and wrote about how she knew every reason the universities would have for not admitting her, and how she dared them to take a chance on her anyway. One of them did. She went to Brown University in the fall – the school she’d dreamed of going to, a dream that you indirectly helped come true. She wanted to tell you that when she traveled to Boston to meet you at a release signing for your third book that October, but she felt too awkward and nervous. She wants to tell you that, still.
Nine years after I sent you that email, I’m a teaching assistant for a writing class at Duke TIP, where the students are obsessed with the fact that you were once a Tipster yourself. Over the past nine years, you’ve become their most famous alumni, their role model, their hero. When I asked my students on the first day of class to name their favorite author or book, 9 of the 18 named you. Looking for Alaska is no longer the book of yours that everyone’s read. The movie version of your latest book was released a couple of days before the student arrived, and it’s all they talked about for two weeks. They wear t-shirt with quotes from your books and use acronyms to refer to them. They obsessively follow you on all social media and quote you whenever possible. Even my co-workers joined the hype, excited for the movie whether they’d read your books or not. All of a sudden, you’re on all of the talk shows, a household name, the author whose books people know even if they haven’t read a book in years. You’ve achieved this nearly mythological status in contemporary literature – a celebrity writer.
I finally saw the movie this week. It was sweet and too giggly and underwhelming, as I expected, and I couldn’t help but feel sad that now people may only know your novel in a diluted movie form. I thought I would hate it when your books inevitably started becoming movies. Part of me still does, but at the same time, I can’t help but be excited for you. I’m not so selfish anymore. Everyone deserves your words, and you deserve every ounce of praise you’re getting.
Nine years after I wrote that email, 6 and 1/2 years after I wrote that personal statement, I graduated from Brown with honors in Literary Arts, with a concentration in fiction writing and a second major in English literature. I’m about to start the last year of my MFA in creative writing at Columbia University. It’s time you know that I have you, in part, to thank for it.
