Two years ago, the novelist John Green was unable to control his thoughts. His mind played relentlessly over the same fears and anxieties. At times, he couldn’t focus enough to read a menu or follow the plot of a television show, much less write a book.
It was a terrifying feeling, but a familiar one. Mr. Green, the author of the best-selling novel “The Fault in Our Stars,” has struggled with severe anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder for about as long as he can remember. He keeps it in check with medication and therapy, but every once in a while, it consumes him.
“I couldn’t escape the spiral of my thoughts, and I felt like they were coming from the outside,” Mr. Green said in an interview.
His first novel, 2005’s Looking for Alaska, was written while he was working as a publishing assistant and production editor at the book review journal Booklist, entering data and reviewing books and slowly realising this might be something he could do himself. He’d write at night and at the weekend, labouring for three years with his editor at Booklist, a children’s author herself, to turn it into something that was ready to send out to publishers. Drawing on his experiences at boarding school, the book is narrated by Miles Halter, who sets out to “seek a Great Perhaps”, in the words of Rabelais, at Culver Creek boarding school. There, he meets the beautiful, unsettled Alaska.
It didn’t make the bestseller list – that wouldn’t happen until 2012, seven years after it came out, once The Fault in Our Stars had boosted all Green’s backlist – but it did win him one of the US’s biggest young adult prizes, the Printz award.
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