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.
“The week that book came out, it sold more copies than all of my previous books had sold in hardcover combined,” Green recalled in a recent interview with the Guardian podcast Stateside with Kai and Carter. “Up until that moment, I’d been very cavalier about sharing my life online and offline, and it was only in the wake of that that I started to realize the cost of that. 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.
“It was uncomfortable to talk about, because how do you not be grateful for this overwhelmingly wonderful thing in your life?” Green said. “I have a friend who’s a very successful author, and I remember she said to me once: ‘Of all the good things that ever happened to me, fame was the worst.’ I think that’s a pretty good way to think about it.”
Green decided to work through his mixed feelings in his new book, Hollywood, Ending. Released this week, the book follows two young actors who make a movie about Andy Warhol, fall in love, and try to stay sane as they sell pieces of themselves to the internet and the Hollywood publicity machine. It’s Green’s first novel in nearly a decade, and his first-ever for adults. But it still feels like a classic John Green book – thanks, predominantly, to its ardent belief that art, and other people, can help us survive anything. In an era in which more and more people must market themselves on social media, courting the dizzying highs and crushing lows of fame, Green still hopes we’ll find something better.
I spoke with Green about the moral complexity of the attention economy, what he wishes he had done differently as a pioneering YouTuber and his brother Hank’s recent AI controversy.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. Watch the Stateside podcast episode in full here.
CS: This book is so much about fame and the various machines that create and perpetuate celebrity culture: journalists, social media, movie studios. Why was this something you wanted to write about?
JG: It used to be that this was a question mostly for celebrities, mostly for actors and to a lesser extent novelists. Now, it is a question for everyone because we all participate in this attention economy. We all transform our private lives into publicly consumable goods, whether that’s posting about our dog’s death on Facebook or our marriage on Reddit or whatever. These questions about how best to handle the publicization of one’s private life are no longer rarefied.
I guess the overriding question was: is it worth it to make art in an age where art will inevitably be so commodified and will cost us so much in the making?
I feel like the moment your fame really kicked into a different gear was with the publication of The Fault in Our Stars in 2012. When did you realize: “Wow, I have really hit something new here?”
I remember I was on the road for about a month touring. I got home, and I called my agent and I said: “When does this end?”
And she said: “You don’t really choose.”
How did you feel in that moment?
Both excited and trapped, which I think is the nature of celebrity a little bit – that it’s exciting and also claustrophobic. You have a choice about how public to make your life. You don’t really have a choice about the public’s response to that.
On the other hand, it was wonderful to have the book reaching so many millions of people. Living with all that at the same time was both exciting and challenging, like it is for the young people in Hollywood, Ending.
It’s much harder for them because I was 35 years old and married and had kids and the foundational relationships in my life were pretty set. When this happens when you’re 22, as it happens to a lot of people, whether they’re influencers or actors, you often don’t have those relationships. It can be really disorienting.
It sounds to me like you’re saying: “This thing that was happening around my house, around my family, that was more real.” Why did the excitement around the book feel unreal?
I don’t think it ever feels real, to be honest with you. I think it always feels like that’s happening to someone else. One of the things that [Andy] Warhol saw coming is that people don’t really see famous people as people. They see them as both more than people and less than people. They objectify them in every imaginable way. They feel free to comment on their bodies, they feel free to comment on their work as if they weren’t people, and so on.
The other thing is that I wanted really badly to be successful. I think I wanted much more than would be healthy to be successful. I had no concept of what it would actually feel like. It was really rewarding to have so many people respond to the books and the story so generously. But the fame part of fame was quite empty.
Why did you want fame in the first place?
I don’t think I was liked very much in middle school. I really struggled with making friends. I thought that if I was famous, then everyone would be my friend and like me. That turns out to be a little bit of an oversimplification.
A lot of people don’t like you, right? The nature of being famous is that everybody has an opinion about you, but not everybody has a positive opinion about you. That’s one thing that I hadn’t really thought very hard about.
The other thing is that compliments simply don’t penetrate. I believe people in the abstract when they say that my work has been helpful to them or that it has been meaningful for them, and I’m extremely grateful for that. I don’t want to disbelieve them because that would dishonor the gift that they’ve given me by investing in my work and by bringing their deepest selves to it.
But the criticism just penetrates in a different way. I believe it, because deep down there’s something about me that believes I don’t deserve any of this and I’m an impostor and I’m not a very good writer.
You and your brother Hank have been creating videos for YouTube since 2007. How do you feel about your legacy as a pioneer of the social internet?
Hank and I try really hard to do interesting, useful, fun, meaningful stuff in online spaces that build community and also make the world suck less. I hope that we’ve been able to do some of that. But there’s no question that just participating in an algorithmically generated internet is morally complex.
You’re competing with Mr Beast for clicks. Even if I’m making an educational video that’s intended for high school students to be able to understand US history or physics or organic chemistry or whatever, I’m still competing for clicks with people who will do or say literally anything for clicks.
Do you think, feeling the way you feel now about the social internet, you would have started making YouTube videos if you had to do it all over again?
I’d do it again because it’s been an amazing experience and it’s been such a gift in my life.
I might do it without my face in the videos, to be honest with you. That’s the big difference. A lot of my educational video friends don’t have their faces in their videos, and I find that admirable.
But so much of the community you build is, frankly, parasocial.
Yeah, it is. It is face-based. It’s hard to imagine not doing it that way.
Actually, the time when Hank and I both realized that we weren’t actually in control of what we share was when Hank got cancer a couple years ago. We realized one of two things was gonna happen.
One: Hank was going to, for the first time in 20 years, take eight months away from making Vlogbrothers videos without an explanation. Or, two: he was going to be forced to talk about having cancer in public.
Hank ended up dealing with it beautifully by not just talking about having cancer, but by sort of science-communicating his way through cancer treatment, which is a very Hank Green thing to do.
What do you make of the fact that in the age of the social internet, so many people, particularly young people, really just wanna be famous? The fame itself is a goal.
Not only is the fame itself a goal, fame has become so decoupled from wealth that no longer is fame a guarantee of financial security. I have a friend, for example, who was a famous TikToker and also worked at the Gap. People would come to the Gap where they worked and be like: “Why are you working?” They would be like: “For money. Because this is where I work.”
I suspect that young people want to be famous for the same reason I wanted public attention, which is that I thought it would fill a hole inside of me. What fills the hole is real connection, which is the relationships that are gonna sustain you through everything you have to survive.
It’s interesting that you’re saying this. In an interview you did last year with the New York Times, you talked about feeling like people believe the internet fills a hole – but then, you didn’t really want to tell young people not to try to use the internet to heal themselves. I’m wondering if you have different advice for young people now.
It’s so hard. I’m going through this now with one of my godchildren, where when you don’t have the relationships that you want to have in your community because you’re different – as I was – or because your interests are too niche or whatever it is, you find connection online. I was part of the first generation of people who found that, in 1993 on CompuServe. It was revelatory, to be able to not be stuck inside of a body that was frail and embarrassing and full of failure, and instead to be this creature online where I could really connect with people. Some of the people I connected with, I’m still connected to. I’m so grateful for that.
Yet at the same time, it can’t replace what we experience with real life connection. I do feel a little differently than I did a year or two ago. I do think we have to build meaningful relationships with each other in meat space, as they say online.
I think it’s very helpful to be reminded that my body is made out of meat, that even the thinking parts are made out of meat. It’s very easy online to lose track of the fact that you’re a mammal. You’re much, much, much closer to being a squirrel than you are to being an artificial intelligence.
I feel like in the book and in this conversation, you are suggesting that fame is corrosive to us and that the online attention economy is not good for us. But having a social media platform, having a personal brand, being on camera – that is all stuff that more and more people just have to engage with, not in order to necessarily be famous, but to have a professional life. How are we supposed to move forward?
What the book concludes, I hope, is that we have to seize the reins of power and understand that we have more power than we think we have as internet citizens, as creators online.
I remember suddenly becoming conscious on the set of The Fault in Our Stars set that everyone cared what I thought. The reason they cared what I thought was not because I’m an incredibly compelling person, but because I had millions of followers on Twitter and at any moment I could blow up the movie. Understanding that with the sacrifices involved in participating in the social internet – there is also an exchange of power. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk don’t have all the power, as evidenced by the declining role of X in society. They have a lot of power. They have too much power. Way, way, way too much power. But, combined, we have more.
Hollywood, Ending is to some extent about how much you have to feed the content beasts in order to succeed. So I did want to ask about a recent dust up that Hank was involved in, where he was accused of using AI to write part of a script for a video. He addressed the controversy. He said that AI did not write the script but admitted to relying on AI more and more to research his work. That’s honestly understandable to me, because he really produces a lot. Hank suggested that you and he had spoken and that you had some criticism of his AI use. Are you comfortable telling me about those criticisms?
Yeah, it’s more than being critical of his AI use in particular. I have my own opinions. I don’t use LLMs and don’t see a need to use them in my work.
It was more about the fact of what you just said, which is Hank makes a lot of stuff. I think especially in the last couple of years, Hank has been obsessively trying to get everything in his head out into the world and I think that is not healthy. We’ve had that conversation and that’s part of being a brother. Hank’s had those conversations with me many times before.
Trying to get everything out of your head seems like a pretty reasonable response to a bad health scare.
Yeah, I think it is a reasonable response to mortality. I think the more reasonable response – not that I’m here to lecture my brother – is to invest in your core relationships.
You have expressed mixed feelings about people seeing too much of you in the art you make. I have spent this interview very much reading you into Hollywood, Ending. How do you feel about that?
You haven’t read into it in a way that makes me uncomfortable, so I feel fine about it. There are other things you could have read into it that would have bothered me.
It’s uncomfortable to be read into the book because I don’t want to be a character in the book. I have written two nonfiction books now and six novels, and writing fiction is so much more vulnerable and intimate than writing nonfiction.
Why is it more vulnerable?
It just is. Because I have to go to deeper places within me. I have to go to places that nobody else knows about, not even the people closest to me. That’s really hard work, but it’s good work because I’m asking the reader to do the same. I’m asking them to bring their deepest selves to the story, to bring their own particular traumas and fears and loves and losses to the story in a way that no one else can. That’s asking a lot. So I have to do the work on the other side to make that worth it. Hopefully.
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Hollywood, Ending by John Green is out now via Dutton Books
