Meet-the-Author Recording with John Green

Looking for Alaska |

John Green introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating Looking for Alaska.

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John Green: Hi, this is John Green. I'm the author of the novel Looking for Alaska. Alaska is a novel about a young man named Pudge Halter who leaves his boring life in Florida to attend a boarding school in Alabama, not entirely dissimilar from the boarding school that I attended when I was in high school.

One of Pudge's hobbies is that he likes to memorize the last words of famous people, and the reason that he goes to boarding school is because he is going to seek a great perhaps, which is a reference to the last words of the French poet Francois Rabelais who said, "I go to seek a great perhaps," and then died. He actually didn't say, "I go to seek a great perhaps." Of course, he said the equivalent words in French.

Pudge, this memorizer of last words, heads out for his great perhaps where he meets a young woman named Alaska, who changes his life. The story of this novel is the story of their coming together and falling apart. The first chapter is titled One Hundred and Thirty-six Days Before, and I'll just read the first page.

The week before I left my family and Florida and the rest of my minor life to go to boarding school in Alabama, my mother insisted on throwing me a going -away party. To say that I had low expectations for this party would be to understate the matter dramatically. Although I was more or less forced to invite all my school friends, i. e. the ragtag bunch of drama people and English geeks I sat with by social necessity in the cavernous cafeteria of my public school, I knew they wouldn't come.

Still, my mother persevered, awash in the delusion that I had kept my popularity secret from her all these years. She cooked a small mountain of artichoke dip. She festooned our living room in green and yellow streamers, the colors of my new school. She bought two dozen champagne poppers and placed them around the edge of our coffee table.

When that final Friday came, when my packing was mostly done, she sat down with my dad and me on the living room couch at 4: 56 PM and patiently awaited the arrival of the Goodbye to Miles Halter cavalry. Said cavalry consisted of exactly two people.

That's the first page of Looking for Alaska. I hope you enjoy it, and thanks for listening.

This Meet-the-Author Recording with John Green was exclusively created in October 2008 by TeachingBooks with thanks to Dutton Children's Books.