Five Years Later

Yesterday was the five year mark. Fifth cancer free check up. You never know if it's all going to hold, although you hope it will. It's the lesson I find filtering into so many of my characters: once you know for sure that bad stuff can happen randomly and can happen to you, it changes you. But it's also that knowledge you have to compartmentalize and shove down deep where you don't think about it every day. You can know it, but you can't controlled by it except to say that as Jenna does in The A Word, "So eat the damn birthday cake." (actually I'm not sure if this is an exact quote and I don't have a copy of the book near by, but if not exact, the quote is close.) Eat the cake. Do the things that scare you. Put yourself out there because tomorrow things could change.

So there it is. Five years ago, brilliant docs got rid of my thyroid cancer. (In case your only experience with this is through FIOS and John Green, let me say that there are many varieties and many outcomes and often they are actually really good ones for which I am very grateful) They cut stuff out and made me briefly radioactive and my metabolism wandered around and then it was over and I had a rakish scar that was so brilliantly done that if you didn't know me then, you probably have no idea. (You have a youthful neck, I remember the surgeon saying. I'm going to give you a little wrinkle. If you keep the scar out of the sun, it will look great. He was right.)

 Five years forward and here I am. I have lived my life and written more books and hung out with the people I love (and sometimes the people I don't) and good things have happened and some bad ones and the world has kept spinning in the also good and bad way it does. But yesterday, I went to make sure because that's what I will do every year for the foreseeable future.  They took a bunch of blood and scanned a bunch of things and I walked around with my temporary hospital wristband and ate mediocre but healthy avocado roll in the cafeteria in between appointments and chatted writing for a few minutes with my lovely friend Jenny Moss, a brilliant author and who happens to work in this same hospital. Even typing this I always worry that tomorrow it will be different. But in a few days that will fade to the background as these things do.

Today though, I'm happy to write a chapter in the book I'm working on and go look at new bathtubs and light fixtures and think about the brilliant and gorgeous cover for next year's IT WASN'T ALWAYS LIKE THIS that the lovely folks at Soho Press just showed me. It's almost September. Fall is coming. (well, such as it does here in Houston.) It's Friday.

Five years later.

In Which I Talk about Fault in Our Stars (book and movie) and other things

So here's the thing: I liked the book better. A lot better, actually, even though watching the luminous film and the absolutely brilliant and lovely Shailene Woodley was a satisfying experience and one that stayed quite true to John Green's text. It just didn't move me the way the book does. Why? Lots of reasons, and I know I'm not the first to post them.

But for the record: The return of Gus's cancer comes without any of the tragic foreshadowing that accompanies it in the book: the argument with his parents that Hazel overhears as they're about to go to Amsterdam. His overwhelming on and off exhaustion while there, including after their love scene. And likewise his death, which comes without the full and not at all hopeful litany of his downslide and the ravages that the illness make on him as he heads toward both the tragic and the mundanely inevitable. I wanted it to be real. As real as it felt in the book. And it felt… not quite there. Close -- like the scene in the gas station, yes. But not quite there.

Feel free to disagree with me. That's the great thing about lit and film-- we all get to have our favorites and our opinions. (yes, even those of you who review my own books!)

Maybe it's because I loved the book so very much and I wanted every word of it be somehow reflected, which I know is impossible, but still.

Maybe it's because I also missed Phillip -- the night time breathing machine to which Hazel was hooked up in the book but was missing in the movie.

Maybe it's because I wanted to cry more. I did not cry when Gus died. But I did cry when Sam Trammel, as Hazel's dad, held up that welcome sign at the airport. Something in the way his face crumbled with both joy and sadness when he saw Hazel and  her mom and Gus just wrecked me.

Pondering all this on this fine Monday morning.

If you've both seen the movie and read the book, what did you think?