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Students, faculty, staff and community members filled the Anderson Center’s Osterhout Concert Theatre on Friday, Nov. 7 for “A Conversation with John Green.” The New York Times best-selling author, known for novels such as Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars and Turtles All the Way Down, spoke on topics including his past and more recent books, his work in global health, the YouTube channel he created with his brother, and how his personal experience with mental-health issues has informed his writing.

The evening was moderated by Sarah Studenmund, the director of the Writing Studies Minor and a lecturer in the Writing Institute at 91����; Atticus Fauci, Student Association vice president for programming; and Katelyn Pothakul, Student Association Programming Board insights chair. Part of the Distinguished Speaker Series, which is led by Campus Activities and run by a committee of student leaders, faculty and staff, the discussion with Green followed in the footsteps of past speakers such as Rainn Wilson, Questlove and Bo Burnham.

“Following Henry’s story over the next five years as he tried to survive multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis really just changed my life,” Green said. “It changed how I think about healthcare systems. It changed how I think about resource distribution, and it changed how I think about information distribution as well.”

Green explained that around 10% of all tuberculosis patients die from the treatable and preventable disease, usually due to lack of access to life-saving antibiotics, which are relatively inexpensive and easy to come by in the United States. He said the most eye-opening part of writing the book was learning the stories of people like Henry and his mother.

“Their experience of being alive in the world is just so different from my experience, because they live in a deeply impoverished community and have always led extremely challenging, precarious lives,” Green said.

Green’s 2023 book, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet, marked his transition from young adult fiction to nonfiction. He found that his role as a public persona on YouTube and other social media sites made it difficult for him to continue writing fiction.

“I want my novels to be read as novels,” he said. “It was starting to feel like people were reading me into my stories in ways that made me very uncomfortable.”

His most recent fictional novel, Turtles All the Way Down, features a main character with obsessive-compulsive disorder, which Green also lives with. While the novel was informed by his experiences, he wasn’t writing about himself. But readers seemed to have difficulty separating the artist from his art.

Studenmund shared that several students in the audience had submitted questions for Green that in part thanked him for writing about mental health in a way that made them feel seen.

“It’s certainly a huge gift in my life that people have found themselves in that story,” Green said. “The truth of a book is that it needs a generous reader. … Every story that’s read is read differently, because people — when they’re kind, when they’re generous — bring their deepest selves to it. And that act of generosity is something I can never repay.”

Whether mental health or other difficult human experiences, such as the cancer diagnosis of a loved one, many of Green’s novels deal with serious topics. Pothakul asked Green to elaborate on how he balances these topics with his trademark humor.

“Life is very funny and very sad at the same time,” he said.

Green spoke about his experience as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital, where he said he experienced this dichotomy firsthand.

“I think the thing to remember is that we are all human, all the way to the end … until we’re not. And that’s so gut-wrenching, but it’s so beautiful too, that you get to be a person the whole time, and you get to have other people in your life who let you be a full person the whole time.”

One of the most important people in Green’s life is his brother, Hank. The Green brothers started their vlogbrothers YouTube channel together in 2007, and it now has more than 4 million subscribers. They went on to create Crash Course, an educational web series targeting students and teachers, in 2011. Crash Course has over 2 billion views on YouTube.

Green ended the evening with three pieces of advice for the audience. First, he emphasized that regular people write books; it’s not an impossible dream if writing is something you love. His second piece of advice was for students in the liberal arts. He acknowledged it can be a difficult road and feel a little soul-crushing at times.

“You’re going to have a thought,” he said. “It’s an inevitable thought. And the thought is, ‘I should go to law school.’ And I just want to say, you don’t have to go to law school.”

Finally, Green said that often we can feel removed from the problems of the world, as we go about the minutiae of our day. But even those seemingly unimportant things can take on meaning when we maintain a love for humanity.

“The truth is, if you ground what you do in a measure of affection for humanity, and belief in humanity, all that stuff becomes lovely. It becomes an opportunity to be in community. It becomes an opportunity to serve your community and your neighbors and your family and your friends, and it becomes an opportunity to try to make the world better in small ways, which is the only way we make the world better.”