What Kermit Knew

In February and March, I hosted two programs at the Waterville Public Library. Both were about author John Green and his books. The first one focused on his young adult books, The Fault In Our Stars, Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska, Will Grayson, Will Grayson, An Abundance of Katherines, and Turtles All The Way Down. Four of them have been made into films and I have had the chance to see three of them. All three are extremely well done adaptations.

If you’re unfamiliar with his fiction, you’re missing a real treat. Every book features wounded, often flawed characters that become more realistic as you get deeper in the story. Green uses his own personal pain and experiences to create protagonists who are not only lifelike, but make you care. In Stars, you meet two teens who meet in a cancer survivor support group and fall for each other, leading them on a quest to find a reclusive author in Amsterdam. It ends sadly, but beautifully. In Paper Towns, you meet two more teens, one of who lives with such toxic parents that she decides her only resort is to vanish, leaving cryptic clues that the other uses to try and find her.

In Alaska three friends at a private boarding school try to figure out what really happened to their extremely mercurial friend named Alaska. It is reminiscent of attending psychological autopsies when I worked at AMHI. An Abundance of Katherines is a quirky look at a young man who has been dumped nineteen times by girls with the same name. He decides to take a gap year and go on a road trip with his Muslim friend where they end up is a very small town whose claims to fame are a factory that manufactures tampon strings, and a mausoleum where the late Austrian archduke Ferdinand is a tourist attraction. There’s also a very intriguing girl and a mad scramble to perfect a mathematical formula that will explain why the main character was so frequently dumped.

Will Grayson features two teens with the same name who accidentally cross paths in an adult entertainment store one night. One is straight, the other gay, both have a poor track record when it comes to romance. The Gay Will is obsessed with producing a high school musical he’s written. There are scenes in this book that will have you laughing so hard you might fall out of bed.

Turtles is a story about a girl with pretty severe OCD (something the author has dealt with for most of his life). There are descriptions of her trying, but failing to be rational about her compulsive behavior that took me back to the time I was trying not to drink and failed miserably. They’re that realistic. When a very rich man who lives across the river from her house, vanishes mysteriously after being accused of fraud, she tries re-friending one his sons who she went to school with years before. Her goal is to get him to tell her where his father is hiding so she can get the reward money, but instead, they form a strange, but neat friendship.

For the March program, I read The Anthropocene reviewed : essays on a human-centered planet which came out in 2021. I am not one who reads much nonfiction, but I found myself savoring this. It has some of the same flavor of my late mother’s From The Orange Mailbox, in that it is a collection of short essays, many incorporating John Green’s personal life, as well as interactions with other people and bits of trivia. Each subject is given a rating between one and five stars.

He is not shy about sharing his personal dealings with OCD and severe depression and by doing so, makes this a far richer book. In the process of reading it, you’ll learn why this book has his signature in many copies, where the largest ball of paint in the world can be found and how it helped him pull out of a really bad depressive episode.

You’ll also learn how Diet Dr. Pepper came to be (it’s his favorite drink), the history of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores, his long history with scratch and sniff stickers, interesting things about Halley’s Comet, early days of the Internet, why the opening scenes from the movie The Penguins of Madagascar is epic, why we should still care about epidemics that no longer infect white people, the history of the QWERTY keyboard, and lots more.

In his new book, Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, he uses the same super informative short chapter format as in Anthropocene, to immerse you in the history of TB and how it’s primarily a socioracist phenomena. I will quote two passages and encourage you to buy or borrow a copy. Please keep in mind that since he wrote the book, Trump has essentially destroyed any chance that the disease won’t spread more and faster by gutting USAID.

P. 86: “Framing illness as even involving morality seems to be a mistake, because of course cancer (he’s referring to his dad getting cancer at age 32) does not give a shit whether you are a good person. Biology has no moral compass. It does not punish the evil and reward the good. It doesn’t even know about good and evil.”

P. 180: Not long ago I was walking in the backyard, staring up at the night sky, when I happened to step on a nail that went right through my shoe and half an inch into my foot. The next morning, I drove on a good road to a clinic a few miles from my house, where I received a booster shot to eliminate the already small chance that my mishap with the nail might result in tetanus. But in order for this minor medical intervention to occur, so many systems had to work in my favor: I needed healthcare access of course-in my case a health insurance program that pays for basic preventative care like vaccines. I needed to live in a community with twenty-four hour electricity so that the tetanus shot could remain cold and not lose its efficacy. I needed a system that could efficiently and reliably transport not just the shot itself, but also the gloves worn by the nurse who did my injection. I needed to live in a community with an education system strong enough to train nurses and doctors. Ultimately, what I needed was not just a tetanus shot, but an entire set of robust systems to work perfectly in concert with each other-a phenomenon that ought not be a luxury in our world of abundance, and yet still somehow is.”

John puts a lot of himself into his books, whether they be fiction or nonfiction. Treat yourself to one of them soon.

PS-he’s speaking this month at Colby College.