Parenthetical.net

* If by “exclusive,” you mean “me, a couple of other librarians, some bookstore folks, a publicist, and 500 students.” And if by “interview,” you mean “hanging out while madly selling books at lunch, and then listening to him speak to a few English classes.”

Summary first: John is awesome. He is intelligent, warm, well-spoken, and funny; he swears just enough to hook the kids without annoying the teachers — in short, he is the ideal author to speak at your high school. (We are lucky enough to get some fabulous authors, thanks to our relationship with our local independent bookstore. If you are a school or public librarian, I highly recommend cozying up to an independent purveyor of books near you!) Disclaimer: quotes below are approximate, since I didn’t have a tape recorder or anything.

In the word cloud of John Green’s second talk to the second group of our English classes, “manic pixie dream girl”* is as big as “my friends” in your average John McCain word cloud. I complained in my Paper Towns review that it was too similar to Looking for Alaska, in that they’re both about puncturing the myth of manic pixie dream girls (MPDGs). So I was pleased to hear John acknowledge that his books have a fixation with MPDGs — because they’re from the point of view of teenage boys, and teenage boys have an unavoidable fixation with MPDGs. (”I hate to tell you this,” he told my girls, “but any boy who likes you thinks you’re a manic pixie dream girl, and will be very disappointed to find out that you’re a person.”)

Other topics of conversation in his wonderfully rambly talk:

- Paper Towns MPDG Margo Roth Spiegelman’s last name means “mirror-maker,” because she reflects those around her — “what you think of Margo Roth Spiegelman says more about you than it does about her.” (”It turns out that authors did mean to put all that English-class stuff in there.”)

- Why do we want to be famous, on the internet or anywhere else? So people will understand us; so we won’t feel like we’re alone in a sea of other people, each of whom are also alone. Fame means that our ups and downs are front-page news, that other people care when we have a good day or are in pain.

- We create our own world, so we have to be careful about how we do it. (The black Santas in Paper Towns, for instance: Santa is made up and his myth recreated from generation to generation, so why do we continue to create him as white?)

- And some advice for anyone who writes (which is to say, everyone): “There is no writing that isn’t revision. You’re trying to get the other person to feel what you feel and understand what you understand. Until you do that, it’s not done.”

* Apparently, this term was coined by Nathan Rabin of The Onion AV Club to refer to… well, Natalie Portman in Garden State, basically. I’ve been calling that character the Magical Mystery Girl, but I gather that is not the Internet-Approved Term. So I will bow to popular pressure.