Living With Cancer
Susan Gubar writes about life with ovarian cancer.
"Cancer books suck," says 16-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster. But she has a favorite and so do I. Mine is the novel John Green wrote about her.
With an allergy to cheesy sentiments resembling Holden Caulfield's, Hazel is the derisive yet tender narrator of Mr. Green's best-selling book and now movie, "The Fault in Our Stars."
Hazel undergoes drug therapy to extend her life, not to cure the thyroid cancer that has metastasized in her lungs. Despite a terminal prognosis, she tries to focus on living with disease instead of dying from it. In the midst of scares and incapacity, Hazel manages to relish jokes, books, her parents and eventually her love affair with 17-year-old Augustus Waters, who "had a touch of osteosarcoma a year and a half ago," requiring the partial amputation of one of his legs.
Through Hazel's wry perspective, the author circumvents what his heroine calls "the (expletive) conventions of the cancer kid genre." No need for a spoiler alert here. You may be or become as enthralled as I am by the sometimes funny, sometimes sad plot twists of this narrative, but what stays with me is Mr. Green's analysis of the experiences of teenagers with disease.
Like many sick children, Hazel displays unusual maturity. Pulled out of school, she has spent inordinate amounts of time learning at home. In the process, she has had to cope with a dysfunctional body, with terrifying breakdowns in the I.C.U., with lugging around an oxygen tank and sleeping with a machine that forces air "in and out of my crap lungs." Precocious, she fully comprehends the double-binds of chemical that extend her life by disabling her.
Early on, physical evidence of cancer separated Hazel from other people. She cherishes the cancer novel "An Imperial Affliction" because its dying heroine refers to herself as "the side effect."
"Cancer kids are essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible," Hazel believes. Contra Shakespeare, in other words, the fault resides in the stars, not in ourselves. Intimate with the look of death, she pledges her love to her boyfriend with the word "O.K.," not the word "always."
Hazel's fear of wounding the people who love her emerges in her sentence "I am a grenade." Dread of shattering those close to her impedes her evolving relationship with her boyfriend, but it also strains her bond with her parents.
"There is only one thing in this world (worse) than biting it from cancer when you're 16," she explains, "and that's having a kid who bites it from cancer."
Hazel's desperate desire to know what happens to the heroine's mother in "An Imperial Affliction" after the book's abrupt conclusion reflects her anxiety about what will happen to her own mother after all the devoted caretaking ends. Will her mom stop being a mom after Hazel's death? When a foundation sponsors Hazel's trans-Atlantic trip to meet the author of her favorite novel, she encounters the testimony of Otto Frank, the father of Anne Frank. She thinks of him "not being a father anymore, left with a diary instead of a wife and two daughters."
Upon her return to Indianapolis, Hazel's father broaches a third point Mr. Green makes, in this case about a potential balm for young cancer patients. "I believe the universe wants to be noticed," Hazel's father says. At this task, Hazel is a pro — she admires, ridicules, reflects, mourns — and this is partly so because of her avid reading of writers who take notice of the universe. "The Fault in Our Stars" suggests that the scrutiny we give the world as well as representations of it yield special rewards to teenagers with cancer.
According to Mr. Green, the insecurity of cancer transforms but does not inhibit personal growth in awareness. Hazel's robust responsiveness derives from acts of attention — undertaken by reading Literature with a capital L and Authors with a capital A, but also through intense engagements with video games and websites.
Mr. Green qualifies and extends his ideas through a number of adolescent characters with quite different experiences of cancer. And just as adolescents sometimes resemble children and sometimes adults, his cast of characters speaks to all ages.
Yet Hazel, with her distinctive mix of realism and humor, most extravagantly pays her debt to the universe "and to everybody who didn't get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn't gotten to be a person yet."
Currently I am reading "This Star Won't Go Out," a collection of journals and letters composed by the real girl who inspired John Green to create Hazel: Esther Earl died in 2010 at the age of 16. The memory of the person she managed to become continues to steer us in precisely the compassionate direction that, I believe, Esther would have wanted. Let's hope the movie does too.
Susan Gubar is a distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University and the author of "Memoir of a Debulked Woman," which explores her experience with ovarian cancer.
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