To the tune of Auld Lang Syne, a sold-out crowd at the Phillips Center sings the words, “We’re here because we’re here.” There is something melancholy, almost sacred, in hearing hundreds of strangers join their voices. And no, this is not a concert. This is John Green’s book tour.
On September 29, Green visited Gainesville to discuss Hollywood, Ending, his adult fiction debut, with author and poet Paige Lewis. The evening, presented by The Lynx Books and the Phillips Center, brought me face-to-face with someone whose words had followed much of my teen years.
Looking for Alaska and The Fault in Our Stars once sat within a foot of my head on the bedside table of my childhood bedroom. Seeing their author onstage in my now college town felt like the resurfacing of the little girl who first read them. I wanted to know how his work had changed, especially now that he was writing for adults, including those of us who had grown up with him.
His new novel follows Kai Laramie and Juniper Castillo, two young actors cast in an Andy Warhol biopic. As their careers and romance unfold, their private lives become public material. Green described a book that began with celebrity culture and widened into a question of how loving relationships can sustain us.
The Places That Keep Our Stories Alive
Two of my favorite organizations in Gainesville made this possible: The Lynx Books & Curtis M. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.
I’ve been to Lynx several times and my favorite thing about it is the culture that is engrained in every fiber of its being. It is a general-interest bookstore in Gainesville with an emphasis on books challenged or banned in Florida and books by BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and Florida authors. Its nonprofit, The Lynx Watch, Inc., works to distribute challenged and banned books widely in Florida.
“We are so lucky here in Gainesville to have one of the world’s great independent bookstores in our backyard” (Green).
The book that once hid inside my backpack is one that others have fought to keep off the shelves. Hearing Green speak about the necessity of art made supporting places like The Lynx that keep those voices accessible feel especially important.
Growing Up Without All the Answers
Something that stuck with me was Green’s willingness to reconsider himself.
“I used to have so many strong opinions. And then as I’ve aged, I just look back at those strong opinions and I’m like, ‘Well, inject a little nuance there, buddy.’”
I used to read books as if they might contain certain answers. But now, I found myself oddly reassured by Green’s uncertainty. A writer who had helped me make sense of the world was still evolving in his own understanding of it.
Green described meaning as something we both discover and construct, comparing it to building the ship that carries us while already at sea. I used to think that my life would eventually become more legible: my choices would reveal their purpose, and what I lost would fit into some larger explanation.
Everything happens for a reason, people would say. I even adopted the phrase, carrying it around with me like a manifestation, believing in it every time I needed a beacon. But sometimes, I deeply struggled to believe that there could be such reason.
His image of the ship unsettled that expectation.
We are living before we know how to live, making what sustains us along the way. Every single one of us.
Promoting a Book About Being Public
There was something very meta about watching Green promote a novel about the costs of public attention. Here he was, answering questions about celebrity culture while participating in the very machine that his book examines.
He described publicity as a peculiar performance: reporters ask familiar questions, publicists vet them, and the person answering has to make the exchange feel spontaneous.
“The problem is that they ask the same questions and you have to act like you’re answering them for the first time.”
And beneath that performance is the awareness that:
“if you say one wrong thing, that’s the headline.”
In a way it felt like Green breaking the fourth wall. Honesty has to be so carefully managed when your words can travel without their context. Even in a conversation about the pressure to turn yourself into something consumable, there is still a book to promote, an audience to engage, and the possibility that a sentence mistakenly worded can become the whole story.
When a Life Becomes Content
The pressure to manage a public image is familiar to those of us who will never experience Green’s level of fame. Green imagined that Warhol, fascinated by images and celebrity, would have loved Instagram. His explanation makes sense. I mean, we have literally become practiced at translating ourselves into photographs and captions, until the life we are living starts to blur with the image we are making of it. We start understanding ourselves through the framing we’ve created and curated.
“Fame is the worst good thing that ever happened to me.”
He spoke about people appearing at his door and photographing his children. It’s crazy how easily familiarity becomes permission. Someone’s work can accompany us through our most private moments, but that connection does not grant us access to theirs.
This exchange goes beyond celebrities. Sometimes we know more about a random stranger’s relationship than what a friend is going through behind closed doors. On Instagram or TikTok, I can encounter a stranger’s grief between an advertisement and a reel, feel moved for a moment, and keep scrolling. We become desensitized to humanity, sometimes mistaking casualness for intimacy. It’s this perpetual cycle that feeds from the modern attention economy.
“Our attention is incredibly valuable.”
Attention sounds like something small. Yet it is how we spend the finite hours of a life. What we repeatedly look at shapes the way we see the world and craft our values.
Knowing Someone Through What They Love
Later, Green spoke about a different kind of attention: the care he and his wife, Sarah, give each other’s writing. They read everything the other produces. Writing is one of their “third things,” a shared interest they can turn toward together.
I didn’t realize until that moment, just how much of my love language revolves around these “third things.”
A lot of knowing someone happens while looking with them at something else: a movie you discuss afterward, a song you both love, a painting they notice that you would have passed, a book that becomes an ongoing conversation.
Sharing something that I love often feels like an attempt to make myself understood. I send a song because its lyrics formulate a feeling I cannot articulate. I ask someone to watch my favorite movie because part of it feels an extension of who I am or how I see the world. And when they have watched it, I care a tad too deeply about how they perceived it, curious of how their brains operated in respect to something that mattered to me. I may have offered them art, but more importantly, I’ve offered something of myself.
Letting someone read what you have made carries that same vulnerability. Hearing Green describe his marriage made care feel tangible. All the reading closely, taking seriously, and returning to what matters to another person. I think it’s beautiful to know that she played a big role in his new book as well. After all, she inspired the premise of the Warhol metaphor.
What Survives in Art
Toward the end of the evening, he returned to why we make things at all.
“Art is not a luxury good. It is essential to the human experience.”
He cited poet Kaveh Akbar:
“Art is where what we survive survives.”
I thought about his books. Certain passages still hold the girl who first read them more clearly than my memory does: what scared her, what once she wanted, what she felt before she had language for it. A person changes, a period of life becomes difficult to remember, and somewhere, somehow, a sentence or song can bring us back to it all again.
As someone who writes, I spend too much time deciding whether an idea deserves to exist outside my head. Is it worthy or interesting enough? Will anyone understand it? Will I wish I had kept it all to myself?
“You are rare. So please make art if you can, and encourage others to make it, despite the costs of doing so.”
In a world where art is often dismissed as impractical, Green challenged the assumption that something must be useful to be worth making. Whether we are creating music, journaling, or baking banana bread for someone we love, there is value in bringing something into the world simply because we have something to express or share. Creation gives shape to what we feel and offers someone else a way to understand it.
We’re Here Because We’re Here
At the evening’s end, Green explained that his friend Amy Krouse Rosenthal had helped turn “We’re here because we’re here” into “a kind of battle cry for hope.” As the room sang together, that hope felt tangible. After a conversation about public scrutiny, fractured attention, and the costs of making art, we returned to what seemed to be Green’s north star: connection, and the art that helps us find it.
I have yet to read Hollywood, Ending, but I am eager to begin. I had walked into the event knowing little about the novel, only to discover how closely it aligns with my own interests: privacy, vulnerability, the media we consume, and the relationships that make life meaningful, but also survivable. As a film lover, Letterboxd warrior, a museum enthusiast, and someone who has read Green since childhood, I am so excited to delve into this Hollywood romance.
So, did he grow up with us? I think so.
His perspective has shifted, shaped by the strange experience of fame, Hollywood itself, and the ordinary, profound experience of love. And those of us who grew up reading him have changed, too. We bring new questions to his work, even as we carry something of the people, we were when we first found him.
There is hope in a room full of people who chose to spend an evening listening to an author talk about art. There is hope in what they might carry home. Whether that be a book, the courage to make something, or a reason to share something, we were all here because we were here.