The Fault in Our Stars

CHAPTER FOUR
I
went to bed a little early that night, changing into boy boxers and a T-shirt before
crawling under the covers of my bed, which was queen size and pillow topped and one of
my favorite places in the world. And then I started reading An Imperial Affliction for the
millionth time.
AIA is about this girl named Anna (who narrates the story) and her one-eyed mom,
who is a professional gardener obsessed with tulips, and they have a normal lower-middle-
class life in a little central California town until Anna gets this rare blood cancer.
But it’s not a cancer book, because cancer books suck. Like, in cancer books, the
cancer person starts a charity that raises money to fight cancer, right? And this
commitment to charity reminds the cancer person of the essential goodness of humanity
and makes him/her feel loved and encouraged because s/he will leave a cancer-curing
legacy. But in AIA, Anna decides that being a person with cancer who starts a cancer
charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a charity called The Anna Foundation for People
with Cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera.
Also, Anna is honest about all of it in a way no one else really is: Throughout the
book, she refers to herself as the side effect, which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are
essentially side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth
possible. So as the story goes on, she gets sicker, the treatments and disease racing to kill
her, and her mom falls in love with this Dutch tulip trader Anna calls the Dutch Tulip
Man. The Dutch Tulip Man has lots of money and very eccentric ideas about how to treat
cancer, but Anna thinks this guy might be a con man and possibly not even Dutch, and
then just as the possibly Dutch guy and her mom are about to get married and Anna is
about to start this crazy new treatment regimen involving wheatgrass and low doses of
arsenic, the book ends right in the middle of a
I know it’s a very literary decision and everything and probably part of the reason I
love the book so much, but there is something to recommend a story that ends. And if it
can’t end, then it should at least continue into perpetuity like the adventures of Staff
Sergeant Max Mayhem’s platoon.
I understood the story ended because Anna died or got too sick to write and this
midsentence thing was supposed to reflect how life really ends and whatever, but there
were characters other than Anna in the story, and it seemed unfair that I would never find
out what happened to them. I’d written, care of his publisher, a dozen letters to Peter Van
Houten, each asking for some answers about what happens after the end of the story:
whether the Dutch Tulip Man is a con man, whether Anna’s mother ends up married to
him, what happens to Anna’s stupid hamster (which her mom hates), whether Anna’s
friends graduate from high school—all that stuff. But he’d never responded to any of my
letters.
AIA was the only book Peter Van Houten had written, and all anyone seemed to know
about him was that after the book came out he moved from the United States to the

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Netherlands and became kind of reclusive. I imagined that he was working on a sequel set
in the Netherlands—maybe Anna’s mom and the Dutch Tulip Man end up moving there
and trying to start a new life. But it had been ten years since An Imperial Affliction came
out, and Van Houten hadn’t published so much as a blog post. I couldn’t wait forever.
As I reread that night, I kept getting distracted imagining Augustus Waters reading
the same words. I wondered if he’d like it, or if he’d dismiss it as pretentious. Then I
remembered my promise to call him after reading The Price of Dawn, so I found his
number on its title page and texted him.