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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.

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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 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