Looking For Alaska. John Green

      

      

       Copyright

      First published in the USA by Dutton Books, 2005

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd,

      1 London Bridge Street,

      London SE1 9GF

      This edition published in 2015

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

       www.johngreenbooks.com

       Looking for Alaska

      Text copyright © John Green 2005

      Additional content for this edition © John Green, 2015

      John Green asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008120924

      Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007369683

      Version: 2019-10-10

       Text Credit

      Pages 24 and 191-192: Excerpt from The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez

      Page 107: Poetry quote from “As I Walked Out One Evening” by W. H. Auden

      Page 111: Poetry quote from “Not So Far as the Forest” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

       Dedication

       To my family, Sydney Green, Mike Green and Hank Green.

      “I have tried so hard to do right.”

      (last words of President Grover Cleveland)

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Text Credit

      Dedication

      Introduction

      Before

      One Hundred Thirty-Six Days Before

       After

       The Day After

       Some Last Words on Last Words

       Deleted Scenes

       Opening Scenes

       Original Draft Opening, August 2003

       Original First Meeting, August 2003

       The Funeral

       Original Funeral, August 2003

       Funeral, Revision Delivered January 2004

       Funeral, Revision Delivered March 2004

       “Before & After” Counting Alaska’s Days

       Q & A with John Green

       Alaska, Ten Years Later: A Literary Retrospective by Michael Cart

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Also by John Green

       About the Publisher

       introduction

      It is a funny business, to introduce a book you published ten years ago. In some ways, I am the least qualified person to write this—for one thing, authors are notoriously poor when it comes to assessing their own work (nothing makes me shudder more than hearing an author friend tell me, “I’ve just written my best book yet”). For another, I last read Looking for Alaska in January, 2005, so among almost everyone who has ever read the book, my memories are the most distant.

      Looking for Alaska began for me in September of 2001. I was working at Booklist magazine as an editorial assistant and occasional book reviewer, and one of my editors, the children’s book author Ilene Cooper, was encouraging me to actually write the semi-autobiographical boarding school story I’d been pitching to her for years. She even gave me a deadline: March 1, 2002.

      Then on September 11, the World Trade Center was attacked. A few days later, my girlfriend, with whom I’d been living for a couple years, broke up with me. I descended into an intense period of depression, eventually taking a leave of absence from my job at Booklist to focus on getting my mental health straightened out. On my last day at the magazine, the publisher Bill Ott wrote me a brief note: “Expect to see you back here in a couple weeks. Eat, get healthy, and—now more than ever—watch Harvey.” Bill had been bugging me to see this old movie, Harvey, for years.

      My dad drove me home to Orlando, where I hadn’t really lived since leaving for boarding school when I was fifteen. I spent a couple weeks in daily therapy sessions, figuring out a medication regimen that worked, and watching a lot of TV, where the news people kept talking about 9/11, the day that changed history. Soon, they were talking about the pre-9/11 world and the post-9/11 world. One night watching cable news, I heard a psychologist say that Americans would organize their memories around that terrible day: before and after. It occurred to me that we almost always measure time in relation to what matters most to us: In the Christian calendar, we measure distance from the birth of Jesus. In the Islamic calendar, they measure distance from the hijrah, the Muslim community’s journey from Mecca to Medina.

      The story I wanted to tell—based very loosely on high school memories—was about young people whose lives are so transformed by an experience that they can only respond by reimagining time itself. I’d stumbled onto a structure that could work for the book, but I had no energy to actually write it.

      And then I watched Harvey. Now, I don’t believe in epiphanies, but all I can say is this: I woke up the next morning feeling a little better, and in the years since, I have never felt quite as bad as I did before watching Harvey. Within a week, I was back in Chicago,