My novel Turtles All the Way Down was published in October of 2017, and after
spending that month on tour for the book, I came home to Indianapolis
and blazed a trail between my children’s tree
house and the little room where my
wife and I often work, a room that depending on your worldview is
either an office or a shed. This was not a metaphorical trail.
It was an actual trail in the woods, and to make it I cleared dozens
of the prolific and invasive honeysuckle trees that choke much of Central Indiana,
and I dug up the English ivy that had taken over, and then
I covered the path in wood chips and lined it with bricks.
I worked on the path ten or twelve hours a day, five or six
days a week, for a month. When I finally finished, I timed myself
walking along the path from our office to the tree house.
Fifty-eight seconds. It took me a month to build a fifty-eight-second
walk in the woods. A week after finishing the path, I was searching
through a drawer for some ChapStick when all at once and
without any warning, my balance failed. The world began to roll and spin.
I was suddenly a very small boat in very high seas. My eyes shivered
in their sockets, and I began vomiting and was rushed to the hospital.
For weeks afterward, the world spun and spun. Eventually I was diagnosed
with labyrinthitis, a disease of the inner ear with a wonderfully
resonant name that is nonetheless an unambiguously one-star experience.
Recovery from labyrinthitis meant weeks in bed, unable to read or
watch TV or play with my kids. I had only my thoughts—
at times drifting through a drowsy sky, at other times
panicking me with their insistence and omnipresence.
During these long, still days, my mind traveled
all over, roaming through the past. The writer Allegra Goodman was
once asked, “Whom would you like to write your life story?” She answered,
“I seem to be writing it myself, but since I’m a novelist, it’s all in
code.”
For me, it had started to feel like some people thought they knew
the code. They would assume I shared the worldviews of a book’s protagonists,
or they’d ask me questions as if I were the protagonist. One famous
interviewer asked me if I also, like the narrator of Turtles
All the Way Down, experience panic attacks when kissing.
I had invited such questions I suppose by having a public life as a mentally ill
person, but still, talking so much about myself in the context of fiction
became exhausting for me, and a little destabilizing. I told the
interviewer that no, I do not have anxiety around kissing,
but I do experience panic attacks, and they are intensely
frightening. As I talked, I felt distant from myself—like my self wasn’t
really mine, but instead something I was selling or at
the very least renting out in exchange for good press.
As I recovered from labyrinthitis, I realized I didn’t want to write in
code anymore. In 2000, I worked for a few
months as a student chaplain at a children’s hospital.
I was enrolled in divinity school at the time and planning to become an
Episcopal minister, but my time at the hospital disavowed me of those
plans. I couldn’t handle the devastation I saw there.
I still can’t handle it. Instead of going to divinity school,
I moved to Chicago and found work as a typist for temp agencies until
eventually landing a job doing data entry for Booklist
magazine, a biweekly book review journal. A few months
later, I got my first chance to review a book after an
editor asked me if I liked romance novels. I told her I
loved them, and she gave me a novel set in seventeenth
century London. Over the next five years, I reviewed hundreds of
books for Booklist—from picture books about the Buddha
to poetry collections—and in the process, I became
fascinated by the format of the review. Booklist reviews were limited to
175 words, which meant every sentence had to work multiple jobs.
Each review had to introduce a book while also analyzing it.
Your compliments needed to live right alongside your concerns.
At Booklist, reviews do not include ratings on a five-star
scale. Why would they? In 175 words, one can
communicate far more to potential readers than any single data
point ever could. The five-star scale has only been used
in critical analysis for the past few decades. While it was
occasionally applied to film criticism as early as the
1950s, the five-star scale wasn’t used to rate hotels until
1979, and it wasn’t widely used to rate books until
Amazon introduced user reviews. The five-star scale doesn’t
really exist for humans; it exists for data
aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the
internet era. Making conclusions about a book’s quality from a 175-
word review is hard work for artificial intelligences,
whereas star ratings are ideal for them.
It’s tempting to make labyrinthitis a metaphor:
My life lacked balance and so I was devastated by a
balance disorder. I spent a month drawing a straight line
of a trail only to be told that life is never simple paths—only
dizzying labyrinths folding in on themselves. Even now I’m structuring
this introduction like a maze, coming back to places I thought I’d left.
But this symbolization of disease is exactly what I’ve
tried to write against in my novels Turtles All the Way Down
and The Fault in Our Stars, where I hope at least OCD
and cancer are portrayed not as battles to be
won or as symbolic manifestations of character flaws or whatever, but
as illnesses to be lived with as well as one can. I did not
get labyrinthitis because the universe wanted to teach
me a lesson about balance. So I tried to live with it as well
as I could. Within six weeks, I was mostly better, but I
still experience bouts of vertigo, and they are terrifying. I
know now with a viscerality I didn’t before that consciousness
is temporary and precarious. It’s not a metaphor to say that
human life is a balancing act. As I got better, I wondered
what I would do with the rest of my life. I went back to
making a video every Tuesday and a weekly podcast with
my brother, but I wasn’t writing. That fall and winter was the
longest I’d gone without trying to write for an audience
since I was fourteen years old. I suppose I missed writing,
but in the way you miss someone you
used to love. I left Booklist and Chicago in 2005, because my wife,
Sarah, got into graduate school in New York. When she finished
her degree, we moved to Indianapolis, where Sarah worked
for the Indianapolis Museum of Art as a curator of contemporary art.
We have lived here ever since. I read so much at Booklist that I
can’t remember when I first came across the word Anthropocene,
but it must have been around 2002. The Anthropocene is a
proposed term for the current geologic age, in which humans
have profoundly reshaped the planet's biodiversity and its geology.
Nothing is more human than aggrandizing humans,
but we are a hugely powerful force on Earth in the twenty-first century.
My brother, Hank, who started out his professional life as a biochemist,
once explained it to me like this: As a person, he told me,
your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people,
and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that
you are a twenty-first- century river, or desert, or polar bear.
Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them,
and reliant upon them. Hank had been with me on the
book tour that fall of 2017, and to pass the time on long drives between
cities, we’d try to one-up each other with absurd Google user reviews
for the places we drove past. A user named Lucas, for example,
gave Badlands National Park one star. “Not enough mountain,”
he reported. In the years since I’d been a book reviewer,
everyone had become a reviewer, and everything
had become a subject for reviews. The five-star
scale was applied not just to books and films but to
public restrooms and wedding photographers.
The medication I take to treat my obsessive-
compulsive disorder has more than 1,100 ratings
at Drugs.com, with an average score of 3.8.
A scene in the movie adaptation of my book The
Fault in Our Stars was filmed on a bench in Amsterdam;
that bench now has hundreds of Google reviews. (My favorite,
a three-star review, reads in its entirety: “It is a bench.”)
As Hank and I marveled at the sudden everywhereness of reviewing
on a five-star scale, I told him that years earlier, I’d had an
idea to write a review of Canada geese.
Hank said, “The Anthropocene . . . REVIEWED.” I’d actually written
a few of the reviews back in 2014—the one about
Canada geese, and also one on Diet Dr Pepper.
In early 2018, I sent those reviews to Sarah
and asked for her thoughts. When I reviewed books, “I”
was never in the review. I imagined myself as a disinterested
observer writing from outside. My early reviews of Diet
Dr Pepper and Canada geese were similarly written in the
nonfictional version of third-person omniscient narration. After Sarah
read them, she pointed out that in the Anthropocene,
there are no disinterested observers; there are only
participants. She explained that when people write reviews,
they are really writing a kind of memoir—here’s what my
experience was eating at this restaurant or getting
my hair cut at this barbershop. I’d written 1,500 words
about Diet Dr Pepper without once mentioning my abiding
and deeply personal love of Diet Dr Pepper.
Around the same time, as I began to recover my sense of balance,
I reread the work of my friend and mentor Amy Krouse Rosenthal,
who’d died a few months earlier. She’d once written, “For anyone trying
to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT
YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That’s pretty much all the info u need.”
My attention had become so fractured, and my world had become so
loud, that I wasn’t paying attention to what I was paying attention to.
But when I put myself into the reviews as Sarah suggested,
I felt like for the first time in years, I was at least trying to
pay attention to what I pay attention to.
This book started out as a podcast, where I tried to
chart some of the contradictions of human life as I experience it—
how we can be so compassionate and so cruel,
so persistent and so quick to despair. Above all,
I wanted to understand the contradiction of
human power: We are at once far too powerful and not
nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to
radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not
powerful enough to choose how we reshape them.
We are so powerful that we have escaped our
planet’s atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to
save those we love from suffering. I also wanted to write about
some of the places where my small life runs into the
large forces of the Anthropocene. In early 2020, after two
years of writing the podcast, an exceptionally large force appeared in the
form of a novel coronavirus. I began then to write
about the only thing I could write about. Amid the crisis—and
writing to you from April of 2021, I am still very much still amid it—I find
much to fear and lament. But I also see humans
working together to share and distribute what we collectively
learn, and I see people working together to care
for the sick and vulnerable. Even separated, we are bound
up in each other. As Sarah told me, there are no observers;
only participants. At the end of his life, the great picture book
author and illustrator Maurice Sendak said
on the NPR show Fresh Air, “I cry a lot because
I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I
can’t stop them. They leave me, and I love them more.”
He said, “I’m finding out as I’m aging that I’m in love with the world.”
It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world,
but I’ve started to feel it the last couple of years. To fall in love with the
world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise.
For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night
sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the
distance of the stars. It is to hold your children while they cry,
to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June.
When my breastbone starts to hurt, and my throat
tightens, and tears well in my eyes, I want to look away from feeling.
I want to deflect with irony, or anything else that will
keep me from feeling directly. We all know how loving ends.
But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me
open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.
Sendak ended that interview with the last words he ever said in
public: “Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.”
Here is my attempt to do so.