good morning Hank it's Friday I really
loved your video about writing yesterday
and for some reason it brought me back
to my first ever book signing on March
5th 2005 at Anderson's bookshop in
Naperville Illinois just a couple days
after Looking for Alaska was first
published coincidentally a video sharing
website called YouTube had launched a
couple weeks earlier but I had not yet
heard of it right so I'd done promotion
the best way I knew how I'd sent out an
email to the few subscribers of my
mailing list I'd told everyone I knew
that I was going to be doing this event
and I remember as we were driving to
Naperville Sarah and I discussed what
would be a successful event and we
decided 12 people if 12 people came to
this thing and bought books it would be
a success in the end three people showed
up one of whom was my boss at Booklist
magazine who very generously pretended
to be a stranger the bookstore had set
up like 40 chairs and a podium so I
ended up reading to this tiny crowd and
I chose a passage from Looking for
Alaska that included the sentence the
only thing worse than having a party no
one attends is having a party attended
only by two vastly deeply uninteresting
people so basically I managed to insult
the few people who did attend the event
afterwards we were driving back to
Chicago and Sarah turned to me and said
I'm not gonna lie that was bad and for
the first three years of my writing
career it was almost always bad like I
stopped reading that passage of Looking
for Alaska obviously but I continued to
have signings attended by between 0 and
5 people even after Looking for Alaska
won the Prince award
it wasn't until 2008 that the crowd
started to get double-digit E and by
then I had learned that books don't
exist to make authors famous or
successful books exist for the people
who read them and my only real job after
finishing writing a book was to be
grateful to anyone who read one of my
stories generously enough to find it
meaningful so I've been thinking about
this for two reasons first because the
TV show adaptation of Looking for Alaska
just came out and it is really wonderful
in fact at least according to Rotten
Tomatoes it is the freshest adaptation
of my work and watching it sent me back
into several versions of the past
simultaneously including the past in
which I was writing the first draft of
Looking for Alaska while recovering from
what I guess now would be considered a
mental health crisis I was living alone
in a small furnished apartment
in Chicago and writing every night
trying to figure out how you can live
with guilt that can't be excused and how
catastrophic it can be when you
romanticize or essential eyes the people
you claim to love and to me those were
not like rhetorical questions but kind
of matters of life and death
because I needed to find a way to what
theologians call radical hope the idea
that hope is available to all people at
all times including even the dead I'm
still quite dependent on radical hope
actually but then the other reason I've
been thinking about this past ank is
because you have just finished a sequel
to your brilliant first novel and
absolutely remarkable thing I can't
remember the last time I was this
excited to read a book it might have
been deathly hallows because Hank you
write the kind of stories I love to read
stories that are about human individuals
but also about the big ideas those
individuals must live with and wrestle
with to make it through this veil of
Tears and while you were of course very
lucky to have a built-in audience for
your writing from the start that also
meant that you didn't have years of
practicing talking about your writing
before people started listening you've
handled that pressure amazingly and you
haven't let it stop you from writing
another book which I can report from
experience is a hell of an
accomplishment
so congratulations I'm accustomed to
looking up to you as a philanthropist
and as a youtuber and as my boss at
complexly but it is a real joy now to be
able to look up to you as a novelist as
well Hank I'll see you on Monday by the
way here in Indianapolis the weather is
just frightful thank goodness I have
this wonderful pizza miss sweatshirt and
this pizza miss scarf to keep me warm in
those cold autumn days all of this is
available only during pizza miss
encourage customers to act now by
pretending that supplies are limited
even though they aren't is something I
wrote in my notes by