John Green on Everything From Sunsets to Diet Dr. Pepper

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Can you get us some detail into why you’ve wanted to focus on facets of the human experience by rating it on a 5-star scale?

JOHN GREEN, AUTHOR, “THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED”: Well, the 5-star scale has become a huge part of critical discourse, almost without our noticing it. I think it didn’t really exist in a large-scale way until the rise of the internet. And one of the things I wanted to interrogate in this book is the relationship between us and technology and the natural world. And I think the 5-star scale is a big part of that.

GOLODRYGA: And you’ve also gotten to slow down in your life, your work life and personally, throughout the pandemic. We’ve heard many people talk about that experience over the past year and a half. What has it been like for you and how did that impact your writing here?

GREEN: Well, I started the book before the pandemic hit the United States, but it certainly dramatically effected the book because it dramatically affected my life. I think in a lot of ways, I wrote the book as a way of trying to write myself back toward hope or toward attention to the things in life that are really lovely without dismissing or minimizing the many horrors that also surround us. And weaving through the pandemic for me was an example of that that, that these things almost live alongside each other. It was incredibly difficult. It has been incredibly difficult for me personally and for my community. But alongside that has to live — for me anyway, has to live hope.

GOLODRYGA: And you don’t shy away from that either. You know, many times people will say, well, let’s look for a silver lining. It’s a tragedy. And you address this head on. You say, personally, whenever I hear someone waxing poetic about silver linings to all these clouds, I think about a wonderful poem by Clint Smith, when called when people say we have made it through the worse before. You address this because it’s something that people may do to make themselves feel better, that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. But you can’t be dismissive of all the tragedy people have experience as well.

GREEN: Yes. One of the things I talk about in the book is that I find attempts to bright side human suffering pretty repugnant. Not least because suffering is unjustly distributed, and we have to remember that. But I also want to live a life of hope and connectedness and I want to be open to those possibilities. And so, for me, I was writing this book to figure out how can I have these things live together in my life? How can I have an awareness of suffering and injustice live alongside an orientation toward hope and wonder?