So when John Green was younger he was a student chaplain for a children’s hospital in Ohio. He tried to write a book about it for like a decade, but only finished after Esther Earl, a young Internet personality who he was close with through Nerdfighteria, died of thyroid cancer at the age of 16.

So this book is about a young girl who has cancer and is really into YA books and writes her favorite author, who himself has written a book about a young girl with cancer. She goes to meet him as her Make A Wish thing and he ends up being a total prick. She wants to ask him questions about the characters and get some resolution and he straight up tells her no, that she’s being a silly child and that his characters are fictional, so the answers don’t exist. You find out later that he wrote this book that she loved so much as a way to cope with grief of losing his daughter. So its success was very much tied to the worst day of his life. But at that point he’s already been such an asshole that it doesn’t matter.