Turtles All the Way Down by John Green

“Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.” 

I was afraid that I would be disappointed in this after the success of The Fault in Our Stars, but I should have known better. This book was a heap load better than TFiOS because I felt it was John Green, his soul bared.

This was a story about love, but it was not a romance. It was about self-love, and platonic love, and familial love. But it was also about pain. The pain we inflict on ourselves, the pain we inflict on others, the pain we experience and how we go on. Green is an avid user of quotes in his novels, and he used one of my favorite ones from Robert Frost: “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.” Life and love and pain goes on, and on, and on, in an endless spiral.

This was one of the best books on mental health that I’ve ever read (but I also can’t remember many at the moment, so). Though I have never experienced what is it like to go through a mental illness quite on this level, I felt that I got a tiny glimpse of what it’s like to have OCD and anxiety. I loved what John Green has said in his interviews and on his vlog about his own mental illness—it hasn’t been his experience that OCD is like a special skill that helps him solve mysteries. It was a glimpse—a mere glimpse—of what intrusive thoughts and obsessive behavior can be like.

Of all the people who could have written a book about this topic, I think John Green was the best choice. Metaphor is his thing, he is quite good at it. One of the quotes from the book says, “One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. In some ways, pain in the opposite of language,” which is so insightful and true. If there was one person who could put pain into language, it is John Green, the master of the metaphor (cue to Augustus Waters, putting a unlit cigarette in his mouth).

TFiOS made me cry in a way that some people might say was emotionally manipulative—making two teenagers fall in love, only to have them be separated by death—but Turtles was emotionally resonant. It made me feel for these characters, not because their stories were tragic, but because I felt that I understood them. To quote Orson Scott Card, “I think it’s impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves.” I understood Aza, and I understood Daisy, and I understood her mother and Davis and Noah. I understood, and I cared, and it made me hopeful.

I loved this book. I love John Green. Five solid gold stars.

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