John Green's Turtles All The Way Down

John Green has broken through in recent years due to his experiences with his school life, how fame affected his writing process, and dealing with his mental illnesses. Even though John wasn’t the best student through the years, it would be hard to testify that school did not make him the writer that he is. Most artists and writers die before their work is recognized for its brilliance, which turns out it can be better than it seems. The unfortunate circumstance of John’s mental health has made him a stronger person and writer for dealing with his problems in his head while also trying to create a world for his characters to be in. John Green has not written a book such as A Tale of two Cities, but he has become a household name and a pop-culture …show more content…
Turtles All the Way Down is a novel that follows a sixteen year old girl named Aza who deals with a specific type of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (O.C.D). Her condition mirrors what John Green goes through when he is overtaken by his thoughts. From a very young age, John has recognized his compulsive thoughts, and he simply thought that he would eventually be relieved of this burden. Sadly, this was not the case. He had a remarkably rough patch in his life just two years before the book had been released. John told the New York Times that “Coming out of that, it was difficult to write about anything else” (Alter). He has gone on to describe his personal experience with O.C.D. to his YouTube channel and prefaced that not everyone will have the same experiences. The thoughts are hostile in the way that if he does not do certain things that it will inevitably cause him to die. These tasks can range from making sure his food in not contaminated, moldy, or poisoned to thinking about how that a majority of himself is made of bacteria. The fame he has received with his last two books made living with O.C.D. harder than normal. He didn’t want to touch anyone or be touched, afraid that there would be vital germs as a consequence. He says his mental illness is isolating even when his loving family try to help. He describes it as if the thoughts have come outside of his body since he is unable to control what he thinks. This provokes the question that if you can not control your own thoughts, how are you going to be the narrator of your own story? John decided to voice his struggle through Turtles All the Way Down. First, to write the book, he needed to take some precautions. He talked with his psychiatrist and decided to write from a distance to not sacrifice his mental