a phenomenon.
This post was written sometime last week. Like, Wednesday maybe? Anyway, I wrote it and then just kind of sat on it for a week because I didn't really know what to do with it. Welp, this is my blog so I'm going to publish it. Mostly because it was my reaction to the movie and had a crazy effect on my thoughts of people and relationships and all kinds of other stuff. So, without further adeu, my unsolicited, unasked for response/critique/review of "The Fault in our Stars".
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After seeing The Fault in our Stars on Tuesday, I raced through Paper Towns, with the promise from my badass roommate that a friend of a friend said it was the best book the author wrote. Ever.
Well, after Looking For Alaska, that was a tall order to stand up to. Seriously, go read that book. Amazing.
Anyway, I finished Paper Towns within the same day of starting it. And I hated it. I hated the characters, I hated what the author was trying to say about who people were. And the end?! Are you kidding me?! I immediately wrote off the whole book as a failure and took a shower to wash it off.
However, the book didn't wash off. I was less concerned with the books quality and more concerned with why this book remained in my thoughts. It's about a boy who is in love with his seemingly perfect, popular neighbor. They go on an adventure and then she disappears. The whole book is about his NEED to find her and rescue her and bring her to safety. Only, she isn't this perfect girl and she hates being this perfect girl, so she purposefully lives this second life in solitude to escape the expectations of her name.
She had become a phenomenon. She was the girl every guy wanted to be with and girls wanted to hate, but also be best friends with. She wasn't human - but this extraordinary phenomenon.
The girl also claimed everyone was living a lie - living how they were expected to live. Do good in school, make friends, be liked, find love, have a family, be successful, die. She made it all seem so shallow and worthless, like in the end none of it would matter. The whole idea made me sick and seemed stupid. There are no "paper" people or "paper" towns. Everyone had a story. Everyone has hurt, and it was offensive to dismiss a whole city (in her case) and what meaning they had found in it all.
My thoughts rested on the idea of people becoming phenomenons. There are those people in my life I have lifted to more phenomenon status than human status. You'd think that'd be a complement, but it's lonely there. It's stripping a person from their right to have flaws and normal human failures. You're restricting a person to a box you've constructed around who you think they are, drawing a direct correlation between what it is you think they are and how they should act. (*And in this whole paragraph while I'm saying "you", I really mean me.)
In the sense that Paper Towns continued to make me think and reasses relationships in my life, the book was remarkably revolutionary. Give it a read if you want to hate yourself for reading it once your done then feel compelled to reassess how much you hate it after you see how much it affects your life.
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