Moleskine Notebook

The Moleskine Notebook is a black, unlined notebook that Augustus Waters kept near his hospital bed during his final weeks. After his death, his father discovered it in the magazine rack beside the bed, but the first three or four pages had been torn out, leaving the rest of the notebook blank. The missing pages, it turned out, contained a letter Augustus had written to Peter Van Houten, the reclusive author of An Imperial Affliction.

Discovery and the Search for Meaning

Eleven days after Augustus died, his father called Hazel to report the find. He had searched the house but could not locate the torn-out pages. Hazel, desperate for any final communication from Augustus, immediately suspected he might have left the pages for her at the Literal Heart of Jesus, the church basement where they had met and where Augustus had held his prefuneral. She searched the room thoroughly—under chairs, around the lectern, beneath the treat table—but found nothing. The notebook itself, with its blank remaining pages, seemed to offer only absence.

The Letter to Van Houten

Hazel eventually realized that the pages might have been mailed to Van Houten. She contacted Lidewij Vliegenthart, Van Houten's former assistant, who retrieved the letter from a pile of mail on Van Houten's dining room table. Van Houten initially refused to read it, but Lidewij insisted, telling him he owed it to his own dead daughter to read a letter from a dead boy. After reading it, Van Houten said only, "Send it to the girl and tell her I have nothing to add." Lidewij scanned the four pages and emailed them to Hazel.

Content and Significance

The letter revealed that Augustus had not been writing a sequel to An Imperial Affliction for Hazel, as she had hoped. Instead, he had asked Van Houten to write a eulogy for her, offering his own notes and observations. In the letter, Augustus reflected on his fear of oblivion and his desire to leave a mark, but he contrasted this with Hazel's way of being: "She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth." He argued that the real heroes are not those who do things but those who notice things, and that Hazel's quiet, attentive existence was a form of heroism. He also confessed that after his PET scan lit up, he had snuck into the ICU to sit with her while she was unconscious, holding her hand and trying to imagine the world without them both. The letter ended with a declaration of love: "I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers." Hazel, reading this, whispered to herself, "I do, Augustus. I do."

The Notebook as Object and Symbol

The Moleskine Notebook, with its torn-out pages and blank remainder, embodies the central tension of the novel: the desire to leave a lasting mark versus the reality that all marks are temporary and often misunderstood. Augustus, who feared oblivion and wanted his life to mean something, used the notebook to write not for a public audience but for a single, flawed recipient—Van Houten—in the hope that Van Houten would then speak for Hazel. The notebook's blank pages are not empty; they are the space where meaning was made and then removed, a physical trace of the act of communication that has already occurred elsewhere. It is a relic of a boy who, in his final days, was still trying to shape the story of the girl he loved.