Hazel emails Peter Van Houten

Hazel Grace Lancaster had spent years writing letters to Peter Van Houten, the reclusive author of An Imperial Affliction, her favorite book and the closest thing she had to a Bible. She had sent a dozen letters, care of his publisher, asking what happened to the characters after the novel’s abrupt, mid-sentence ending—whether Anna’s mother married the Dutch Tulip Man, whether the Dutch Tulip Man was a con man, what became of Anna’s friends, and what happened to Sisyphus the Hamster. Van Houten had never responded to any of them. But now, through Augustus Waters, she had a new avenue. Augustus had emailed Van Houten’s assistant, Lidewij Vliegenthart, and received a personal reply from the author himself. When Augustus shared that email with Hazel, she realized she had a chance she had never had before: to ask her questions directly and receive an answer.

The Letter

Hazel spent two hours writing an email to Peter Van Houten, rewriting it repeatedly because it seemed to get worse each time. She addressed it to Van Houten care of Lidewij Vliegenthart, explaining that her friend Augustus Waters had just received an email from him at that address. She hoped he would not mind that Augustus had shared it with her. She told him that as a three-year survivor of Stage IV cancer, she could say he got everything right in An Imperial Affliction—that the book had a way of telling her what she was feeling before she even felt it, and that she had reread it dozens of times. She then asked her questions directly: whether Anna’s mother married the Dutch Tulip Man, whether she ever had another child, whether she stayed at 917 W. Temple, whether the Dutch Tulip Man was a fraud or really loved them, what happened to Anna’s friends Claire and Jake, and what became of Sisyphus the Hamster. She acknowledged that these were not important literary questions but said they had haunted her for years, and she did not know how long she had left to get answers. She added that if he ever decided to write anything else, even if he did not want to publish it, she would love to read it—that she would read his grocery lists. She signed it with great admiration, as Hazel Grace Lancaster, age sixteen.

The Response

Two days later, Hazel received a reply from Lidewij Vliegenthart’s email address. Van Houten wrote that he could not answer her questions in writing, because to do so would constitute a sequel to An Imperial Affliction, which she might publish or share on the internet. He said he could never answer such questions except in person, and that she was there while he was here. But he confessed that the unexpected receipt of her correspondence had delighted him—that it was a wondrous thing to know he had made something useful to her, even though the book seemed so distant from him that he felt it was written by a different man altogether. He invited her to visit him in Amsterdam, saying he was usually home and would even allow her a peek at his grocery lists. Hazel shouted aloud when she read the invitation, and her mother ran in to see what was wrong. Hazel explained that Van Houten had said he could not tell her except in person, and then invited her to Amsterdam. She told her mother she had to go, but her mother said they did not have the money for international travel and the expense of getting her medical equipment over there. Hazel realized the reason her parents had no money was her—she had sapped the family savings with Phalanxifor copays, and her mother could not work because she had taken on the full-time profession of hovering over her. She told her mother not to worry about it, but she could not stop thinking about the possibility of being the only person who knew what happens besides Van Houten himself.