John Green on his new novel Hollywood, Ending and the importance of creativity: "Art is fundamental to the human experience"

Hollywood, Ending marks an important milestone for author, John Green. It's his first ever adult novel after enjoying global success writing YA fiction.

He's best known for The Fault in Our Stars (released in 2012, which would go on to be a box office smash), Paper Towns and Looking for Alaska, which was his debut back in 2005.

Nine years after the publication of Turtles All the Way Down, Green is back with a new novel aimed at an older audience that's been eight years in the making.

The story follows two young actors and how their lives change after gaining fame for a role in a biopic about Andy Warhol.

Radio Times caught up with the author to find out all about his new novel, Hollywood, Ending, and what the future holds.

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What did writing for an adult audience allow you to explore that you couldn’t in previous fiction? Did you experience any challenges making the switch or did you find it quite natural?

John Green: When you write for teenagers, nothing is really off the table, because teens are sophisticated and intellectually capable readers. But the questions of early adulthood — what will I do with my life and who will I do life with — are fundamentally different from the ones we ask in adolescence, and I wanted to explore some of those questions in Hollywood, Ending.

What were the main themes you wanted to explore in Hollywood, Ending, and why? What inspired you at this time to write this novel?

JG: I wanted to write about the attention economy and celebrity culture, but more than that, I wanted to explore what life feels like when you don't yet have the grounding relationships that will help one survive all that one must survive. How do we find that sustaining love? How do we learn to trust it in an untrustworthy world? And how do we find ways to situate past trauma in the past tense, even when it so often feels ever-present?

What do you hope readers take away with them after reading Hollywood, Ending?

JG: In the novel, Juniper is asked this very question about the movie she has starred in. She says that she hopes people take away that both art and love have transformative power in our lives. That's a cheesy answer, but it's also a true one. Art is not optional for humans. We've been making it since long before we had a caloric surplus or specialisation of labor. Art is fundamental to the human experience. That's what I hope readers take away.

How did you approach creating Kai and Juniper?

JG: For me, characters aren't created so much as they emerge in the writing of them. Kai emerged as charismatic and inexperienced, while Juniper is ambitious and careful and relentlessly committed to her craft. I wanted them to be very different people with very distinct responses to the strangeness of celebrity, but I also wanted them to share a fundamental yearning for connection and creative expression.

What does the future hold? More adult fiction?

JG: I'm extremely fortunate to be able to follow my creative curiosities, whether that ends in work of fiction or nonfiction. I have no idea what I'll write next, but these days I've been reading a lot about the Luddites and the Industrial Revolution. Maybe that will work its way into something; maybe not. But hopefully this next one won't take eight years to write!

Hollywood, Ending is available to buy now.

For all the latest RT Book Club news, interviews, Q&As with the authors, reviews of previous books and more, visit The Radio Times Book Club.