Origins

Before John Green became an author and published The Fault in Our Stars, he began to study theology and for this he completed an internship in a hospital. During his internship, he worked as a pastor for families with terminally ill children. However, this work affected him so much that he could not go on doing it. Source (Kathleen Deakin, Laura A. Brown, James Blasingame Jr. John Green. Teen Whisperer (London, Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 6-7.)

In interviews, Green describes that his experiences working with terminally ill children in this way stayed with him and that he wanted to write a story about it even then. However, at the time, he did not feel able to adequately address this terrible topic, because on the one hand, he wanted to address the ...