Illustration by Kate Greenblatt
To say John Green is a big part of our teenage years is an understatement. He’s won countless awards for his young adult novels, encapsulating a generation of readers with thought out narratives and characters that can’t help but draw you in. His movies gross millions of dollars, and his fanbase reaches thousands. His influence over the literary world is almost unparalleled. With the recent release of his latest book, we get to see Green in a new light through his characters, and the result is an emotionally satisfying adventure that will prove to you why Green can’t fail.
His new book, Turtles All The Way Down, draws inspiration from his own Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and paints a haunting picture of what it’s like to live with OCD. Green himself has talked about his consuming thought spirals and his inability to avoid metaphor when trying to express mental pain which is a main theme in the book. Reading Turtles All The Way Down felt like stepping into his brain for a moment, as he expressed the symptoms of OCD extraordinarily.
Turtles All The Way Down is about a sixteen-year-old girl with OCD named Aza Holmes. Aza isn’t really protagonist material. People like her, sure, but she’s the “sidekick.” She’s her mother’s daughter, or her best friend’s best friend. She’s “Somebody’s something,” a feeling most people are all too familiar with. Not everyone can be a main character, and in Turtles All The Way Down, the characters know this. They talk about themselves as if they know what they are: characters. Aza’s best friend, Daisy Ramirez, says she always thought she was living in a romantic comedy, and Aza often thinks about how she doesn’t feel in control of herself, she feels like some force beyond her is influencing what she thinks and does, almost as if being controlled by an author. Aza references James Joyce’s novel Ulysses and compares herself to its main character, Molly Bloom.
You see, Aza can’t control her thoughts, and unlike most characters, none of which have any control of their thoughts or actions, she is very aware of this. She is aware of her “thought spirals,” what she calls her tightening and uncontrollable thoughts, and how they keep her from doing what she’d like. Her thought spirals bring her down, they’re like a weight keeping her from swimming when everyone else is weightless. They bring her to harm herself, believing, but not really believing, that if she just puts enough hand sanitizer on her hand that she’ll be able to relax. Aza is obsessed with the idea that her thoughts are not her own, and it distracts her from everyday life.
In the very beginning Aza notes all of the things she’d like to say to her friends, Aza wants to be a better friend, to compliment Daisy’s new hair color or join a discussion of her friend’s art project, but she can’t. She can’t stop thinking about whether her finger is infected, or about the microbes living inside her. She thinks the answers to her questions are the most important things in the world, no matter how hard she tries to put these questions aside to be there for her friends, but her best friend Daisy has other ideas and begins to feel resentment.
Let’s give Daisy credit, she’s Aza’s best friend and has supported Aza despite her inability to maintain normal conversations, but Daisy doesn’t understand Aza. She doesn’t understand that the task Daisy’s given to her will be nearly impossible with Aza’s condition. Aza never wanted to find the missing billionaire Russell Pickett, she never intended to restart a friendship with her old friend Davis Pickett, who is now missing a father. She didn’t need to go after the reward that the police were offering for finding Russell, but Daisy needed her to try, and she did. Whether or not she manages to meet all of her goals, she surpasses what most people could do, let alone what anybody else could do with her condition. This representation is important. Far too frequently characters with OCD are overlooked or have had their disorder cast aside, but this book demonstrates how people with OCD can overcome any obstacle in front of them.
John Green made it very clear that Aza’s condition is an obstacle to her mystery solving, not an advantage. “There’s history of fictional characters that have been able to use their OCD as a way to push on their extraordinary crime-fighting skills, such as Monk or Sherlock Holmes, to the edge of their ability. Aza has none of the advantages that Sherlock has as a detective,” he said.
Having been a guest at “some non-sensorial place only properly crazy people get to visit,” with Aza Holmes, and knowing that Aza’s uncontrollable compulsions, and inability to focus on thoughts of her own were based off of Greens’ own experiences, Turtles All The Way Down will make you feel more admiration for a real person than any other fiction book on the market could.