Talbot’s profile aims at dispelling notions about Green’s books, and about the kind of person that would write a YA novel. One would imagine a YA author to be either romantic and feisty, with a passionate belief in the power of youth, or simply interested in exploiting a bunch of readers who mirror that belief. Nothing could be further from the truth. To demonstrate this, Talbot starts by throwing out a seemingly haphazard bunch of facts about Green: his ’misfit’ status through high school, his past Youtube enterprises, his preference for Argyle socks. While this seems, at first, to simply be an attempt for us to ‘get to know the author’, it also performs the key role of ‘humanizing’ him, helping us understand how Green came up with the ideas for his books. She quotes Raoul Meyer who says “John strikes me in some ways as the same teen-ager he once was”, which adds an aspect of relatability to his novels, making him the perfect candidate to write a YA novel.
Despite Green’s claim that he wanted to write an ‘unsentimental cancer novel’, Talbot reveals him to be a surprisingly sentimental person, constantly contemplating the bigger questions, just as the characters in his novels do. It seems that her overarching aim is to show readers this side of Green, his enthusiastic adolescent fears and obsessions, coupled with a genuine desire to be accessible.
At the same time, there is a very gaping hole in this quest for relatability: ‘nerdfighter’ doesn’t exactly scream ‘sensitive romantic’. Even this ‘geek’ aspect is reflected in his novels, particularly in TFIOS, in which the character of Augustus is very obviously a ‘nerd’, a clever appeal to his nerdfighting followers. With Esther, Talbot shows us that he had a real life muse for TFIOS. She goes on to describe his Skype conversations with various fans, cancer survivors and otherwise, whom he keeps hooked, both with his witty banter, as well as deep musings. Thus, by slipping in important as well as irrelevant details about Green, Talbot achieves her aim of portraying him as a relatable, accessible, grounded author, whose sensitivity and eclecticism make his novels universal in their appeal.