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The Anthropocene Reviewed · Complexly, John Green

The Anthropocene Reviewed, Reviewed

August 27, 2020·23 min·1 clip
Maurice Sendak told Terry Gross 'I'm finding out as I'm aging that I'm in love with the world' — and John Green says he has only recently begun to feel the same.
John opens by announcing that The Anthropocene Reviewed is going on indefinite hiatus after one more episode. He begins reviewing the podcast itself by describing the period following Turtles All the Way Down in 2017: exhausted from promoting a novel about OCD by answering personal mental health questions, and feeling that his public self had become a product. A famous interviewer asked if he, like his narrator, got panic attacks when kissing. He had allowed strangers to knock on his door two to three times a week, and found the experience of The Fault in Our Stars — more than 10 million copies, SNL, Time's best fiction — deeply unsettling alongside the targeted abuse. He acknowledges that non-cis-white-male creators at similar success levels experienced far worse. To recover, he built a physical path in his Indianapolis yard between his shed and his children's treehouse, spending a month on manual labor. A week after finishing, he was hospitalized with labyrinthitis, a balance disorder. He deliberately refuses to treat this as metaphor. Recovering but unable to return to fiction, he found old draft reviews written in false-objective third-person that his wife Sarah recognized as broken: she told him reviews are memoirs, not objective assessments. His 1,500-word piece on Diet Dr. Pepper had never mentioned his personal love of it. Re-inserting himself into the essays unlocked the format. Rosianna Hals-Rojas suggested making it a podcast; Stan Muller signed on to edit. John says the podcast has been among the most fulfilling creative experiences of his life and that it gave him quiet — space to breathe and pay sustained attention. He gives reasons for the hiatus: having said what he knows how to say about human power and powerlessness, needing family time, and needing to complete the Anthropocene Reviewed book for Dutton. He states his only article of faith is radical hope — the Dickinson-inflected idea that hope never stops at all. He quotes Maurice Sendak's final Fresh Air interview: 'I cry a lot because I miss people. They leave me and I love them more. I'm finding out as I'm aging that I'm in love with the world.' John says he has only recently begun to feel that himself. He closes by crediting listeners with helping him fall in love with the world and live his life again.

As heard by us

A self-review that folds illness, writing, and goodbye into one understated episode.

John Green uses the episode to review himself, and the result is more revealing than tidy. He talks through the indefinite hiatus after the next episode, the dizziness and labyrinthitis that left him in bed, the trail he cut through the woods at home, and the old review format…

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If you want a goodbye that turns the podcast's own review format on itself.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →
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