ANXIETY
At work, [young-adult novelist John] Green has surrounded himself with people who are approximately as smart as he is, but a lot calmer. When I asked [his wife] Sarah how anxious John was, she laughed and said, “The word ‘very’ comes to mind.” But, she said, “it’s part of his identity and the way he experiences the world, and it’s not a wholly inward-focussed anxiety. It also helps him to be empathetic.” Green told me that he had been prone to “obsessive thought spirals for as long as I could remember”—but he’d had good therapy, starting when he was a teen-ager, and felt that his emotions were “fairly well managed.” Besides, “from a novelist’s perspective, the ability to cycle through all the possibilities and choose the worst is very helpful.”
— Margaret Talbot, “The Teen Whisperer,” in The New Yorker
John Green (illustration by Bartosz Kosowski)
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