John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas discuss If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson. This episode was originally released to subscribers in January 2019.
John Green and Rosianna Halse Rojas discuss If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson and associated topics like love at first sight, alternating perspectives, and the book’s impact on YA literature. This episode contains plot spoilers.
This episode was originally released to subscribers in January 2019. The Life’s Library Discord and subscriptions are now closed after a wonderful three years of reading together. Check out past books at www.lifeslibrarybookclub.com, Twitter, and Instagram.
Life’s Library logo by Bethany Mannion.
John Green 00:00
Hello, and welcome to our very first Life's Library podcast. I'm joined by Rosianna Halse Rojas, and we're gonna be discussing If You Come Softly today. Thank you so much for being part of Life's Library. We hope that you enjoyed this book as much as we did -- or, I guess I shouldn't speak for Rosianna. I liked it though.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 00:17
I liked it a lot. I, this is my first Jacqueline Woodson book that I've ever read.
John Green 00:21
Really?
Rosianna Halse Rojas 00:22
Yeah. Yes.
John Green 00:23
Oh.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 00:24
And I was really, really taken by it, and I'm kind of, like, immediately want to read all of her other work.
John Green 00:29
Yeah, I mean some of her recent books are so, so good. Brown Girl Dreaming, Another Brooklyn. But this book was written in 1998, which was really before the big surge in young adult literature. Like, this book couldn't have won the Printz Award, the big award in YA Lit, because the Printz Award didn't exist when If You Come Softly was published. And in some ways I think If You Come Softly is as important to YA literature as it is now known as the other classics that are often credited with creating kind of the rules for the category. I just think that it's such an important book in the history of the kinds of books I write and the kinds of books that I love, and so I'm really excited that we're starting with this one.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 01:15
Yeah, it's such a key love story but then also a story about the different ways you can be young and what it means to be young for different people in such -- yeah, in a way that feels like it's really formative of that genre especially.
John Green 01:30
Yeah, I think it did have a big impact on YA literature, and also it was one of those books that came out in the late 1990s that really helped the broader world outside of, like, YA librarians and teachers start to understand that books for teenagers could also be -- for lack of a better term -- properly good.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 01:52
Yeah. [laughs] News flash.
John Green 01:55
So I guess we should begin with a kind of non-spoilery section of the podcast, for those of you who haven't read the book yet. And by the way, we should also say that right now you can go to lifeslibrarybookclub.com to sign up for the discussion forums at Discord. It's really cool -- you pick a shelf, one of twelve shelves, and then based on the shelf that you pick, it's like the Sorting Hat. You're sent into a group where you can have conversations about If You Come Softly, and the books that we're gonna read in the future, and also about lots of other stuff.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 02:23
It's really exciting the discussion opens on the 24th of December, which might be in the past when you're listening to this, but might be in the future. And the discussion period for each book will last six weeks, so you have plenty of time if you haven't started reading the book yet -- there's plenty of time to read it with other people. Or if you want to start reading it all over again, then there's lots of time for that too.
John Green 02:43
Yeah, and I think the discussions will be really fun and interesting and then we will also get to talk to Jacqueline Woodson herself in a discussion that -- as we're recording this, we haven't scheduled, but Jackie has kindly committed to. So we're gonna figure that out in the next couple weeks.
Rosianna, I wonder if we could start in a non-spoilery way by talking about maybe your initial impression from the first couple chapters of the book.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 03:12
Yeah, I think the switch in tenses was the first, the thing that really kind of jumped out from the first couple of chapters of the book for me because when I began the book, I imagined that we would be following Jeremiah throughout. So the switch in tenses from the first to the second chapter, when you meet Ellie, but you don't know that she's Ellie yet. It immediately kind of challenged my -- I suppose assumptions isn't the right word, but my kind of preconception of how the story would take me? And from that moment I felt, I don't know, I felt almost kind of this, like, excitement about this story that was going to be told to me. But then I also, whenever I start a book it's hard not to frame it in the context of the title. And so beginning this story, I found myself looking for all the soft things, like the soft light or trying to see softness in the characters. And I think that one of the amazing things about the first chapter is that you get such an immediate impression of all the ways that Jeremiah kind of sees himself as hard or is seen as hard, and that kind of contrast is set up kind of very immediately.
John Green 04:20
Right, it's definitely true that from the outside, the social order looks at him as being hard or being tough. Partly because of his athleticism, primarily I think because of his race and gender. And it isn't until later in the book that you see, you know, the immense softness, the vulnerability. And I really liked that the book started that way. It started with him, comfortable. Or our perspective on him started with him comfortable. So much writing about the way that he feels about his skin and within his skin so that we can feel the dislocation that's coming. And it's really heartbreaking. Just being aware of teenage vulnerability to me is always heartbreaking because kids -- and Ellie, Ellie too -- want to project a sense of confidence in the world. They don't want everyone to be able to see how easily hurt they are and how deeply wounded they can be. And the tension between that, like, performed self as strong and the true self as profoundly soft, vulnerable, weak, fragile, all of those things -- it's so powerfully drawn in this book, I think.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 05:46
Yeah, absolutely and he is so aware in that first chapter of all the ways people around him have taught him about how he should see himself. Like that kind of, I don't know, very almost adult feeling within this extremely vulnerable child, and Ellie as well. Hearing, you know, the voice of his grandma saying that she believed a person could be too Black and then hearing kind of the contrast in where his father is talking about Blackness in general. And kind of this awareness of all these different voices, almost like shouting or saying things at you at once, like that felt very much like kind of teenager space. Whereas Ellie is in this big, empty house and she feels like, very kind of absolute teenage loneliness as well that I thought was an interesting contrast between the two. Even though, you know, later on there are moments of shared loneliness and that, but it did seem a contrast between, kind of, noise versus, you know, big space and big silence.
John Green 06:44
Yeah, another thing that struck me in the first couple chapters is that often when a book is written in more than one voice, it's still written in one voice, you know?
Rosianna Halse Rojas 06:52
Yeah.
John Green 06:54
Like, it often doesn't feel like we're seeing the world from two different and distinct and intensely individual perspectives. But in this story it really, really does. Jeremiah's chapters feel deeply Jeremiah, and Ellie's chapters feel deeply Ellie. And I just think that's such an accomplishment. It's so hard to do that well, and it's so often done poorly.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 07:19
Yeah, it's beautiful. I think that it's almost like the time moves differently, chapter to chapter. I think it's more than just the tense -- there's something in kind of the rhythm of sentence to sentence, that you get a sense of them that's completely separate from the other. And to the point that, like, you can't really hear the author at all, even though she's obviously on every word of the page. But the, yeah, it just becomes a characters absolutely.
John Green 07:44
Yeah, which is very hard to do, at least in my experience. The other thing I wanted to get to before we talk about the kind of spoilery part of the discussion is this one moment that they have together that is really the only moment they have together for quite a while. And it's a classic meet-cute, right, like the classic meet-cute idea is that you literally run into someone. Like, when they were making The Fault in Our Stars movie, they did it differently than it was in the book because they wanted to acknowledge that this was going to be a classic meet-cute. And so they literally had Augustus and Hazel brush shoulders and then, like, get awkward and look at each other and feel uncomfortable and then walk away. And I was thinking even as they were filming that scene, I was thinking, like, oh, this is not like The Fault in Our Stars book, but it is kind of like If You Come Softly.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 08:42
Yeah [laughs]. Where you've got that, like, full on, like storylines crash into each other moment. Like these two worlds --
John Green 08:49
Exactly, like --
Rosianna Halse Rojas 08:50
-- bump.
John Green 08:50
-- yeah, where the two worlds physically collide. Books are spilled in the process of these two vastly different worlds physically colliding. And then, you know, life is never the same after this collision. And I love it as metaphor but I also, I also like that in a love story that isn't going to be typical in a lot of ways, that it has this beginning that feels very, like, sweep, romance novel-y, really lovely and yeah, I don't know. I just really love that she chose to have them meet that way.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 09:32
Well, what's more also it has happened, kind of, before the beginning of the book, which I thought was really interesting. Like --
John Green 09:38
Mhm.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 09:39
-- that's the last sentence of the first chapter is, on top of everything, he had met a girl. That's not happening in real time for us, so that was just kind of a really interesting choice to me. And then you get Ellie kind of going back and talking through it as well. But it makes it feel sort of bigger, and it makes it feel outside of the story, like it has this kind of eternal nature to it. I think in your letter for Life's Library, you talked about the kind of comparison of stories like Romeo and Juliet. And for me, just from the beginning that really kind of tapped into that, yeah. Bigger, sort of, universal feeling of that fated moment of when they bump into each other and drop all the books. [laughs]
John Green 10:17
Yeah, and I think with that, we can transition into the spoiler-y discussion. So if you haven't read the book, or if you haven't finished the book, now is the time to hit pause on the podcast and come back and listen to the rest of it when you have finished the book. So, we're gonna give you, like, one second right now to stop the podcast so that you can enjoy the book cold and clean and in a way that books are meant to be enjoyed.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 10:42
[laughs]
John Green 10:45
Okay, right, so it is a Romeo and Juliet story, in a deep, deep way, right. Like, it's about first love, it's about the wonder and magic of love at first sight, which I thought was just explored so fascinatingly in this book. And of course, it's also about the tragedy of loss. And, you know, which is the gut-wrenching conclusion of it all. But I want to start about talking about first love and especially about love at first sight. One of the things I find completely fascinating about this book is that both Jeremiah and Ellie are completely aware of the fact that there is a, in Jeremiah's case a girl in his life, and in Ellie's case a boy in her life, even though they have only spoken, like, one word to each other for the first eighty pages of the book.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 11:39
Yeah!
John Green 11:40
Like, for the first third of the book, they don't say a second word to each other, but they are both, like, in a relationship, like, despite the fact that they never see each other. And it really makes a case for love at first sight, and for the reality of that. For the reality of what I think later, Ellie's sister calls perfect love.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 12:00
Yeah, and it splits the book into literally, like, yeah that first part is entirely from that one interaction. When part two begins, it's that second interaction, but that's what -- yeah, like, as you say, eighty pages in. Which I thought was really remarkable. But you really feel it from them. You feel --
John Green 12:16
Yeah --
Rosianna Halse Rojas 12:16
You kind of, you don't doubt it. There's an honesty to that feeling there. And I love the parts where her sister asks her about his last name, and she's like, "I don't know, but you know." [laughs]
John Green 12:30
[laughs]
Rosianna Halse Rojas 12:31
"That's kind of irrelevant."
John Green 12:32
"That's not important!"
Rosianna Halse Rojas 12:32
Yeah!
John Green 12:33
"The point is that I'm in love." [laughs]
Rosianna Halse Rojas 12:35
Yeah. But that's interesting because then that does become important later in the story, obviously, his surname, but --
John Green 12:42
Right.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 12:42
-- but that kind of, yeah, that single-mindedness. "You can't tell me how I feel. I know how I feel." And you both feel that with such, yeah, such kind of simplicity, but then also there's nothing simple about it, of course.
John Green 12:55
I had not made the connection that she says she doesn't know his surname, it's not important, and then of course his surname turns out to be tremendously important. God. What a book. I kept thinking about when Sarah and I fell in love -- or more precisely, like, in the months between when I really liked Sarah and when we started dating, I went, I spent like eight days in a Motel 6 in Birmingham, Alabama, which I don't recommend on any level.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 13:27
[laughs]
John Green 13:28
And the idea was that I was going to research for my novel Looking for Alaska. I was gonna, like, go to my old high school and I was gonna smell the smells and feel the heat and that was gonna make me better at writing about all that stuff. But what actually happened is that I was just kind of in a depressive headspace and I only left the motel maybe like two times.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 13:48
[laughs]
John Green 13:49
And so I was just kind of, like, in this hotel room, I don't -- just in a weird headspace. And I had this audio recorder. This was pre-phones having voice memos. I had this audio recorder that recorded on physical tapes, and unfortunately I still have the tape of me talking about Sarah --
Rosianna Halse Rojas 14:09
Aw.
John Green 14:10
-- who was not my girlfriend and who, you know, I basically only knew -- like, we'd hung out twice, and other than that our entire friendship occurred over email. And I have these voice memos of me, like, talking about Sarah and I don't -- I have no desire to write, I have no desire to do anything. It's only talking about Sarah and all the things that are interesting about her, and then I'll like, after recording one voice memo, you can hear a little, like, bit of silence, and then I'll come back on and say --
Rosianna Halse Rojas 14:39
[laughs]
John Green 14:39
-- like something else that I had just thought of that's just so interesting about her. And it's super cringe-y, of course, but it did remind me of that.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 14:49
Oh, it's so great! Like you had to talk to someone about it so you talked to yourself about it, and I love that. [laughs]
John Green 14:55
Exactly, yeah, right, because I realized that it was, like, way out of perspective with the reality of what our relationship was, right. Like, the reality of what our relationship was was we were fairly casual acquaintances.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 15:09
[laughs]
John Green 15:10
But that was not what was happening inside of my mind. Like, inside of my mind there was a girl. You know, as Jeremiah puts it. And I do -- one of the strange things about this book is that makes such a convincing case -- in the same way that Romeo and Juliet does -- for the reality of love at first sight. It's not simple, the love that one has at first sight is not like the love that Jeremiah and Ellie eventually develop, but I still think the love at first sight that they have is real.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 15:45
Yeah. It's that fated moment, but there's nothing shallow about it. And I think because you're following both of them, chapter to chapter, throughout these eighty pages, from that first interaction, it does help you not doubt it because they're both kind of reinforcing it for me this side. And yeah, it makes kind of the reader so invested in it, as well, like I felt so invested in their story and yeah. I kind of, I don't think I had fully processed that they hadn't interacted again for much of the story, because you believe it so much.
John Green 16:19
Yeah, and that's part of what makes it so rewarding when they do finally start to hang out and talk and, you know, the epic, amazing, first kiss scene in this book is just, like, one of the best kisses in the history of young adult literature.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 16:38
It's stunning. It's so romantic.
John Green 16:41
It's so good! It's so, so good. And regardless of whether you see the world more from Ellie's perspective or more from Miah's perspective, I think that the way that their love works, the intensity of it, the depth of it, because you believe in that as a reader, you're able to empathize with both of them more deeply. Which, in turn, makes the heartbreak of Jeremiah's killing, you know, that much deeper and that much more powerful.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 17:12
Yeah.
John Green 17:14
It helps you to understand the scope of the loss that when we talk about young people dying, when we talk about young people dying at the hands of authorities, we're not talking about statistics. We're talking about human beings who are loved so, so deeply, and yeah, I mean I just -- even though I've read the book several times, I just, every time I'm just reeling at the end of it.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 17:46
Yeah, it's that moment of also of knowing that there was kind of a both of short-term hope of what was going to happen the next day, and then also this kind of long-term hope of just the life lived and the life potentially lived together and it's absolutely devastating. We received a lot of Tweets and Instagrams comments already from people who've read ahead and just absolutely devastated and were like, "What've you done?"
John Green 18:13
[laughs] Yeah, and it is really devastating. I think there's two losses when a young person dies: there's the loss of the present, and this is something that I think is explored really well in the book even though it's only the last couple of chapters. But, you know, the loss of the present is what you were gonna do tomorrow, what you were gonna do the day after that, graduating from high school. And then there's the loss of the future, which are the decades and decades of life that you don't get to have and when you grow up, you know having loved someone who died...you think about that for your whole life. I mean, you know, even now I had a classmate of mine die in high school and even now I think, like, you know that person would be 42 years old now. And they would've experienced so many heartbreaks and so many joys and that was robbed of them. And it's hard not to feel a kind of ongoing sense of loss about that. And maybe it's, maybe you have to feel an ongoing sense of loss about that because really the loss is ongoing.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 19:24
And it's such a reality for so many young people and such a real fear. One of the parts that really stands out for me -- and obviously it's kind of revisited at the end -- is when his dad warns Jeremiah about running in white neighborhoods. And that was, like, both obviously very practical advice, but also that sense of, like, going too fast from what is expected of you. And going farther than what is expected of you, and feeling free, like, it's that very horrible concern about you can't be free and you can't feel free and you can't run further and faster and for longer. There is a limit to that. Or is, there is a risk of a limit to that.
John Green 20:08
Mhm. Yeah.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 20:10
And the fact that that's when he's killed is so painfully resonant there, I think. And that bit, another bit that just really gets me is that kind of falling of the sadness, sudden sadness as he died and then nothing at all.
John Green 20:24
Yeah.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 20:26
It's just, oh, beautiful writing. Painful reading.
John Green 20:30
Yeah, that moment is one of the moments where you see that Jacqueline Woodson is a poet and, you know, that ability to, you know, do something really deep and difficult in just a few words and in just a few seconds of the character's life...it's astonishing to me. That's something that you also see in her other work, from the stuff she's written for adults to her picture books. Like one of Alice and Henry's favorite books is her book Show Way. But yeah, I think that ability to describe the last moment of Jeremiah's life -- that's one of the things that really haunts me about this story.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 21:18
I, there's something about the format as well, of it being, you know, a relatively short book. You can read it again, and you can go back through, you know without too much time being spent on it.
John Green 21:27
Yeah.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 21:29
And see how it's been threaded throughout, and you know, how I guess going back to that view of kind of predestination of fate and so on. Like you have all these signs to it, but also you kind of see the care with which those themes have been explored throughout the book. Yeah, that's something I really like about shorter books. And shorter stories as well. I think I for a long time thought like, "Oh, I'm not a short story person" but lately I've been reading a lot of them, and I like that both in YA and -- well, not all YA, but many YA books it's just the length allows you to really spend a lot of time with a particular story and with characters. And kind of see all the pieces and If You Come Softly is like the premiere example of that.
John Green 22:12
Yeah, I think because it's short, in part, it has to be incredibly careful, right, like everything, every word needs to be there for a reason. Every scene needs to be there for a reason, and in a lot of cases, scenes are accomplishing multiple things at the same time, which always blows me away. Something that I have absolutely no gift for. But, you know like Ellie's conversations with her mom, for instance, are doing so much to establish who Ellie is, who her mom is, but also to explore, you know, questions of vulnerability and hurt and abandonment and this need that we all have and that Ellie's mom has to seek freedom to not feel over, you know, so overwhelmed by one's responsibilities that one feels like, you know, one loses their personhood. And that resonates with Jeremiah's experience, it resonates with Jeremiah's parents' experiences. For a very short book, it's endlessly rich. And that's often the case, I think, with short, masterful works of literature. Like I think about Sula by Toni Morrison, or The Great Gatsby. A lot of times the, you know, a writer's shortest novels are their most powerful ones because there's so much care put into every sentence.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 23:41
Yeah, and on that note about the conversations between Ellie and Marion. Like, I was so amazed by that, from that, kind of, first conversation with her, you then go into this conversation that never really happened in a big way, or rarely happened in a big way about the time that Marion left and why she left and kind of goes right into that wound straight away. So you're seeing both of the characters from the outset are dealing with these big wounds and actively looking at them, I think. Actively going into them, which is another part of like the huge pain and the huge loss at the end is that you feel like they were kind of getting somewhere and they were starting to feel settled with things and they were starting to feel a level of --
John Green 24:26
Mhm.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 24:27
-- reassurance, both within each other but then also kind of in their own lives independently.
John Green 24:32
Mhm.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 24:32
And then that's all, sort of, not taken away but it's -- the promise of that is lost in a lot of ways.
John Green 24:41
Yeah, no, absolutely. It's funny, I read the book for the first time probably when I was 23 or 24. And I thought Ellie's mother was a terrible, terrible villain.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 24:54
[laughs]
John Green 24:55
And a horrible person. And not that I am at risk of, like, leaving my children or anything, but I get her perspective so much differently now. Like I read the whole book very differently now. It's a little bit like how when I first read Catcher in the Rye I was like, "What a great book about a badass kid."
Rosianna Halse Rojas 25:17
[laughs]
John Green 25:19
And then when I was like, an adult and I read Catcher in the Rye, I was like "Oh my god, this poor child." Like I just want to like, I want to be the catcher in the rye. I want to save him from all of the pain that he is experiencing and all of the, you know, the adults who don't wish him well. And I feel a little bit the same way with If You Come Softly, where my relationship with Marion is just completely different from what it was 18 years ago.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 25:47
But, you know, neither of those are kind of really wrong. You were just, I guess it's like a different emphasis on --
John Green 25:53
Right.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 25:53
-- who you choose to be kind of generous to in the story. And I think it's easier when you're closer to an age --
John Green 25:58
Yeah.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 25:59
-- or an experience.
John Green 26:00
Yeah, but that's one of the things I love about really great books. You know, there probably aren't a lot of books for which this is true. But with a really great book, my relationship with it does change over time. And the, kind of the lessons it has to teach me change over time. When I first read If You Come Softly, I thought it was a book primarily about the reality of love at first sight. I didn't understand, you know, or at least I didn't deeply understand the extent to which it was also about oppressive power structures and how they can shape and in some cases end people's lives. I didn't understand Marion's perspective at all, you know, I thought she was merely, merely a bad mother.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 26:43
Yeah.
John Green 26:43
When -- of course the truth is complicated, like you can tell that she's desperately trying to be a good mom while also trying to be her own person.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 26:52
Have you seen the Paul Dano film Wildlife that just came out?
John Green 26:58
I have not.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 26:58
The Carey Mulligan. It, I was thinking about it a lot as I was, you know, with the scenes with Marion, it's a mother who, whose father goes off to fight fires and basically abandons her and her son. And she, like in a lot of the interviews and stuff people are like, "How is it playing such an unlikable character?" And Carey Mulligan in every interview has had to be like, "She's not unlikable! Like I like her very much. She's struggled with a lot of things." And I think it's kind of, it's the same kind of figure. It's women really struggling with that, with those expectations of what their roles should be. And yeah, also the children having to kind of, I don't know, figure out what their relationship is and what they mean to them, at all the same time.
John Green 27:39
Right.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 27:42
Yeah, I think it's great to see this explored, you know, twenty years ago. Not that it's the first time to explore that, but just that I think it's kind of quite a common figure and a common thing. And it's also when children start to see their parents as people. And I think for, you know, in Ellie's case, she had to do that quite young and Jeremiah's as well. I think he did that quite young, too.
John Green 28:05
Right.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 28:05
It's interesting that both their mothers are kind of lonely women at home a lot of the time.
John Green 28:10
Yeah, and their mothers have very different responses to, you know, to that loneliness. I think Jeremiah's mother becomes more dependent upon Jeremiah whereas, you know, Marion becomes really someone who wants her own life. Wants to be separate from all of these obligations and responsibilities. I do think that there are incredibly strong cultural messages that only a certain type of woman especially is likable. And that type is the woman who meets all of her familial obligations first and puts herself last?
Rosianna Halse Rojas 28:54
Yeah.
John Green 28:55
And that is a troubling message. You know, you don't hear that in the same way about men, like nobody ever says like, "Oh man, he really put his career first."
Rosianna Halse Rojas 29:04
[laughs]
John Green 29:05
You know, that's the expectation, is that you would put your career first.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 29:08
It's that extra credit thing as well of, like you know, when you see a guy out with the kids, you're like, "Oh, how nice!" [laughs]
John Green 29:14
"Oh right, yeah, wow --
Rosianna Halse Rojas 29:15
Yeah.
John Green 29:15
-- what a great dad!" Yeah! Well, no, what a basic dad.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 29:19
Basic dads!
John Green 29:20
Right, like. I mean that's one of the things that I really like in this story, is that Ellie's dad is never in the dang book.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 29:30
No.
John Green 29:30
Like he's always at work! And nobody's mad at Ellie's dad. Like when I was reading this book when I was 23 years old, I wasn't like, "Hold on a second. What about the dad? What's the dad doing?" I was just like, "Oh, you know, dads have to work." But like, do they?
Rosianna Halse Rojas 29:44
Do they just have, like, that one very sweet scene about like the New York Times and that's kind of like, that's --
John Green 29:49
It is, yeah.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 29:50
-- that's the moment.
John Green 29:53
Yeah. I do like that he makes a brief appearance, but like he's, you know like, he is not at the center --
Rosianna Halse Rojas 29:58
No.
John Green 29:58
-- of going through the hardships and wonders and challenges of Ellie's life the way that Marion is.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 30:07
Not at all. Yeah, and also helping her grapple with the fact of Marion and the fact of, you know, her having left before. Like, he's just not there at all.
John Green 30:18
Right. Yeah. Oh man. What a great book!
Rosianna Halse Rojas 30:22
It's so good. Oh, the other thing I wanted to mention was, when I was rereading it, like I kind of read it, like you know, probably two weeks apart, twice. There's a bit when they first kind of properly meet and start talking in the class when they're going through the amendments. When the teacher asks, "So are you familiar with the fifth amendment?" And I just -- that like, the first time I read it, I was like, oh, it allows for this kind of witty response of, you know, the right to silence. The second time I read it, I was like, knowing kind of what I knew about the ending of the book, it was just another one of those beautiful, horrible, foreshadowing moments of like this kid who's been criminalized and seen as a criminal.
John Green 31:04
Right.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 31:04
That was something that stood out so much on the second reading. I just wanted to mention that.
John Green 31:08
Right. Yeah, that's really interesting that the state is supposed to assume that you are innocent and that you have a certain set of rights and when the state doesn't assume that, the consequences can be catastrophic.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 31:24
Yeah, and of course, like, of course a young Black boy knows the fifth amendment. That's kind of what he's been taught.
John Green 31:30
Yeah. Well, the last thing I want to talk about, Rosianna, before we head over back to the Discord to continue the conversation there. You can go to lifeslibrarybookclub.com to join the Discord. I know Discord can be a little intimidating at first. There's a lot of things happening on the left side of the screen. Uh, the screen is black in default, which is a little intimidating, I think, just inherently. But it is a really lovely community that the folks who are running the Life's Library Discord have built, and I think if you hang around for a bit, I know that like initially I felt like, oh this is not a place for middle-aged people. You might feel that way if you're a middle-aged person. It can be intimidating at first but if you hang around for a bit you'll find, I think, that people are incredibly kind and also that, like, it's a social network that -- for lack of a better term -- is working.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 32:21
Yeah. It's the only one. [laughs]
John Green 32:24
It's the only one in my life that's working right now. But admittedly, I can't access the others so I have no idea what's happening on them.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 32:30
One thing with Discord is like, don't feel like you have to catch up with everything. I think that was my problem when I first started using Discord. I always felt like I had to read up and back. Just dive in. Just --
John Green 32:39
Yeah.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 32:41
-- like walking into a room.
John Green 32:42
Yes, like, it's like walking into a room. Do not necessarily say to yourself, I need to find out everything that all these people have said for the last two days.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 32:50
[laughs]
John Green 32:51
Just be like, hey, I'm here. The party has started. How's it going? [laughs] But the last thing I want to say about If You Come Softly, and this is something that we've touched on a few different ways. This book came out in 1998. It is extraordinarily, almost supernaturally contemporary, right? Like the only thing about If You Come Softly that feels like it was not written yesterday, to me, is Brooklyn.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 33:23
[laughs]
John Green 33:23
Like Brooklyn has changed a lot in the last twenty years. But other than that, the book just feels extraordinarily of this moment, but also of every moment. And that is a really special and rare thing. When I was reading the book, I just felt extraordinarily lucky. I felt like I was getting to -- when I was rereading it -- I felt like I was getting to reread a true classic that is not yet recognized as a true classic. And that's a crazy feeling. I've only had it a few times in my life, and I just feel like it's an extraordinarily contemporary and eternal novel.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 34:09
Yeah, very excited that it's getting a lot of new readers and even more excited that I can be one of them.
John Green 34:16
Yeah. Well, I'm glad that you got to read a Jacqueline Woodson book and now you're gonna have to read a bunch of them.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 34:21
Yeah. [laughs]
John Green 34:22
Well, I in turn have not read any of the work by our next book club selection. Other than the "book club selection" I don't think we can announce that yet so, I will be in your shoes very shortly.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 34:35
Yeah, I'm excited. It's gonna be a really fun year, I think.
John Green 34:40
Yeah, we're so excited about Life's Library, and thank you again for being part of this with us. You can go to lifeslibrarybookclub.com to sign up. So thanks again for being part of Life's Library with us. We'll see you in the Discord.
Rosianna Halse Rojas 34:51
See you then!