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  • Good morning, Hank.

  • It's Tuesday.

  • I spent the weekend with Charlie and Christine or Miles and Alaska and Sarah, their director.

  • The eight episode, who adaptation of my first novel, Looking for Alaska, is supposed to begin shooting soon, and I wanted to show them around my old haunts.

  • The trip was supposed to be for them so they could see the place I based Culver Creek on, but I realize now that it was mostly for me.

  • We walked around the campus of Mild High School, which looks vastly different from when I was a student there, but still somehow retains its spirit.

  • We visited the gym, including our academic decathlon banners, toured the school's incredible art studios and talk to some students.

  • And then, after a while, Charlie and Christine wandered off to look at the campus while I chatted with a couple of my old classmates.

  • When you write a book, you have to let it go.

  • At some point, you stop fiddling with the text and the story is set in print, and then it isn't yours anymore.

  • Not really.

  • It belongs to the people who read it, which is a wonderful and painful surrender.

  • But looking for Alaska was always different for me, partly because the book is about a kid from Florida who goes to a boarding school in Alabama.

  • And I was a kid from Florida who went to a boarding school in Alabama, the story's fictional.

  • But I was only 23 when I started writing it, and, of course, I saw myself in Miles and in the other characters to Alaska's self destructive impulses were mine.

  • The colonel's fits of rage were mine, and since the story was published, I've often worried that I left too much exposed.

  • The truth is, I wrote the book because I wanted to go home, by which I mean the fall of 1993 smoking cigarettes under this bridge with people I loved, who loved me.

  • I'd never loved peers like that before, ferociously without any self consciousness or fear.

  • That couldn't last, of course.

  • And it didn't, as the graffitied Walt Whitman quote puts it so succinctly.

  • These are the days that must happen to you, and after you can go back to the smoking hole and it's beautiful graffiti, but you can't be home again.

  • And so I wrote the book to attempt time travel.

  • What if I could go into the past, imagine things differently, make different choices?

  • Maybe through fiction, I would be allowed back into the home from which time and loss had expelled me.

  • But even after years of working on the book, I still had no answer for why the center cannot hold.

  • What I learned along the way is that novels do not solve problems or heal wounds or whatever.

  • When a story works, it's because the story, as Emily Dickinson put it, tells all the truth but tells it slant because I've failed so spectacularly at letting go of this book.

  • I've often felt like I was carrying Miles and Alaska around with me these last 15 years, which has been lovely at times and at other times very difficult.

  • But as I watched Christine and Charlie walking away from me that afternoon, I felt that Miles in Alaska we're also walking away off to explore Kovar Creek together, and I felt myself letting go At last.

  • Charlie and Christine are both so passionate and generous and kind, and in many ways they know Alaska and miles better than I do with Sarah and the rest of the people working on the show.

  • They're building home together, and I don't feel envious or possessive.

  • I just feel grateful.

  • There go miles in Alaska off to experience the adventures I imagined for them, yes, but also many more adventures.

  • It's their story now, and I can't wait to see how they tell it.

  • Hank, I'll see you on Friday.

Good morning, Hank.

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