Identity, as the authors say in this article in the San Francisco Chronicle, is one of the main themes of the novel. Levithan’s lowercase Will is struggling to connect with other human beings, which improves once he meets Green’s uppercase Will, who is struggling with his place in his best friend’s life. But no such forces are at work in Will Grayson, Will Grayson. There’s nothing wrong with a flat character the interesting thing about The Coldest Girl in Coldtown’s Tana isn’t that she changes a great deal over the course of the novel, but that the world is throwing all of these awful things at this really engaging character who is determined to survive. Given how necessary representation is, I really respect that Levithan specifically set out to show someone living with all of that, showing the next step instead of the first step.īut what is actually going on with the lowercase Will-realizing that people can help, even if they don’t understand-doesn’t feel like enough. The lowercase Will has already accepted that he’s gay, is moving towards being over that his dad left, and is living with depression. “I wanted my will to be very much in the middle of things, because I don’t feel there are enough books written about teens caught in the middle of things,” he writes. In an interview collected at the end of my edition, David Levithan talks about how he was very deliberate in making the lowercase Will Grayson in medias res.

Through that lens, I’m not entirely sure what to do with Will Grayson, Will Grayson.

I think there are more reasons for reading young adult fiction, but Rutkoski’s point is very true. Reading, as I’ve mentioned to Ana, gives us access to extra lives and lives that we cannot live, and what’s more inaccessible than first experiences? It’s the reason I cherish picking up a story without any spoilers, so my first experience with a text is entirely mine. “ eaders are drawn to stories about first experiences, and YA literature is rich with it,” she says at io9. In August, Marie Rutkoski, the author of next year’s The Winner’s Curse, posited that the reason adults read young adult fiction is that young adult fiction is necessarily fiction of change. Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan

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