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Esther Earl, inspiration for John Green's 'Fault in Our Stars,' will have her writing released

Stories, letters, and other material written by Earl, who died in 2010, will be released in 2014 in a collection titled 'This Star Won't Go Out: The Life and Words of Esther Grace Earl.'

Esther Earl's collection will be titled 'This Star Won't Go Out.'
  • By Molly Driscoll Staff Writer

The writings of Esther Earl, a teenage girl who died in 2010 after being diagnosed with thyroid cancer and to whom John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars” is dedicated, are being published.

A collection titled “This Star Won't Go Out: The Life and Words of Esther Grace Earl” will be released by Dutton on Jan. 28, 2014 and Green will write a foreword for the book.

“She would have loved to be an author,” Earl’s mother, Lori Earl, told USA Today.

Earl’s father, Wayne, said he was going to self-publish his daughter’s material until Green saw it. The author gave the stories, letters, and other writings to his editor.

Earl, who died when she was 16, became well-known on the Internet for her YouTube videos. Green said that he tried to write a novel about young adults who were diagnosed with cancer before meeting Earl but that the work always came out too negatively. Getting to know Earl made him see that “kids with stage 4 cancer can be just as funny, and as normal and as afraid as any other kid,” the author told USA Today.

However, Green has made it clear that his protagonist, Hazel, is very different from Earl.

“I don’t want people conflating Esther with Hazel (they’re very different),” he wrote on his Tumblr page. “And it’s extremely important to me that I not claim to be telling Esther’s story.”

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