It is the sanity of life that makes us mad. – Gabrielle Aplin
CHAPTER ONE
Every story has a beginning and Augustus Waters, when enquired to recall the most significant events of his life did not state his birth or his first shoddily spoken words or his discovery of awareness or anything immense and extensive and astonishing. He would say a lone name, 'Hazel Grace Lancaster.'
Those words themselves were tales of their own. Where they came from, their reasoning behind this creature, this girl. Crucially, why they meant so much to the boy because after all, this is his story.
To begin with, Hazel. An inbetween colour for an inbetween girl. She was neither dead nor alive, breathing nor drowning, loved or loving. No, she was everything stuck in the middle. She was stuck between living with cancer and dying from it.
Grace suggests that one might move with elegance or acts with refinement or speaks with charm but from my reunions with the girl she is none of those things. She was fowl-mouthed, rude and heated but she had her reasons. And I regret to say I was one of them. Her animosity towards me urbanized far too delayed to see how I was idolized for my writing.
Conceivably this is me, trying to make amends for what I have done in the past by creating a legacy for Augustus Waters to be remembered for. There may be no victors in disease but opportunely there is reminiscence. And as we pursue oblivion into the darkness we rest assure that he will not be forgotten that easily. This is the story of Augustus, let it commence with Hazel Grace Lancaster and that faithful Wednesday in the literal heart of Jesus.