It tends to bum me out to watch most journalists interview John Green about Turtles All the Way Down. They almost always steer the conversation back to his OCD, as if that single detail explains the book and the writer. All of Green’s work emphasizes how critical it is to imagine people complexly.

And yet, at the release of the book (and subsequent movie), most journalists flattened the book to one aspect (Aza’s OCD) and found one of Green’s attributes to talk about (Green’s OCD). Of course they did. They probably had too many interviews to conduct, too many articles to write, and too little time to read and watch the work they were interviewing artists about. It’s too convenient and easy to discuss the obvious, clickbaity common thread between the book and its author.

Green is reliably gracious in his responses to these interviewers, but it has to be discouraging to write a novel with so many interwoven themes and interesting characters only to have your work reduced to a singular idea.

Thus, this is my attempt to imagine Green’s work complexly.

Free Will?

In my humble opinion, Turtles isn’t as much a book about OCD as it is a book about free will.

In this line, I see the beautiful simplicity of a very old saying: the kind of advice you’d get from a wizened grandparent. In one simple line, Green calls attention to a recurring question in the book: when do we actually have a say in the course of our lives?

Every character in the book seems to be desperate to come to terms with their agency rather than their fate. Take this iconic text from Davis to Aza:

Davis insists on defying inevitability: he acts so he will not be acted upon. His gestures – grand plans, provocation, and theatrical risk – are often reactive attempts to seize control after experiencing disruption. Those strategies read as effortful, sometimes clumsy bids for authorship rather than simple exercises in dominance.

Green refuses the easy plot in which such behavior becomes proof of villainy. Instead he renders Davis’s struggle with sympathy and specificity, showing how the same moves that can alienate others are also intelligible responses to fear and dislocation. Davis regains control in his life without putting other people down: he reliably helps Aza feel loved and valued. The novel privileges explanation over excuse: we see the stakes behind the posturing without letting the posture off the hook.

Crucially, Green locates durable agency not in dramatic repudiations but in incremental practices: telling the truth, tolerating feedback, keeping promises, learning new habits, and accepting responsibility even when outcomes are uncertain. These small, repeated acts reconfigure relationships and options over time, turning spectacle into steady work. Read this way, Davis’s defiance looks less like a final stance than a first imperfect step toward actually being free of him.

And it pays off:

But the novel also refuses tidy consolation. Green is careful to show that practicing agency does not guarantee transformation or stability; setbacks recur, rhythms reassert themselves, and uncertainty remains. That honesty matters because it keeps the book from becoming a self-help manual and instead locates freedom inside stubbornly ordinary life.

The Impossibility of Identity

Aza’s struggle with identity is less a search for a single, stable self than a navigation among competing parts. Her OCD literalizes plural personhood: a demonified voice, several names, and even the bacteria that make up her body all stake claims on who she is. Those claims produce anxiety because they blur the boundary between “me” and “not me,” and because some of those “not me"s (bacteria, trauma, etc.) can be changed or acquired by contact.

Extending far beyond her OCD, Aza’s multiplicity shows up in small, everyday details: the different names she answers to, the fanfiction version of herself she despises, the intrusive voice that insists on certain rituals. The novel makes those fragments vivid without reducing them to metaphor: the demon is part of Aza’s mind, and the microbiome becomes a literal challenge to singular identity when a kiss can alter who she is from the inside out.

Calling Aza “a demon” captures a felt truth but not the whole truth. This line seems to be carefully crafted and placed: as a reader, it is nearly impossible to agree with Aza. At this point, we have met a character who contains multitudes. She is kind, but she can sometimes be blind to others’ needs. She is intelligent, but she sometimes does foolish things. She is fighting to survive, but she doesn’t seem to believe in her ability to do so.

Aza’s resignation is a brutal collapse of distance between self and symptom. Where earlier language treats intrusive thoughts as an external enemy to be fought, this line refuses that comfort: the enemy isn’t an intruder to be expelled but a feature of the narrator’s interior life. The horror of the line comes from its intimacy; self-loathing is not a reaction to a problem but the felt substance of identity.

Reading it alongside the book’s microbiome imagery sharpens the existential sting: if microbes can alter who you are from within, then moral judgment and bodily contingency become dangerously entangled.

Narratively, the confession invites empathy rather than spectacle. Green gives the reader access to the voice that condemns itself, which is different from explaining behavior from the outside. The line resists easy redemption; it honors the experience of being unbearably small and culpable inside one’s own head, while also refusing to reduce Aza to a single trait.

In this moment, Aza is telling herself a simple story: she is a demon. That story is an attempt to name a pain so large it feels total, but naming is not the same as knowing. Humans are tangled assemblages of habit, history, biology, longing, and circumstance; any single label – demon, victim, hero – flattens that complexity and therefore misrepresents the person it intends to explain.

Green persistently resists those flattening moves. He renders Aza’s shame, her rituals, her tenderness, and her moments of grace all at once, so that identity appears less as a fixed verdict and more as an ongoing, contested practice. The book asks readers to hold contradictions: to see harm and care, compulsion and agency, despair and small recoveries as simultaneous facts of a life.

Recognizing complexity neither negates suffering nor offers cheap absolution; it widens the frame so the response can be humane instead of just tidy. No simple story is a true story, and Green’s narrative ethics is to keep the story plural enough to do justice to the person inside it.

We’re Here Because We’re Here

In the film adaptation, Aza’s mom sings “We’re here because we’re here,” a quiet anchor: instead of declaiming meaning, the refrain insists on presence. That insistence reframes intention away from dramatic control and toward the simpler, braver fact of continuing to show up.

Thematically this echoes the book’s argument about agency. Green privileges small, repeated practices over theatrical ruptures; the song compresses that idea into a single, communal statement – survival as steady attendance rather than a decisive victory. It makes endurance feel like a deliberate, shared act rather than only something that happens to you.

For Aza and the book’s preoccupation with plural selves, the song functions as a social tether. Hearing others claim “we’re here” softens the pressure for a single, coherent identity and offers a counterpoint to the isolating voice of intrusion. The music turns solitude into a rhythm you can join, making presence a form of reassurance against internal fragmentation.

In The Anthropocene Reviewed, Green reviews “Auld Lang Syne”, sharing this review on vlogbrothers: We’re Here Because We’re Here. The song gives weight to small moments of care. It mirrors Green’s refusal of easy consolation – its insistence on being present is both gentle and uncompromising, a communal practice that holds the novel’s themes of agency, identity, and persistent, everyday survival.