Mental Beatdown

Me, Earl, and the Dying Girl Being Compared to TFIOS

Let me explain: I don't hate Me and Earl. I absolutely fucking adore this book.

What I hate is that it's being relentlessly compared to The Fault in Our Stars and being labeled as a rip-off. That is so fucking wrong and opposite.

If anything, Me and Earl is the anti-thesis of TFIOS. It tears books like TFIOS apart. TFIOS said that there's something about death that makes it beautiful, and you can learn from it. Me and Earl says that it's random, there's nothing beautiful about it; it only hurts.

The main reason for comparisons is because both books involve someone dying of cancer, and both are seen as love stories. If you read Me and Earl, it's not so much a love story as a forced interaction between two people in bad situations. In TFIOS, Hazel and Augustus stared at each other for seven minutes straight and go out of their way to meet and never act awkward around each other at all and basically act like people in a book.

In Me and Earl, the main guy is forced to contact Rachel (cancer girl) after his mother insists he do so. Rachel doesn't want to speak to him, he doesn't want to speak to her, and it's all very forced and awkward. People labeled TFIOS as hilarious; this book is much, much darker (and, due to that, much funnier). 

TFIOS was about two "damaged" (but really quite perfect and unhindered BY THEIR GIANT FUCKING CANCER THAT WAS SUPPOSEDLY SO BAD) people falling in love in a perfect and unrealistic way. While being insanely fucking pretentious, and yapping on about oblivion and humanity, and basically being John Green's way of saying "LOOK I CAN WRITE PRETTY SENTENCES." I don't hate John Green at all; Paper Towns is fabulous. Because it's about real people (except Margo). 

Me and Earl is about two very awkward, damaged, uncomfortable people forced to be together and withstand a horrible situation. Me and Earl drives home a completely different point than TFIOS; that death doesn't deserve pretty sentences. It deserves harsh, dark, awkward and painful moments between two people who don't really know what to do with themselves. Reading TFIOS is not painful; reading Me and Earl is. It's funny, and it will make you laugh incredibly hard. But it is also incredibly painful. You learn nothing, you gain nothing. You watch two people try their best to withstand an awful situation until it ends. It's the Breaking Bad for teen novels. You won't see one long metaphor in this. No "her eyes shown like a million stars, and she looked as beautiful as the moon." There's masturbation jokes and lesbians and death and a lot of movie references. Because that's how people cope. Jokes and movies and being around people as a form of escape.

I may sound super pretentious when I write this. I probably do. But I swear to God, this novel inspired me more than any other novel I've read since The Catcher in the Rye. It's still beautiful, and moving. But in a way that isn't so forced and fake. 

Me and Earl isn't TFIOS all over again. It's in a caliber of all it's own.