INSTEAD OF producing another devastatingly quirky novel along the lines of Looking for Alaska, Paper Towns, or his breakout The Fault in Our Stars (which has sold some 30 million copies, making it one of the 21st century’s most popular books), he has released a nonfiction volume under the auspices of Crash Course Books, his new imprint from Penguin Young Readers.
Published last month, Everything Is Tuberculosis tracks the medical, political, and cultural history of a disease that kills around 1.25 million people worldwide every year—although it’s been curable since the 1950s. The book is full of all the requisite facts and figures but also includes something that will be familiar to fans of Green’s previous works: a deeply sensitive, articulate teen protagonist who’s also very sick. In this case, he’s ill from TB.
Also in this case, the protagonist is real. His name is Henry Reider, and he’s the reason Green spent more than half a decade delving ever more deeply into the history of, and the struggle to control, TB.
Green has for years collaborated with his brother, the prolific, Montana-based creator Hank Green, on numerous internet projects, building a YouTube audience of roughly 4 million for the duo’s videos. The brothers use that massive fan base to champion a variety of causes, many associated with global health philanthropy. Which is why in 2019 Green and his wife, art curator and educator Sarah Urist Green, found themselves in the impoverished West African nation of Sierra Leone touring hospitals and maternity clinics financed by the nonprofit Partners In Health, for which he serves as a trustee.
On the last day of the grueling trip, Green, exhausted and feeling ill, was quite ready to go home. But their guide had one last thing to show them—Lakka Government Hospital, Sierra Leone’s only dedicated tuberculosis facility. It was old, underfunded, ramshackle, and absolutely packed with sickly, emaciated men, women, and children in the throes of TB. “I was just shocked,” Green recalls. “I was shocked by the prevalence of the disease and by how sick the patients were.”
One of them, a diminutive boy named Henry Reider, who shared his first name with Green’s son, took it upon himself to give the author a tour of the place. Reider’s sister had already died of tuberculosis, and his mother was ill with the disease. Green initially thought Reider was perhaps only 9 years old before discovering he was actually 16. Years of sickness severely stunted his growth. “I was extraordinarily moved by meeting Henry,” Green recalls. “And I’m still moved by his family’s story, what they’ve been through, and how they’ve stuck together through it.”
Green was so deeply affected that he embarked on years of intensive TB research—so intense that his wife accidently supplied the book’s title when she remarked that he seemed to think that “everything is tuberculosis.” The resulting book is not a 600-page doorstop but a slim, easy-to-tackle 200-pager that weaves Reider’s ordeal into the larger story of why a disease that’s totally curable nevertheless took his sister (along with millions of others) and has haunted him for most of his life.
The reason, Green says, is because TB prospers in tight, airless spaces such as tenements and factories, and the medications that treat it most effectively can be expensive. Or rather, expensive in a place like Sierra Leone, one of the poorest countries in the world. A disease that is a barely remembered curiosity in the West still rampages through parts of Asia, Eastern Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa. It would take a great deal of work and cash to stamp it out worldwide, but Green believes human perception stymies such efforts. Put simply, while the raw statistics of TB’s toll are widely known, they don’t make much of an impression on people who haven’t experienced the havoc it causes on a personal level. People who, in other words, haven’t met Henry Reider.
Green hopes the boy’s presence in Everything Is Tuberculosis will forge that missing emotional connection. “I wanted to focus on one person’s story because, in the end, we’re not moved by statistics but by human stories,” Green says. “I don’t find tuberculosis compelling because it’s the world’s deadliest infectious disease. I care about it because I watched someone I care about go through hell in order to get access to what you or I would be able to access with no problem.”
The drugs needed to defeat TB are readily available in rich nations, and many of the things that can exacerbate it, such as malnutrition and extreme stress, aren’t big deals here either. “I try to grapple with that because I don’t know how to conceive of 1.25 million people dying every year of a curable illness,” Green says. “I just don’t know what that looks like. I’ve seen 400,000 people together at the Indianapolis 500, but I don’t know who their parents are, who would grieve for them when they’re gone, and I certainly don’t know how to expand that crowd times three and imagine all of them dying annually from a disease we can cure.”
Given the sorts of issues Green wrestles with, it’s no wonder the Indianapolis native, who lives on the north side with his wife and their two kids, Henry, 15, and Alice, 12, sometimes struggles to get out of bed in the morning. Like, really struggles. “I’m a bit of a depressive personality type,” he says. “Many days I don’t want to get out of bed, but coffee helps.”
On a typical day, Green drops his kids off at school, then spends the morning in his basement office, writing. He’d like to do a novel next, though he hasn’t yet nailed down exactly what the story might be. He also thinks he won’t write about illness in a nonfiction capacity for the rest of his life.
In the afternoon, he switches to what he calls his “day job”—answering emails and conducting lots and lots of remote meetings concerning the many projects of which he’s a part, including the Good Store, a collaboration with his brother that currently sells coffee, soap, socks, and merch, with 100 percent of the profits going to charity. “If you told me 10 years ago that I would be doing a lot of meetings, I would have been astonished,” Green says. “As for writing, I like thinking of it as something I do for fun, even though it’s actually the only source of income I have.”
He typically clocks out sometime between 5 and 6 p.m. to spend time with his family. In the summer, he also gardens with his mother, who lives next door. The two of them plant and tend pepper plants, then can hot sauce in the fall. When he wants someone else to do the cooking, some of his favorite restaurants include Speedway cafe and gourmet market Borage; Jonathan Brooks’ award-winning Beholder; and the Latin cuisine at SoBro mainstay Delicia. His non-gustatory pursuits include bowling and playing old-school pinball. “But in general, what I most want to do is be with my family and close friends,” Green says. “I enjoy an evening out with my buddies.”
In fact, that’s one of the reasons he’s still in Indianapolis. Like most people his age, he finds it incredibly hard to make new friends. But he’s already got plenty of friends in Indy, most of whom knew him “back in the day,” before he became a celebrity. Indeed, it’s one of the strongest reasons why a man who could live just about anywhere chooses to stay here. “Making friends in adulthood is hard,” Green says. “I always tell my kids, ‘I know it’s hard when you’re kids too, but hold onto those friendships if you can, because there’s nothing like a friend you’ve had for 30 or 40 years.’”
He’s also a longtime fan (and, with his wife, a sponsor) of an English soccer team named AFC Wimbledon. Not because the team is particularly good but because he is enamored of the club’s unusual, fan-owned business model. “We all own the club together, and even those of us who put in more money still only get one vote in its leadership,” Green says.
Green hears a lot of bad news during his teleconferences and in-person meetings with representatives from various health organizations. Especially these days, with a self-described enemy of conventional medicine leading our nation’s top health agency and research and science-focused initiatives under siege from “cost cutters” in the Trump administration. For instance, The United States President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has been credited with saving some 26 million lives since its establishment during the second Bush administration by providing treatments for patients and therapies to prevent babies of infected mothers from getting the disease. But now that money has abruptly vanished. “It’s heartbreaking and devastating,” Green says. “I get regular briefings on global health issues and recently had one where someone burst into tears.”
It’s easy to be sad and overwhelmed by it. Or in the case of Green, who makes no secret of his struggles with depression, anxiety, and obsessive compulsive disorder, to become so devastated that he retreats to his bed, especially these days, when so many of the causes he champions—even his belief in being good to others being key to living a good life—seem under siege.
Yet he perseveres. “This is a huge step backward for us as a species, but it’s not the end,” Green says. “At least, I don’t think it’s the end. I’m extremely optimistic on that front. After all, we’re not the first generation to believe we were near the end, and every one of those others has been wrong.”
He’s also optimistic about his decision to stay in Indianapolis. Sure, the city could use more ambitious public art projects and better public transportation, but it’s obvious (at least to Green) that over the last few decades, things have vastly improved. There have been ups and downs, but the general trend has been positive. Why shouldn’t future years see a similar pattern? He’d certainly like to use the city as a setting in future writing projects. “I love writing about Indianapolis,” Green says. “I feel like it’s a fascinating place to write about, and there’s lots of cool stuff happening here. The thing I’m writing now isn’t set in Indianapolis, and I miss it.”
Green’s fondness for his hometown seems undiminished even though everyone from business contacts to reporters solemnly ask him why he stays here. His response, that he just “f—king loves it,” is a measure of his enthusiasm. “It’s an awesome place to live. You get four seasons. You have the White River,” Green says. “I think people who live in Indianapolis wildly underrate it.”
