She had seen a lot in a short amount of time. 'John knew, intimately and deeply, what Esther had gone through. Suddenly the narrator, Hazel Lancaster, came into being – though not an embodiment of Esther – and there was a story to write. When she died at the age of 16, Green was so angry and frustrated that he poured his feelings into the book. The Fault in Our Stars is dedicated to her. The point at which the approach to the story finally solidified was a friendship that Green shared with a young girl called Esther Earl, who was had thyroid cancer. 'The drive to talk about these young people's issues, what that experience was for them, had been with him from the moment we started working together,' explains Strauss-Gable. Green found the work too difficult, but it began a 12 year-long path to find a way to tell a story about these teenagers who live, love and laugh just like any other teenagers. The other experience that triggered the book was working as a student chaplain in a hospital, with terminally ill children and teenagers. Strauss-Gabel credits this for the reason he writes about unconditional love in the way that he does. While he was writing The Fault in Our Stars, John Green became a father for the first time. They're very aware of how much time they have left, in a much more tangible way than other people are.' The difference between Hazel and Gus, and everyone else, is that they are very much aware that they're going to die and we're not. 'We never really thought of it as a book about illness. Screenwriter Scott Neustadter says that it is this that he and his writing partner, Michael H Weber, focused on. And thus begins a love story that is dazzling in its innocence and authenticity the perfect capturing of first love. At this support group, Hazel lays eyes on a boy with foppish hair and movie-star looks - Augustus Waters (Ansel Elgort) – who is in remission from bone cancer. The person whose eyes we are seeing this through is 16-year-old Hazel Grace Lancaster (played by Shailene Woodley), our heroine, who has stage 4 thyroid cancer, and is only alive because of a new drug that should have stopped working on her by now. The story starts in a cancer support group for children, each person getting up to introduce themselves and their illness, and stage of illness. Not glossing over things is an understatement.

The fault in our stars movie making out