Yes, I read, "The Fault In Our Stars" and saw the film version. Yes, I remain male. Yes, I am expecting you to judge me, right now.

In the interest of transparency and keeping my strong journalistic backbone in tact, I will admit that I did enjoy the book and that I was moved by the story, but slow down – not to tears. And, I'd like to make one thing absolutely clear – Augustus Waters kind of sucks. He is selfish. He showboats. He cares about himself, above all else. The coolest thing about the guy is that he wears a Rik Smits jersey for part of the novel, and that Smits nickname in the NBA was “The Dunkin’ Dutchman,” which is close enough to The Flying Dutchman to seem cool to me.

Waters makes several grand gestures throughout the novel to display his affection for his girlfriend, Hazel Lancaster. He starts out hot from the very beginning of their tangled, star-crossed teen love by relentlessly staring and smiling at Hazel until she smiles back at him—something I did not realize girls found irresistibly romantic until I read the book. Waters later makes Hazel read his favorite book, which also happens to be a textual adaptation of his favorite video game about defeating a zombie apocalypse. It seems that if there is anything that lights the romantic candle of teenage female desire, it is definitely PS3 conquests transcribed on paper.

Waters refuses to call his girlfriend anything other than by her first and middle names, Hazel Grace, despite the fact that she politely asks him, multiple times, to call her only by her first name. I also did not realize – until I read the novel – that women love it when you ignore their polite requests and, instead, do whatever you want.                    

Worst of all, Waters appears to take a sickening amount of pride in each of these gestures, like he has just swept Hazel off of her feet and solidified his place as best boyfriend in the history of the world by doing things that only he has a real interest in. He seems to do everything for the sake of the gesture, not for the sake of her happiness. I could be an idiot, but that seems a little selfish to me.      

It would be impossible, however, not to appreciate the grandest Waters gesture of them all—the trip to Amsterdam. Taking his girlfriend to Europe for several weeks, as his dying wish, is actually pretty top-notch romance stuff. I’m sure Billy Shakespeare would not mind seeing his star-crossed lovers theme played out in this way.          

Obviously, the kids-who-fall-in-love narrative does not appeal much to me. However, "The Fault In Our Stars" is terrifically moving in its depiction of the love between parents and children, and in its commentary on what it is like to die – in general and, specifically, from cancer. By far, the most moving love story of the novel exists between Hazel and her parents. The Lancasters relentlessly love their dying child. The whole world expects that to be the case. Yet, somehow, it is incredibly moving to see it played out in the novel on a day-by-day basis over time. The ups, downs, triumphs and close encounters with death as Hazel's parents care for her with a sense of hope and unconditional love is as powerful as it gets. It is not the growing bond between child and child, but the omnipresent bond between parent and child that drives the plot of the novel.                

Throughout "The Fault In Our Stars," Hazel repeatedly unleashes quips about the process and side-effects of dying. It is uncomfortable, sad and difficult to read. No one wants to think about children dying. Hazel lives that thought every day. The reason the text is both so difficult to read, and so valuable, is that Hazel – through all of her romance and exploration of what it really means to be in love – never loses touch with her reality. She is falling head-over-heels in love while also acknowledging that she very sick and that will eventually die. The great beauty of the text is not that the love story exists, it's that the love story unfolds while Hazel and Augustus are slowly overcome by the disease that ties them together.    

Cancer, explained biologically, is a rapid and uncontrollable reproduction of cells. The body makes so many cells, so quickly that a sort of overload takes place, and that overload shuts down the body. It is a crazed whirlwind inside the body. Cancer is chaos. The novel intentionally reflects the way cancer operates. Augustus swiftly enters Hazel’s world, twists and turns her life around with grand gestures, creates a powerful and uncontrollable emotional chaos that sweeps everyone off of their feet and then he dies. Every part of their relationship happens at hyper-speed, similar to the way cancer cells reproduce. Perhaps, the greatest value of the Augustus-Hazel narrative is not in its illustration of the teenage love story, but in its illustration of what it is like to die from cancer, but live on relentlessly.

"The Fault In Our Stars" is an extended, drawn-out and wonderful metaphor. You put the cancer in your love story, but you do not give it the power to kill you.