Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is a fantastic book. It’s a book about friendship, navigating the world of high school and yeah, it’s about cancer and loss. Now I just said that it was a fantastic book, I think for the first time in my adult life I’m going to utter the phrase, “I think that the movie may be better”.
Greg has some interesting ideas on how to get through high school. It mostly includes talking to everyone but not becoming friends with anyone. He has a friend named Earl, who isn’t really that deep of a friend because they never talk about anything except surface things, movies and making movies. And it’s not that they don’t have things that they could talk about. Earl’s mother is an alcoholic, his step father is in prison and his brothers are drug dealers. Greg ,however, is your average middle class kid who really hasn’t had any problems to deal with in his life and Greg prefers to play it safe and not reach out or let anyone in. Greg and Earl bond over making films and while Greg rips their abilities as film makers to shreds, they are encouraged to keep making them over the years and the view them in secret. The two boys focus on making these films (it seems) for different reasons. For Earl, he gets to surround himself with the stability of Greg’s family, as for Greg, he doesn’t have to open up to anyone, the parameters of their friendship is rigidly defined. That is, until Greg’s mother asks him to hang out with Rachel, a girl he was mildly friendly with when he was younger at Hebrew school. Rachel has been recently been diagnosed with leukemia and Greg’s mom thinks it’s the right thing to do.
At first, things are a little strained. Rachel resents that he’s going to be “her friend” now that she has leukemia and he feels weird being there, but slowly an actual friendship arises. As Rachel becomes more ill, Earl shares their secret movies with her and she loves them. They decide to make a movie for Rachel, but this is an abject failure in at least four different formats (including sock puppets, stop motion animation and Ken Burns’ documentary story etc.).
There are lots of comparisons between the Fault in Our Stars and this book. I guess the obvious comparison is that there are characters with cancer and both books are adamant that they are not “kids with cancer books”. I found this book to be better than the Fault in Our Stars, because this book really wasn’t about cancer. This is a book about about Greg, and Greg learning what it means to be a friend and what it means to live life fully. He finally realizes (with some fighting words from Earl) that he’s shutting out the world and that even his best friends aren’t even friends if he doesn’t change his ways. I really enjoyed the book and even though Greg is selfish and too self deprecating, he sounds very much like a teen struggling to find identity and to fly under the social radar. The reason I think it will probably better movie than a book is because Greg and Earl’s movies play such a large role in the book and I’m dying to see them. My very good friend got to see an early screening of the movie and she has confirmed that it’s simply wonderful. So now I wait!
