With david levithan dutton books

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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CHAPTER FOUR 
I
went to bed a little early that night, changing into boy boxers and a T-shirt before crawling 
under the covers of my bed, which was queen size and pillow topped and one of my favorite 
places in the world. And then I started reading 
An Imperial Affliction
for the millionth time. 
AIA
is about this girl named Anna (who narrates the story) and her one-eyed mom, who is 
a professional gardener obsessed with tulips, and they have a normal lower-middle- class life 
in a little central California town until Anna gets this rare blood cancer. 
But it’s not a
cancer book
, because cancer books suck. Like, in cancer books, the cancer 
person starts a charity that raises money to fight cancer, right? And this commitment to charity 
reminds the cancer person of the essential goodness of humanity and makes him/her feel loved 
and encouraged because s/he will leave a cancer-curing legacy. But in 
AIA
, Anna decides that 
being a person with cancer who starts a cancer charity is a bit narcissistic, so she starts a 
charity called The Anna Foundation for People with Cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera. 
Also, Anna is honest about all of it in a way no one else really is: Throughout the book, 
she refers to herself as 
the side effect
, which is just totally correct. Cancer kids are essentially 
side effects of the relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible. So as the 
story goes on, she gets sicker, the treatments and disease racing to kill her, and her mom falls 
in love with this Dutch tulip trader Anna calls the Dutch Tulip Man. The Dutch Tulip Man has 
lots of money and very eccentric ideas about how to treat cancer, but Anna thinks this guy 
might be a con man and possibly not even Dutch, and then just as the possibly Dutch guy and 
her mom are about to get married and Anna is about to start this crazy new treatment regimen 
involving wheatgrass and low doses of arsenic, the book ends right in the middle of a 
I know it’s a very
literary
decision and everything and probably part of the reason I love 
the book so much, but there is something to recommend a story that 
ends
. And if it can’t end,
then it should at least continue into perpetuity like the adventures of Staff Sergeant Max 
Mayhem’s platoon.
I understood the story ended because Anna died or got too sick to write and this 
midsentence thing was supposed to reflect how life really ends and whatever, but there were 
characters other than Anna in the story, and it seemed unfair that I would never find out what 
happened to them. I’d written, care of his publisher, a dozen lette
rs to Peter Van Houten, each 
asking for some answers about what happens after the end of the story: whether the Dutch 
Tulip Man is a con man, whether Anna’s mother ends up married to him, what happens to
Anna’s stupid hamster (which her mom hates), whether
Anna’s friends graduate from high
school
—all that stuff. But he’d never responded to any of my letters.
AIA
was the only book Peter Van Houten had written, and all anyone seemed to know 
about him was that after the book came out he moved from the United States to the 
Netherlands and became kind of reclusive. I imagined that he was working on a sequel set in 
the Netherlands
—maybe Anna’s mom and the Dutch Tulip Man end up moving there and

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trying to start a new life. But it had been ten years since