Five Feet Apart

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It is easy to read, laid out in alternating chapters – changing between Stella’s point of view and Will’s. When she’s not writing, she is watching old black and white movies, listening to Doris Day on repeat, or reading ancient Greek plays. All the characters except for Poe (and they kill him off) are: a) very archetypical, and b) completely bidimensional. Let’s get past the fact that Stella and Will fulfill Hollywood tropes (her being the type A personality control freak and him being the CF ~rebel~ who doesn’t take his illness seriously). Because your life is so much more than treatments and hospitals and life expectancies no matter your chronic health condition.

As their friendship deepens into something more intense, they face more obstacles than they can handle. When it comes to Stella however, he stops rebelling, and begins to see that he can live his life and have more of it by keeping up with his treatments. When talking about things that irked me the wrong way, I am in debt with Gunnar Esiason and Elsie Tellier for their analyses on the premise of Five Feet Apart, which have educated me a lot on the matter.

Sometimes I thought the panic must be worse for him than the lack of breath as the panic exacerbated things every time. CF is bad enough on its own; you don’t need to try and manipulate readers into feeling bad for these characters.

They are described as out of breath and coughing but no description of the ick factor that is so common for those with CF. However, I’m also aware that an equally large number of CFers have raised concerns over the romantization of CF and the novel’s central topic. every time it talked about the characters struggling for breath, i inhaled so deeply, marvelling at how well my lungs work.

Not to mention the insta-love between Will and Stella, which was probably the root cause of all the wrong things in this book. And even this is arguable because let’s face it, other than falling in love with each other Stella and Will never did anything that would have threatened their lives. I read TFIOS years ago, and I remember thinking it was ok, I wasn’t blown away, sure it was sad, but I felt it tried too hard to be sad…. the movie: I liked the book ending more, because we got to see an epilogue and I really needed that epilogue after watching the movie! Will and Stella, two people met under different circumstances finds solace in each other, though they know they can't ever be together.