When a friend or casual observer tosses stuff like this out as a spiritual bromide, I’m offended. He or she is struggling to be faithful when life doesn’t look like the doings of a loving, just God. If the suffering, confused or grieving person says it, I wince inwardly but sympathetically. God must be teaching a lesson or achieving a greater good or have an even better plan for their life. Despite working hard, a person goes broke. Interestingly, I most frequently hear the phrase “everything happens for a reason” when something has gone terribly wrong.

As the philosopher Leibniz put it, this is the best of all possible worlds. So not only is there an explanation for everything, but there is a good cause for everything. God is ultimately the cause of everything. That idea of faith goes something like this. And turning on that notion of God, faith comes down to this: Everything happens for a reason. Of course, for some Christians that “something” is God. Something that ultimately explains everything and needs no further explanation. Right? There has to be something that everything stands on that doesn’t need anything else to stand on. The scientist responds, “And on what does that turtle rest?” “It rests on the back of a giant turtle.” A scientist is giving a lecture about the history of the earth from the Big Bang forward. Her friend Daisy tells Aza that her illness reminds her of a story that her mom likes to tell. Only in her case you can never arrive at that last doll. Larger ones have smaller ones nesting inside them. Instead of a self, she frets that she is like one of those Russian stacking dolls. So much so that she doubts that there is a real her. She cannot tell which of the invasive thoughts is really her. We learn toward the end of the book that the title describes Aza’s experience of her own mental illness. Thoughts, one after another, arguing back and forth, swirl in an increasingly tight spiral that goes down and down into her psyche with no bottom in sight.Īza narrates John Green’s young adult novel Turtles All the Way Down. Her psychiatrist’s term for them is actually “intrusives,” but Ana experiences them as invasive. Germs have insinuated themselves into the dark recesses of her body, lurking deep within her intestinal tract slowly but surely infecting her with c diff (clostridium difficile colitis).Įating a peanut butter sandwich in her high school lunchroom can trigger a vortex of what she calls invasive thoughts.

For her, the world is a teeming mass of predatory germs. Aza wrestles with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Aza turtles all the way down