hazel disgrace

How a Laura Dern movie led to this real-life gay divorce story is almost too wild to believe

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Laura Dern in a scene from the 2014 film The Fault in Our Stars.
credit: 20th Century Fox

A new LGBTQ+ challenger approaches the pantheon of messy ex horror stories. Featuring marriage equality, a web of lies, Laura Dern, and bestselling teen romance author John Green, one woman’s tale of relationship woe has taken BookTok fans by storm.

Green’s hit 2012 novel The Fault in Our Stars celebrated its eleventh anniversary this week, which he commemorated with a cute, irreverent video. User @yayakampen stitched said video with a video of her own, sharing a story which absolutely no one was prepared for.

Like, at all:

@yayakampen #stitch with @literallyjohngreen lol great story tho. really had me believing 💀 #faultinourstars #munchausensyndrome #factitiousdisorder ♬ original sound – Yaya

“Hi John, congrats on 11 years of Fault in Our Stars,” she starts. “Your book actually completely changed my life, twice, and it’s the weirdest way possible. Let me tell you more about it.”

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Kampen goes on to explain that, though the novel was released in 2012, she knew nothing about the story until the movie adaptation came out in 2014 starring Dern, Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort.

“At the time, I was married to someone who was dying of terminal bone cancer,” she explains. “She had only a few months left to live, so it was a very poignant story.”

She and her then-wife had apparently expedited the marriage due to her diagnosis, so the pair hadn’t known each other for long. That point made itself apparent as she watched the film and noticed the plot seemed a bit familiar. Disturbingly familiar.

“As I’m watching the movie, I’m realizing that almost identical to the story plot is my wife’s life,” she recalls.

“I thought, ‘This is just too close,'” she says. “So I went back, read your book, and even the phrases that you used, she would use on the daily.”

“So it was your story that inspired her to fake terminal bone cancer, but it was also your movie from that story that gave me the first alarm bells to prove that she was lying to me about having terminal bone cancer.”

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“I guess, thank you?” she ends, before adding another quick “Congrats!” for the anniversary. Something tells us this isn’t exactly what Green had intended his story be remembered for.

Folks on social media were left with mouths agape from Kampen’s tale. The video, which has almost 2 million views on TikTok, is accompanied by an entirely aghast comment section.

One user played on a quote from the book, commenting, “You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in faking it” with a nice heart emoji.

Meanwhile, the official account for Penguin Books UK simply wrote, “The way I clutched my non-existent pearls”.

The story made its way over to Twitter, where many gasps were gusped:

For a refresher on some of those wild story beats, let’s revisit the extended The Fault In Our Stars trailer:

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