Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

About Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is Jesse Andrews's debut novel, originally published in 2012 by Harry N. Abrams. It follows Greg Gaines, a high school senior in Pittsburgh who has spent years developing a strategy for surviving school: stay friendly with every social group, join no group, make no strong impressions, keep all relationships at a comfortable remove. His only real friendship is with Earl Jackson, his co-conspirator in making deliberately terrible art-film parodies they never show anyone.

The plan is destroyed when Greg's mother forces him to spend time with Rachel Kushner, a classmate who has just been diagnosed with leukemia. Greg narrates the entire novel from the future, insisting that it is not a love story, that he is not an inspirational character, and that everything turned out badly. He is right on all three counts, more or less. The novel's tension comes from the gap between what Greg claims he feels and what the reader watches him actually feeling.

Earl is the novel's other crucial figure. He is Black and poor and brilliant, from a neighborhood dramatically different from Greg's, and he exists in Greg's narration with a kind of affectionate resentment — Greg understands that he needs Earl, cannot quite articulate how much, and spends the novel hovering on the edge of actually understanding his own life. Their friendship, and the terrible films they make together, is where the book's emotional core sits.

Structure, Voice, and Dark Humor

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is structured as a confessional written by Greg after the events of the novel. He compulsively undercuts his own narration — dismissing his own feelings, warning readers away from fictional sentimentality, mocking the conventions of the very genre he's operating in. This structure is funny, but it's also precise: Greg's compulsive ironic deflection is exactly the kind of self-protection the novel is quietly dismantling.

The book is genuinely funny in a way that many YA novels about illness are not, and that humor is not a defense against its emotional weight but the vehicle through which the emotional weight arrives. Andrews makes readers laugh at Greg repeatedly before asking them to look at what Greg has actually lost, and what he never quite let himself have.

The 2015 film adaptation won the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, bringing significant attention to the novel. The film preserves much of Andrews's voice and structural approach while adapting the story for a medium that cannot maintain ironic narrative distance the same way prose can.

Why Me and Earl and the Dying Girl Has Been Banned

Me and Earl and the Dying Girl has been banned or challenged in 52 school districts across 12 states. The challenges cite the novel's language — which is frank, colloquial, and includes profanity — sexual references in Greg's narration, and in some cases the general subject matter of a teenager dealing with a friend's terminal illness.

Greg's voice is deliberately rough and resistant to uplift, which is what the novel requires. He is not trying to teach anyone anything, and the book is not trying to be a lesson. His language is the language of a real teenager avoiding the feelings he can't bear to have, and the refusal to clean that language up is part of honoring what the novel is about: the specific, un-sanitized texture of adolescent grief.