Hazel Grace Lancaster is a teenager living in Indianapolis, who has terminal thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs. Believing she is depressed, her mother Frannie urges her to attend a weekly cancer patient support group to help her make friends with individuals who are going through the same thing. There Hazel meets Augustus "Gus" Waters, a charming teenager who lost a leg to bone cancer but has since apparently been cancer-free. He invites Hazel to his house where they bond over their hobbies and agree to read each other's favorite books. Hazel recommends An Imperial Affliction, a novel about a cancer-stricken girl named Anna that parallels her experience, and Gus gives Hazel Counter Insurgence. They keep in touch via text over the weeks that follow and grow closer. After Gus finishes the book, he expresses frustration with its abrupt ending (it ends in the middle of a sentence). Hazel explains that the novel's mysterious author, Peter Van Houten (Willem Dafoe), retreated to Amsterdam following the novel's publication and has not been heard from since.