Five Feet Apart Study Guide

Rachel Lippincott is from Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Lippincott attended the University of Pittsburgh where she initially studied pre-med. She took a course called Writing Youth Literature, which sparked her love for the young adult genre and inspired her to change her major to creative writing. Shortly after graduating, Lippincott’s mentor and former professor (novelist Siobhan Vivian) invited her to apply to write the novel adaptation of the screenplay “Five Feet Apart” (which Lippincott wrote with Mikki Daughtry and Tobias Iaconis). Lippincott was successful, and Five Feet Apart became a #1 New York Times bestseller. Lippincott went on to collaborate again with one of the screenwriters of “Five Feet Apart,” Mikki Daughtry, with whom she cowrote the Young Adult novel All This Time. Lippincott then cowrote another novel, She Gets the Girl, with her wife Alyson Derrick, before debuting her first solo novel The Lucky List in 2021.

The main conflicts in Five Feet Apart relate to the incurable genetic disease cystic fibrosis, which affects about 100,000 people worldwide. It’s a genetic disease that causes mucus to build up in organs, particularly the lungs, making it difficult to breathe. Stella’s character is loosely based on the successful YouTuber Claire Wineland, who vlogged about her experiences with cystic fibrosis. Through her videos, Wineland advocated for the humanization and normalization of people with terminal illnesses, and she shared information and wisdom about her disease. Wineland and her family created an organization—Claire’s Place Foundation—which supports young people with cystic fibrosis. Wineland was intimately involved in the creation of Five Feet Apart as a consultant so that the creators could depict life with cystic fibrosis as accurately as possible. Wineland passed away at the age of 21 from complications following a lung transplant in 2018 before Five Feet Apart was released. The film and novel are dedicated to her.

Five Feet Apart is often compared to John Green’s novel The Fault in Our Stars, which is a similarly tragic story of a romance between two terminally ill teenagers. In the same vein, Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell is another modern young adult classic which is thematically and stylistically similar to Five Feet Apart in that it features a dual point of view between two teenagers who fall in love despite great barriers and differences. After writing Five Feet Apart, Rachel Lippincott reconvened with screenwriter Mikki Daughtry to collaborate on the novel All This Time, which depicts an adolescent romance complicated by grief and debilitating health problems. Lippincott’s first solo novel, The Lucky List, also shares the themes of grief in adolescence as well as romance and LGBTQ+ issues. Her most recent novel, Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh, again employs a dual point of view to tell a love story complicated by the teenage characters’ exploration of their queer identities.