Prose Interview
PERSPECTIVE & GENRE: A CONVERSATION BETWEEN LAUREN C. JOHNSON (The West Façade, SFWP) AND VINCE GRANATA (Everything Is Fine, Atria Books)

What do we gain when we write from the first-person? What can this perspective help us to access regardless of whether we’re writing fiction or memoir?

Those are questions Vince Granata, author of Everything is Fine , and Lauren C. Johnson considered as they wrote their first books. Vince and Lauren met more than ten years ago in the MFA in Creative Writing program at American University. Vince was writing through a family tragedy and sharing the pages of what would eventually become his debut memoir. Meanwhile, Lauren was finding her footing in a story about a sentient statue who didn’t know herself — grappling with who she was versus others’ expectations of her. Their first-person narrators couldn’t be more different from one another, yet Vince and Lauren were collaborators who witnessed early drafts transform into the books they are today.    

Vince and Lauren recently reconnected, before the release of Lauren’s debut novel, The West Façade. For several months, they exchanged questions and answers over email to craft this collaborative interview on finding the right form, knowing when to write from the first-person perspective, and maintaining tethers to beloved people and places through story.

Lauren C. Johnson: We met in Dolen Perkins-Valdez’s fiction writing course over a decade ago. When you first began to write about your family’s story, did you know that Everything Is Fine would take the shape of a memoir? 

Vince Granata: “Memoir” wasn’t initially in my head. I was more familiar, then, with fiction writing, and I figured that starting with a more familiar genre would help ease the challenge of my family’s story. Quite early on — our first workshop, I believe — I submitted a story that fictionalized some aspects of the month after my mom died, specifically my bumbling efforts to “keep it light” while helping my sister move into a new apartment. The story’s final scene features a conversation between my proxy protagonist and his sister, reflecting on their mother and shared grief. This last scene, unlike just about everything else in the piece, hadn’t actually occurred. I invented it for the story, using fiction to revise my past. 

While I understand why the story took this shape — and can offer myself some grace for not having been the same empathic, supportive brother I created in my proxy protagonist — I remember how troubling it was to me, at the time of writing, that I’d used fiction in this way. That story helped convince me that I needed to take a different approach.

Lauren: Did you develop a process for determining when a story wants to take the shape of fiction versus non-fiction?  

Vince: I’m not certain I have something I’d call a “process,” but this example gets at one way I’ve thought about moving between genres.

After I finished Everything Is Fine, I knew I needed a break from nonfiction, so I spent a year working on short stories. This is not to say that I believe fiction is “easier” to write, but I needed to restore my love of writing through a means that didn’t require rigorous interrogation of “I.” Also, I’d recently gotten sober, and while I wanted to write about addiction and recovery, I was living one day at a time and knew I didn’t have the psychic bandwidth to reflect on that experience in total. But I could describe elements of that experience, and if I did this through the prism of fiction, I could write about addiction without the added pressure of “I.” 

Having learned something from my previous experience with autofiction, I didn’t write characters who were thinly disguised versions of me. Rather, the characters I wrote who struggled with addiction had wildly different lives, situations, and personalities. I found that in writing those characters, I developed a great deal of empathy for them, and in empathizing with those characters, it became easier to empathize with myself — with who I had been in my active addiction. 

Which leads me to one of the many things I admire about The West Facade. It was endlessly compelling to read about characters striving to live up to their carved forms and subverting those forms. While I’m sure there are myriad craft challenges in creating characters that are carved in the images of religious icons while also having their own distinct identity, I found myself wondering about the emotional stakes you felt in writing them. 

Lauren: I wanted to write a story that took place on the Notre-Dame Cathedral — not in it but on it — because the first time I saw the cathedral, I thought it looked like a city of statues. To me all statues look a little bit alive and, frankly, kind of frightening. They’re so imposing! So, I wrote into Notre-Dame, initially focusing energy on figuring out how to bring those statues to life and turn the cathedral into the metropolis I saw in photos. In those early drafts, I wasn’t even thinking much about perspective — just setting. While I centered the story around the statue of Sainte Geneviève, I wrote from her limited third person point-of-view.

Originally, I envisioned this story as a romantasy, but once I realized I was writing a book — rather than a short story or novella — the story became more about Geneviève and her journey, including both romances and friendships. To better access her emotional landscape, I changed the perspective to first person. 

That’s something Dolen helped me think through. When I shared early chapter drafts, she advised me to spend more time with what Geneviève wanted. At one point, Dolen even told me she didn’t think I knew Geneviève very well, and she was absolutely right. That was probably indicative of the fact that I had just entered my thirties and was still figuring out who I was or, rather, learning to feel right with myself. 

I think that’s what the emotional stakes are about for me. Geneviève’s story is all about desire and the freedom to feel desire — not just in a romantic sense but in a ravenous-to-experience-all-life-has-to-offer sense. So many of us grow up thinking that the things we want are silly. Initially, Geneviève has a hard time accepting that she actually wants things. Writing from the “I” perspective helped me get closer to those wants.

…while I’ve certainly wanted to believe there’s this thing called “writing craft” that exists separate from our personal, emotional lives, all of my experiences suggest that the opposite is true. 
Vince Granata

Vince: I realize we’re well beyond genre distinctions in terms of craft here, but I think that’s the larger — and sometimes scarier — point. In my experience, toggling between fiction and nonfiction has often had more to do with my psychic or emotional needs than matters of craft. And while I’ve certainly wanted to believe there’s this thing called “writing craft” that exists separate from our personal, emotional lives, all of my experiences suggest that the opposite is true. 

Lauren: Thinking of emotional stakes got me thinking about the way you described your family home in Everything Is Fine. I was so struck by your description and the symbolism of your family piano in an early chapter. The piano is definitely what our professor, Stephanie Grant, would call a “divine detail.” When you were writing your memoir, how did you decide which items and descriptions you would make divine?

Vince: I think I see these details as objects that have a sacred connection to characters. The piano you’ve mentioned has a sacred connection with my mom.

My mom was very much not a musical prodigy — something we share — but in the last years of her life she worked at learning piano and got to the point where she could feel her way through some Chopin nocturnes. There was one in particular that she’d play over and over. I’m realizing I no longer remember which one, but I can still hear it, how it sounded like a lullaby. In the last months of her life, when my brother was isolating in his room battling psychosis, she’d play that song like it might soothe him. Even though she played it so many times, she would always follow the sheet music, which meant that if she glanced at her hands, she’d lose her place, need to repeat notes to relocate the rhythm, but she’d keep trying, trying to make something beautiful while there was so much pain in the house. 

Writing about that piano — still, eleven years later — is one of the best ways I have to remember her. For me, that makes the detail sacred.

One of the most beautiful memoirs I’ve read is Lily Dancyger’s Negative Space. To absurdly summarize, the book is about the writer’s attempt to reconstruct her father’s life years after his tragic death. There’s a line toward the end of the book that I think about often: “I kept my life tethered to him as long as he was the question I was trying to answer.” 

I love tethered — love writing as a means to stay tethered to people who aren’t literally present. And in thinking about divine details, and that piano, and the experience of writing that piano, I can’t help but remember how writing my book felt like a tether connecting me to my mom. What this also meant is that when the writing was finished, I lost that tether.

Lauren: Does talking or writing about your memoir help reestablish that tether for you? Are you able to create new tethers or open new portals with stories and pieces you’ve written since completing Everything is Fine?

Vince: My mom knew I wanted to be a writer, so whenever I have conversations about my writing, I wonder what she would think about the fact that my name is actually on the cover of a book. While this is different from the more intentional reconstructing that writing about her involves, I think we could call it a tether, one that many people probably feel when they experience something that they shared with a loved one who has died.

And I think that’s how, even if I’m not writing about her as often, I can still feel connected to her when I write. So much has changed about me in the years since she died, and sometimes all those changes make her feel distant. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that writing still matters a great deal to me, which is something my mom knew. So, I think just the act of writing, for me, is a way to make her feel close.

What about tethers reconnecting you to a place? While this can mean one thing for nonfiction, I’m thinking of how writers create this connection with places they haven’t literally visited. I know you’ve visited Paris and Notre Dame, but I’m fairly sure you haven’t visited 14th-century Paris! While I’m certain that a tremendous amount of research went into creating that world, how do you go about convincing a reader that you have a real, living connection to this place? 

Lauren: In terms of research, I read a ton of academic books, including Paris in the Middle Ages by Simone Roux, The Gothic Enterprise by Robert A. Scott, The Beguines of Medieval Paris by Tanya Stabler Miller, The Dream of the Moving Statue by Kenneth Gross, and many, many others. The website Medievalists.net became my home base while I was drafting the novel. As the name implies, it’s run by academic medievalists who regularly post articles covering all aspects of medieval life, from the geopolitical to the everyday — food, clothing, entertainment, and contraception! 

But beneath the scaffolding of research that supports Paris in The West Façade, you’ll actually find San Francisco. By that I mean, where research couldn’t capture the full experience of living in Paris during the Bubonic Plague, I wrote into my experience as someone living in San Francisco during the COVID-19 pandemic and, particularly, the early days of shelter-in-place. 

I lived (and still live) in a densely populated apartment building in a densely populated neighborhood in a densely populated city. And I have to admit that as much as I adore Paris, I am truly in love with San Francisco. In 2020, I felt isolated because of safety measures but also intensely connected with neighbors through interdependence and safety. Having The West Façade to work on during the most intense phases of the pandemic provided me with an outlet to process my feelings. 

Vince: I definitely felt some of the tensions of being isolated while longing for community in Geneviève’s experiences and particularly loved how her very specific position in Bubonic Plague-era Paris heightened those experiences. 

One thing I remember about Covid, especially the early days, was feeling compelled to try to write from within that experience — I’m sure many of us felt that way — but, my god, was it difficult. For me at least, trying to write about my experience in terms of “I” felt nearly impossible, and I wasn’t really able to pinpoint why. I’m wondering how it felt to write about your experience during Covid through this novel. While the specifics of Paris during the bubonic plague were not the same as our circumstances during Covid, Geneviève’s experiences absolutely felt emotionally true to what I remember of life during Covid. Are there certain approaches that the setting of this novel allowed? 

I got to play around with the “I” without it being me, and there was something freeing about that.
Lauren C. Johnson

Lauren: Writing into the verisimilitude of medieval Paris offered a kind of mental escape hatch; challenging myself to describe the food, fashion, buildings, and customs from nearly 700 years ago was a welcome distraction. It allowed me to write about life in a city during a pandemic without the immediate pressure of getting every detail right about life in San Francisco in 2020. This kind of displacement — writing about another city experiencing another pandemic — helped me access my own feelings about living through Covid.

Writing from Geneviève’s perspective helped me access what I was experiencing, too. I got to play around with the “I” without it being me, and there was something freeing about that. To be clear, I don’t see Geneviève as a fictionalized version of Lauren the author. It’s more that empathizing with her as a character helped me empathize with myself and others during that time.

Vince: Yes, that idea of getting “to play around with the ‘I’ without it being me” is fascinating and I think crucial to thinking about the experience of writing in different genres. In my own fiction writing, I think I’ve avoided first-person perspective because it feels like I’m falling into similar patterns — at least syntactically — as in my nonfiction, so introducing another level of distance, third person, often feels freeing. 

But the way you’ve described writing Geneviève’s perspective — the closeness of “I” in a fictionalized, fantastical character — does sound freeing. After spending time with her in your novel, I can see how this approach made her more than a vessel for the experience of living through a pandemic; it made her an individual whose anxieties and dreams clash in singular ways with her circumstances. To my mind, regardless of genre, this is what the most effective characters achieve.

Lauren C. Johnson’s novel, The West Façade, was published by SFWP in March 2026. Vince Granata’s memoir, Everything is Fine, was published by Atria Books in February 2022.

Lauren C. Johnson attributes her upbringing in Florida — America’s weirdest state — to her interest in the ecological and surreal. She’s the interviews editor for The Racket Journal and is a co-founder and editor of Club Chicxulub, a speculative fiction journal and reading series that amplifies emerging authors. She also co-hosts Babylon Salon, one of the Bay Area’s longest-running reading series. Her short stories, interviews, and essays have appeared in numerous journals, including The Rumpus and Orion Magazine online. The West Façade is her debut novel.

Vince Granata is a writer from New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of the memoir Everything Is Fine (Atria Books, 2021). His writing has appeared in Rolling Stone, Slate, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, The Massachusetts Review, and LitHub, and has been recognized in Best American Essays 2018 and Best American Essays 2020. He teaches writing at Grand Valley State University.

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