Erin Vincent’s Fourteen Ways of Looking is a genre-defying text, one that disrupts readers’ notions of what memoir, fiction, and autobiography might resemble, all while it challenges their tolerance for obsession, repetition, and insistence on an almost mystical importance for the number fourteen. Written in a series of fragments that narrate the sudden, untimely death of her parents, Vincent draws from a broad well of intellectual influence, from the Oulipo school to ultra-contemporary fragmentary writing and memoir, weaving a poignant snapshot of herself at the age of fourteen. I sat down with her to discuss her debt to Georges Perec, Oulipo, and constrained writing, as well as the oft-maligned, misunderstood figure of the fourteen-year-old girl in popular culture.
Can we briefly discuss your background as a writer, what you’ve written in the past, and how you came to writing?
When I left high school, I dreamed of going to university, but I couldn’t because my parents were gone, and I had to work. I knew I wanted to write in some capacity, so I eventually got a job as a cadet journalist and became a fully-fledged journalist a few years later. But sadly, I hated it. The world of a daily newspaper was not for me. The last straw was when I was asked to do what is called a “death knock” where I would have to go and knock on the door of a family whose daughter had just been murdered. I had experienced such a death knock on my own door when I was a teenager, so I refused, and that was the beginning of the end of my journalism career. So, I left and studied design for a while and a couple of years later my now-husband and I decided to move to London to try our luck, but we didn’t get there. We had a stopover in LA for a week and never left! In LA I worked in the fashion industry as a tailor on high end advertising fashion shoots (Versace, Dolce & Gabbana etc.) with famous models and actresses and hated that too (working with celebrities is not fun!) so I applied for a job at my local bookstore and worked as a bookseller for a while which was absolute bliss. Eventually I was promoted to Community Relations Manager, managing the author events, which I absolutely loved, and it was while doing that job that I started playing around with writing again. And that’s when I wrote my first book, Grief Girl.
Oh, and I did finally get to university… in 2020! I studied for a Master of Arts in creative writing (where I began writing Fourteen Ways of Looking) and now I’m working on a PhD.
You have written a book that continually references the number fourteen, as an age, as a date, as a page number, as a chapter, and in so many different, unexpected ways. The common denominator that links otherwise scattered ideas is the number fourteen. Can you walk us through the significance of that number to you, to the narrator, and that you hope it might hold to the reader?
Fourteen has always been a significant number for me, because that’s the age I was when my parents died. In about 2020, I reread a short story by Lorrie Moore, “How to Become a Writer.” In the beginning of the story, she writes, “It is best if you fail at an early age – say, fourteen.” That really resonated with me. Also, around that time, I discovered the Oulipo group and was reading a lot of fragmentary writing. I couldn’t get the Lorrie Moore quote out of my head, so I started writing a little essay with fourteen as the starting off point. After that, I began seeing the number fourteen everywhere – every book I read, every show I watched, in the news… the number fourteen kept appearing. It felt very strange, so I started writing all of these instances down. It’s funny you know, after writing the first book I could not imagine ever wanting to write about my parents’ deaths and my grief again, but the number fourteen kept calling me. I couldn’t stop. I became obsessed. And so, I ended up with these notebooks filled with fourteen facts, and instances of fourteen throughout history. I then started writing memoir fragments about the year my parents died and after a while, I thought, “I should start putting these together. I think there’s something here.” So, I set myself a constraint—every fragment had to have the number fourteen in it. Now, how could I do that without driving the reader crazy? It became like a game. Eventually, I loosened up a bit and decided that the meta-reflections that run through the book did not have to contain the number fourteen, but every other fragment does.
I am hoping the reader sees the connections between the memoir fragments and the fourteen “factual” fragments… The way they speak to each other and inform each other. My first book was written in my fourteen-year-old voice. I immersed myself in the grief with that narcissism of being a teenager. Later on, around the time when I began seeing the number fourteen everywhere, I felt as though the world was starting to come in more, into myself and into my life. This book brings the world in; it’s my fourteen-year-old self and my adult self melding with the world.
So, I set myself a constraint—every fragment had to have the number fourteen in it. Now, how could I do that without driving the reader crazy? It became like a game.
Did you worry at all about the possibility of alienating your reader with the obsession, repetition, insistence on the number fourteen?
Yes, that was one of my biggest concerns. Originally, every fragment began, “At fourteen.” It became relentless, and I thought, this is incredibly annoying. So, the difficulty with this book was how to write it and not alienate the reader. I don’t know if I’ve achieved that. Readers will have to tell me. It was a huge challenge. How do I have the number fourteen in every fragment without it being so repetitive that it’s highly frustrating for the reader? And I remember thinking, I love Joe Brainard’s I Remember, and I don’t find his repetition of starting every sentence with “I remember” frustrating or annoying at all. But I couldn’t achieve that with “At fourteen, At fourteen,” so I had to find another way. I had to mix it up a bit. I’m hoping the reader will become immersed in the story I’m telling and occasionally stop noticing that the number fourteen is in almost every fragment.
The form of the book is fragmented, split into loosely linked remarks or short vignettes that are then further split into separate sections offset by backslashes. The form of the text moves us to question the genre: is this a poem or is it prose? Is it memoir? Autobiography? Do these categories hold any value or are they concepts that you seek to challenge, disrupt?
I suppose I am seeking to disrupt those categories, because I don’t know what this book is. When people call it a memoir, I think, “Yes, it is, but it’s not only a memoir.” I’m trying to play with form. I once tried to describe it to someone as a bit of poetic prose, a bit of memoir, a bit of history, a bit of biography. I don’t know how I would classify it, actually. With my first book, I felt very stuck in a genre. It was published as YA, because it was written in my fourteen-year-old voice. In one way this was a positive because I wanted to give young people, who were experiencing grief, the kind of book I wished I’d had at their age, but on the other hand it was frustrating because I wrote it for everyone, not matter what age. So, this time I wanted something that couldn’t be stuck on one shelf (even though it will be), or described in a simple way, because people always want to categorize books. They want to say it’s just a memoir about grief and that’s all it is. I wanted it to be more than that. Some people call it a prose poem. But I’m not a poet.
Well, maybe you are.
Hmmm…. I’m not sure.
The death of the narrator’s parents, her mother in particular, emerges as a sort of void that the narrator is writing around. We have this moment of trauma that the narrative is built around, that we never address directly and that we need to piece together, almost like a mystery. There’s also a sense of culpability on the part of the father that we never real see unraveled. Is this something that you did deliberately?
Yes, because I haven’t really teased it all out myself. I can’t speak to my father now. I say in the book, is it fair to write about him when I don’t know who he might have become? And one of the main reasons it’s written in fragments is to mimic the fragmentary nature of trauma and the fragmentary nature of my memories of that time. The white space on the page represents the silences, omissions, the unspeakable and the unknowable. There are so many gaps, so many things I don’t know about my mother, so many things I don’t know about my father. My father’s admission that [the accident] was his fault, I got that second hand. He said that to my older sister. There are just so many gaps in the narrative for myself as well. I really couldn’t resolve any of that for the reader either. I have many questions still and no one to give me answers.
The fourteen-year-old narrator is often the lens through which confusing, traumatic, world-altering events are filtered. You avoid sexualizing her, as in sexualizing yourself, although there are scattered references to the sexualization of fourteen-year-old girls—the age of Sue Lyons when she played Lolita, for example, and the way the group of Surrealist men leer at Gisèle Prassinos, their femme enfant. I feel very aware, as the question of the Epstein files and the ages of victims become the subject of discussion, dissection in the media, of how the fourteen-year-old girl is demonized, dehumanized. I was just wondering how you, with the special interest you’ve taken in this particular number, would respond to the idea that a fourteen-year-old is an adult.
Yeah, that horrifies me, actually. But I can also see how fourteen-year-old girls can be manipulated into thinking of themselves as adults. When my parents died, there wasn’t much compassion. It was like, “Come on, get over it, time to move on,” as though I wasn’t a child, as though I was old enough to deal with this on my own, get on with it and shut the hell up. So, I thought, “Oh, I’m not a child, I’m an adult.” I was convinced by the adults around me that… well, I have an inkling that a fourteen-year-old immersed in the horror of grief was a very ugly thing for people. You use the words “demonized” and “dehumanized.” That really resonates with me. And so I never, ever used the word “orphan” because an orphan is a child, someone to be pitied. I wasn’t a child. I didn’t want pity. How dare I use that word? That word “orphan” is for poor little children who lose their parents, and that wasn’t me. So when I see what’s happening with these young girls, it fills me with a rage I can barely stand. What they have been through is far worse than anything I have experienced. The way they can be so easily manipulated and just used up and thrown out, or not only thrown out, killed. My husband, who has known me since I was nineteen, says, “People sort of brush aside what happened to you and think, ‘Fourteen, Oh, that’s fine, you can deal with it by the age of fourteen. Maybe if you were eight or nine, they’d give a damn, but you were fourteen.” It’s such an in-between age. So, I decided, oh, well, I must be more like an adult, and I must behave that way, and I must push it all down and be strong and amazing, you know?
I have an inkling that a fourteen-year-old immersed in the horror of grief was a very ugly thing for people.
The references in this text are so far-ranging: Walter Benjamin, Marguerite Duras, Gertrude Stein. How did you go about collecting such a varied assortment of facts and quotations?
This was the fun part. I’d already collected instances of fourteen that had appeared to me randomly, but once I became obsessed with the number, I started seeking it out. So I began looking into books from the library, biographies or different books by people I loved or admired, and look for an instance of fourteen, and it was almost a way for me to feel connected to these people. While I was writing I had friends say, “I’ve just found a fourteen fact. I’ve just found this great fourteen thing” and they would send it to me. And I’d say, “Oh, thank you, that’s lovely” knowing that it didn’t work that way, I had to find them myself, they had to connect with me in some way. So every writer, every actress, every director, every artist in the book has meant something to me in my life at one time or another. And there was something so wonderful about looking for a fourteen reference and finding one with someone I love, or whose work I love. I felt so connected to them. When I was fourteen, I felt so unbelievably alone. And I really tapped into that when I wrote my first book. But this book, I didn’t feel alone. I had my tribe with me. Every time I found a new fourteen fact related to someone, I felt like, “Oh, my people.” I was creating my own community as I was writing this book.
It seems like there are a lot of very famous people who did lose their parents or a parent at age fourteen.
Yes. I’ve been thinking of writing a book about different people, who are accomplished in some way, who lost a parent (or both) when they were young. Some of them are in Fourteen Ways of Looking. It fascinates me, that drive. I know when my parents died, one of the ways I coped was to say to myself, “I either kill myself or find a way to survive.” And once I decided I would survive, then I had to work out how. And so, I told myself this story about the orphans in literature and in popular culture, and I thought, “I have to become someone amazing. I have to be accomplished, I have to do something with my life, I have to make this matter, give it meaning.” I set out on a kind of quest to become “someone”. I didn’t even know what that meant. I was quite relentless and ambitious. It kept me alive. It kept me going, this quest to make something of my life and not just have this whole awful thing define me and ruin me.
On page 99, you ask, “Why do I keep getting drawn back to French writers, artists, directors, performers, philosophers?” Can we unpack this question? Particularly with regards to Oulipo.
I didn’t even understand that myself when I was writing it. I think part of it is that I felt like there was a brutal honesty in the work that I was looking at, but also this sort of playfulness, and a bit of a fuck-you attitude, which I really liked. I became quite obsessed with Georges Perec when I was writing the book and at one point thought he would be a major thread throughout, especially when I read that his parents died when he was young during World War II. I thought, “Oh, wow, here’s my person… here is someone who had something horrific happen and then spent a lifetime playing with language and being so light-hearted.” Even with his book, W, or the Memory of Childhood there’s a playfulness there, despite the fact that a lot of what he is writing about is quite horrific. He particularly inspired me and continues to.
The Oulipo school comes to mind as one possible source of inspiration for the uniqueness of the book. It’s been compared with Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Are there any other sources of inspiration that come to mind?
All at once, I discovered the Oulipo, Georges Perec, just as the number fourteen started appearing everywhere. And then I read David Markson’s Reader’s Block, and it changed my writing life. I read it, and I thought, “This is a novel?! You can do this and call it a novel?! Wow!” It’s almost like he gave me permission or courage to go where I wanted to go. Also, the work of Sarah Manguso, Kate Zambreno, especially Book of Mutter, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, and Aug 9—Fog by Kathryn Scanlan… taking someone’s diary and pulling small pieces out of it. I love books that utilise the white space on the page, which I think she does really beautifully in that book.
[O]ne of the main reasons it’s written in fragments is to mimic the fragmentary nature of trauma and the fragmentary nature of my memories of that time.
What’s next? Do you have anything planned moving forward?
Fourteen Ways of Looking is coming out in the UK on March 19th, and then the US and Canada on April 7th. After that, I don’t want to write about myself, so the next thing I’m working on is the creative component of my PhD. I’ve long been obsessed with Euripides’ Medea so I’m experimenting with a book, a novel of sorts, that looks at the way Medea has been performed through the ages, the women (and men) who have played her, and the changes in the way the Medea and her terrible act have been perceived. Maria Callas makes an appearance as does Lars von Trier, Sarah Bernhardt, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Sophie Okonedo and many more. There’s also an amazing Japanese production from the ’80s in which Medea is played by a man. It is absolutely stunning. This is one of those books I think no one will ever publish, but what the hell, it excites me and that matters more to me at this point.
Fourteen Ways of Looking is available in the US from Deep Vellum on April 7th and in the UK from CB editions on March 19th.
Erin Vincent is the author of Grief Girl which was named a New York Public Library Best Book. Her latest book Fourteen Ways of Looking is to be published in the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia in March/April 2026. Her work has also appeared in The Guardian, Electric Literature, The Offing, Meanjin, and elsewhere. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of Technology Sydney and is currently studying for a PhD in creative writing with a focus on fragmentary literature.
Cristina Politano is a writer from New Jersey. Her essays and fiction appear in Identity Theory, The Dodge, and La Piccioletta Barca, among other places. Twitter/X and Instagram/BlueSky: @monalisavitti.
minor literature[s] 