Reel Around the Fountain follows a boy from a working-class family navigating his growing awareness about his own sexuality as he searches for answers about his family’s past. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The core of the book’s genesis wasn’t so much about family history as it was about examining how queer kids are often targeted by predators. Queer kids tend to be good at keeping secrets — at blending into the background, into the walls — and I wanted to explore and expose that. The intersection of queerness and working-class, paycheck-to-paycheck life creates conditions predators can take advantage of. That intersection wasn’t something I saw represented growing up, and it’s still not something I find often, but I wanted to portray it with fairness and affection. It’s a world I know well, and I wanted to honor it.

But I was equally interested in family dynamics, and how those dynamics create room for people like priests to exploit queer kids. As I structured and wrote the book, though, the family itself started to take over. I felt it was important to show that kids from poor backgrounds aren’t exploited because of some lack of love or parenting — it’s that society creates the conditions that marginalize working-class families in the first place, and predators find the cracks in those conditions.

The story captures working-class life with remarkable specificity. How important was it to portray that community with both honesty and affection?

This was extremely important to me. I didn’t want to pander, stereotype, or romanticize working-class life and people. It was key to me to examine how we pull the levers we have access to in this life — and sometimes that may not be many levers at all. In addition to this, I wanted to explore gender roles, and how working-class life is often misunderstood to be rigidly gendered when, in fact, that isn’t always the case. With the grandparents in particular, I wanted to examine masculinity and femininity as a spectrum, not a binary norm. The grandfather and grandmother expose how circumstance often dictates what gender expression in family caregiving actually looks like.

Working-class life also often starts earlier than other facets of life do. White-collar, wealthier kids get a different kind of upbringing — more protected, more cushioned. Working-class kids shoulder different burdens, and shoulder them sooner. Through JP and his family, I wanted to explore that. I also wanted to highlight how the institutions that are supposed to protect people — police, social services, hospitals — often aren’t trustworthy, or aren’t there for people like JP’s family when it counts.

JP slowly learns that every family member remembers the past differently. What does the novel suggest about the relationship between memory and truth?

In any love circle — the one you’re born into or the one you build — stories are told by the storyteller, not recorded by some neutral archivist. As a storyteller myself, I can’t count how many times I’ve sat across from someone I love and found we remember the same event completely differently. I like that. And I know my version isn’t absolute truth. Instead, it’s a form of characterization. So while JP is trying to piece together the story of his birth, that search is also a way for him — and for the reader — to understand each family member through how they tell it. Every version of the story reveals as much about the teller as it does about the event.

I also think it’s important that truth, for the individual, is shaped by survival, not accuracy. What we remember is what we can handle remembering — what lets us survive the day, and the times, we’re living through. JP’s quest for the truth of his birth shows that we can never fully know it. Memory is fluid and fleeting. That’s part of the human condition. I hope that by the end, the reader is still left without the full truth of his birth story — but with the understanding that each storyteller’s memory reveals something about them, not about the events themselves.

What do you hope readers take away about family, forgiveness, and the stories we inherit? 

We inherit stories, but since stories are fluid with memory, and truth is subjective, how we choose to shoulder and carry the burden of those stories matters. The truth of a story changes and evolves as we change and evolve as human beings. That’s key to this novel. We inherit family burdens, and those burdens are carried differently as we move through — and change within — this world. I want to be deliberate here with the word change instead of grow. Shouldering the burden of stories isn’t a progressive climb toward growth; it’s up and down, like every other facet of life. Where we are — reacting to outside circumstances — shapes our truth and our memory in that moment.

Forgiveness is a big part of this story, but for me as a writer, what mattered most was that JP needs to forgive himself — for the blame he’s chosen to inherit, both for the weight of his family’s beginning and for the abuse by the priest. If we can’t first forgive ourselves for things — even things that were never our fault, but that we assume blame for anyway — we can’t truly forgive the people closest to us.

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