Lauren C. Johnson is the author of the new novel The West Façade. She is the co-host of Babylon Salon, a literary series in the Bay Area, and she lives in San Francisco.
Q: What inspired you to write The West Façade?
A: Statues have always fascinated me—and if I'm being honest, scared me a little, ever since I was a kid. So many of them look eerily lifelike, and I couldn't help but imagine them coming to life at night when everyone was sleeping.
I probably can blame my mom for that; she used to love to tell this same “ghost story” inspired by a Twilight Zone episode about mannequins coming to life after the shopping mall had closed. It was the scariest thing to me.
So when I had the chance to visit Paris during a college study abroad trip and tour the Notre-Dame Cathedral, you can imagine I became enamored with the statuary.
I loved the gargoyles, of course, who doesn’t? But I was especially drawn to the figures placed alongside the three main entrances, on the cathedral’s western face. There's something so imposing about them, and maybe that's the point, right? They were created to portray biblical stories and encourage people to attend mass.
I remember being particularly struck by the faces carved into the arches above the doorways—there are just rows and rows of them, and when you look up, there they are peering down at you.
That combination of fear and curiosity sparked my imagination. I wanted to humanize those sculptures and see the world through their eyes.
That semester, I played around with a short story in a notebook, but I didn’t really know what to do with it, so I kept it shoved in the back of a drawer for years. Still, it haunted me. I was genuinely surprised that no one had written a story from the perspective of the Notre-Dame statues before.
Nearly 10 years later, when I started my MFA program at American University, I finally decided to run with the idea. The West Façade grew from a short story to a novella to eventually a novel. I came to love the characters so much, I knew I wouldn’t be able to really focus on another writing project until I saw this idea to completion.
Q: How did you create your character Geneviève?
A: It was such a process. I often describe myself as a place-based writer—when
a story idea comes to me, the setting emerges first, and the characters and
plot grow from it.
That was especially the case with The West Façade. I knew I
wanted to write about the statues on one of the most iconic cathedrals in the
world, but I had to write through a lot of drafts to understand Geneviève.
Some of the best advice I got during my MFA program at American University came
from one of my thesis advisors, Dolen Perkins-Valdez. She said I needed to
figure out what Geneviéve wanted, and I took that advice to heart. I explored
whether Geneviéve wanted love, a forbidden relationship with another cathedral
statue, or wings so she could fly.
As it turned out, Geneviéve wanted all of the above, but most importantly, she was very bored on the cathedral wall and wanted to live. It sounds simple, but it took me a lot of drafts to reach that realization.
I also visited Paris and spent entire afternoons inside the Notre-Dame Cathedral, walking around it, taking notes and photographs.
Many of the original statues on Notre-Dame were destroyed during the first French Revolution, so the Sainte Geneviève you can see today is not the same one that stood on the cathedral in the Middle Ages. This historical detail gave me freedom to speculate on the arrangement of the statues in The West Façade.
In real life, Bathsheba stands in the Portal of Saint Anne, but in my novel, I placed her and Sainte Geneviève side by side, and their friendship is an important thread.
Q: How did you research the novel, and what did you learn that especially surprised you?
A: At first, I read every academic book I could get my hands on about medieval
Paris and cathedrals. My list included Paris in the Middle Ages by Simone Roux,
The Gothic Enterprise by Robert A. Scott, The Beguines of Medieval Paris by
Tanya Stabler Miller, and The Dream of the Moving Statue by Kenneth Gross, and
many, many, many others.
Later, I learned about the website Medievalists.net and that
became my home base. 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—like food, clothing, entertainment, and
contraception.
I also booked a consultation with a prominent medievalist, Danièle Cybulski,
and later took her course, Medieval Masterclass for Creators. I’m a big fan of
the Medieval Podcast, also hosted by Cybulski.
Really, I could have spent another 10 years trying to get every historical detail right and at some point, I think you just have to tell the story.
In 2021, I took a workshop through Catapult with novelist Cari Luna, and she said something along the lines of, “you can also just make stuff up.” Meaning, because The West Facade is a fantasy novel, I could give myself permission to lean into the speculative. If I hadn’t taken this advice, I might still be digging through the archives with an unpublished book.
Something I learned that surprised me was that 14th century Paris was far more cosmopolitan than many of us imagine. Paris was home to one of the most prominent–if not the most prominent–universities on the European continent.
It was also a major hub for commerce. There was a well-established merchant class with families setting up their homes and shops right on the Pont au Change–one of the major bridges that connects the island of the Île de la Cité to the Right Bank. So, I tried to reflect that energy and diversity in The West Façade.
Q: The writer Rita Chang-Eppig said of the book, “Imaginative and immersive, The West Façade is a sensuous fairy tale all about the delights and horrors of the human body. I will never look at statues the same way again.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I think Rita is spot on and I was thrilled to receive this blurb.
The West Façade takes place during the Bubonic Plague, a time when death was extraordinarily present. The book asks how we can reconcile the staggering beauty of our lives with the horror and sorrow that, all things considered, we’re pretty fragile and short-lived.
That’s a question religion tries to answer, but as someone who’s not religious, I found myself exploring these themes from a secular lens.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Florida, my home state–and where my family still lives–has a tremendous influence on my writing. I’m particularly interested in exploring the complications between wildlife and human development.
So, my next project is a modern retelling of Bambi, set in an enclosed, high-fence trophy hunting compound in Florida, and all the myriad complications that come with that setting.
I’m in the very early phases of that project and am not sure yet whether it will be a novella or a novel. Right now, I’m drafting impressions, scenes, and little moments. Really just playing around and I’m having a blast.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I think The West Façade is a weird book; there’s this kind of winding structure to the first act especially.
Though I tried to outline later drafts, the story seemed to resist the kind of plot elements we see in contemporary commercial fantasy, and I think that’s because so much of the stakes revolve around Geneviève's psychological and physical transformation. Also, she’s a statue, so time unfolds more slowly for her.
I’m grateful to my publisher for believing in this book and letting it be itself without changing the structure too much. I think if I had tried to publish it with one of the major publishers, I would have had to strip back the internal monologue and focus more on action sequences.
But not every book should be Fourth Wing or A Court of Thorns and Roses–as much as I appreciate those series and their fandoms. I think there’s room in our libraries for books that take all kinds of meandering shapes.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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