Robert Lopez is the author, most recently, of The Best People (2025), the third installment of interconnected “People” books, which began with Good People (2016) and continued with A Better Class of People (2022). Similarly, Molly Gaudry is the author of Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir, which is the third installment of interconnected “tea house woman” books, which began with We Take Me Apart (2010) and continued with Desire: A Haunting (2018). This conversation took place over a shared Google doc from October 10, 2025–November 3, 2025.
Molly Gaudry: How would you describe your People books for anyone who isn’t yet familiar with them?
Robert Lopez: First I would try to avoid the question because I don’t know how to describe the books individually or as a triptych. What about you? How would you describe your trio of books? Maybe I can find something in your answer to steal.
MG: My own response to this question is often incomprehensibly generic, like, “My first two books were verse novels, my new one is a memoir-in-essays with a novel-in-progress inside it, and hundreds of literary quotations collaged throughout.” That usually ends the conversation, but if someone perks up I can engage further.
RL: That’s an excellent strategy, answering in such a way that ends the conversation. I like your answer because it’s all about genre and nothing to do with the actual content or narrative or even anti-narrative and the phrase incomprehensibly generic is brilliant. Trying to describe any work of art is always reductive and beside the point, which is why your answer is perfect. For me, it’s a combination of not knowing how to make any description of the work sound interesting and the aforementioned reductive and pointless bit. If put to it, I would work in the term uncanny and maybe something like echoes and rhymes, which seems incomprehensibly generic, too.
MG: And yet, these words aren’t incomprehensible at all. Which is, I think, our first major point of departure as we do our best to articulate how our three-book sets aren’t trilogies in the traditional or expected sense. We both resist (quite stubbornly, apparently) having discussions about extended plot or character arcs. Instead, we’re more interested in language. In genre. In our own stylized modes of intertextuality. The words we use to describe our books focus on forms, genres, echoes, rhymes, the uncanny. Additionally, neither of us set out to write “a trilogy”—and neither of us thinks of our own project as such. So at what point did you realize you were writing a second People book, and that it was in some way—or could be—connected to your first People book? And how did you decide to start a third?
RL: The first book was a collection of stories that was assembled without any intent of beginning a larger project or the stories themselves speaking to each other in those rhymes and echoes we spoke of earlier. The stories went together as a collection, but didn’t involve a larger narrative or arc or shape. The last two books were put together in exactly that fashion and thus it felt like I was making a book rather than assembling stories that were all written as one-offs. A bunch of the pieces in the last two books were originally written the same way, but I revised and crafted them so they’d go together and fit into a larger arc. So, there was a lot of crafting in the last two books and that process was actually enjoyable.
MG: Can you say more about your approach to craft, or about how your People books are crafted differently than your other books?
RL: Craft, of course, is about paying attention to the architecture of the work and how each element fits together. The guiding principle of A Better Class of People was straightforward – there would be a longer story and in between there would be shorter stories taking place on the subway. So, you had to take the subway to get to the next story. What went on during those subway rides informed and influenced and referenced the longer stories and vice-versa. The longer stories varied in form and style, but the subway stories were uniform in their construction, one single block paragraph. Some of the goings on referenced Good People and would foreshadow The Best People, which at that point I knew there would be a third installment to finish the movement. I also knew that The Best People had to differ from the other peoples, so here we have a series of flashes that read like instruction manuals – second person imperative bits between the longer stories, but not as a vehicle to get to the next piece. There are a lot more of those instructional pieces than there were subway pieces, I think. And all of these pieces have the same sort of rhymes and echoes so that ultimately the experience is uncanny.
MG: Recently, you and I came up with a short list of other writers who also did this: William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who wrote multiple books set in the same fictional location; JD Salinger, who wrote about the Glass family across several books; Tana French and Elizabeth Strout as more contemporary, popular examples; and Renee Gladman and Anne Carson are more experimental examples. Knowing that we’re not alone in this, why do you think so many writers are compelled to stay in the same literary universe—or, better yet, why did you?
RL: I also mentioned Peter Markus, whose “Brothers” books are an extraordinary example of staying in the same literary universe. For me, it was a way to entertain myself, as much as anything else. The longer you stay at the fair the harder you have to work to keep yourself engaged. Or maybe that doesn’t apply to anyone else, so when I say “you” maybe I’m only speaking about myself. I suppose we get bored of our same old tricks and this might be a way to fight against that boredom. Then there’s also a certain satisfaction in working in the same universe by not having to create a completely new universe. I think that might be another element to this question. Most of the writers I know prefer revising rather than coming up with something new—it’s akin to that, too. What say you? How was the process of writing this book different from the others? Or was it similar? Or more likely a combination. Did you have to refer to the first two books or do you know them so well you could work forward without looking backward?
MG: The earliest draft of Fit Into Me began while I was still in the middle of figuring out Desire. Not counting all the editing and reshaping I did with Abigail and Kathleen at Rose Metal Press, I probably worked on Fit for over a decade (taking years off at a time). So in the early days, I was still pretty close to my first two books. But as Fit marinated and matured, I let my memory of those other books fade so that this one could become its own thing. Process-wise, all three books began with the constraint of using a word bank. In Fit Into Me, the memoir, I explain more about the specific banks I created and the technique I developed, to show how Fit Into Me, the novel (and by extension my other books), came into being. As you put it, aptly, up above, there are echoes and rhymes across all three books. Can you share more about the echoes and rhymes in yours, or the combination of differences and similarities across your three books?
RL: Constraints are great and strangely freeing in the best ways. Certain character names appearing and re-appearing in unexpected ways is one example of an echo. So much so that we’re never sure if this is the same Manny as the one we’ve previously experienced. Then there are stories that cover the same event or the event isn’t exactly the same but similar in strange ways. Dialogue that was put into the mouth of one character might be repeated in the mouth of another character in another story. There’s a lot of Easter eggs, or direct referencing of other stories, throughout all three books. Hiding those eggs in plain view every so often was enjoyable. I had no idea I was going to end The Best People with the same run of language that started the triptych Good People.
MG: You wrote “we’re never sure if this is the same Manny…” Does that “we” include you, too?
RL: Yes, that includes me, as well. It’s possible I’m playing with the notion of identity, particularly on the page, when a “character” is as much an invention of the reader as the writer. Names are arbitrary, but somehow we attach meaning to them. Perhaps I’m trying to render them meaningless.
MG: I’m interested in these overlaps between our projects. Like your Manny, there is a tea house woman in all three of my books, but in Fit there are two tea house women—the mother, and the daughter who inherits both job and title. Because it got confusing which one I was referring to, I had to give them names, which I do in a footnote, but the footnote is there to draw attention to the complete arbitrariness of the names chosen—e.g., how about Clarissa, after Mrs. Dalloway, because sure why not? Events, too, across my books are re/told from different characters’ perspectives, and the details noted and shared are so divergent one wonders if these characters were at the same events at all. I think that this is an important feature of these books for me—that we have our own experiences of events, that truth and perspective, not to mention our faulty and fading memories over time, are always subjective at best.
RL: I like the idea of letting memory fade and allowing the next book to be its own thing. I also like the idea of events being told and retold from different perspectives to the degree that the telling is so divergent that we’re no longer sure these differing perspectives were at the same event. As a result of all of this, are you more partial to this book, not just because it’s the most recent, but rather that you came to it fresh but still relying on foundations you’ve already built? I know asking this sort of question is ridiculous, like picking out a favorite child. For me, for instance, Good People was a collection of stories, whereas the other two were crafted as novels-in-stories so the experience of assembling the work was wildly different. I enjoyed the last two, A Better Class of People and The Best People, much more because of the need to craft the hell out of it.
MG: I’m still overwhelmingly partial to my first book. It came out quickly, easily, and it was a fresh and unexpectedly joyful experience working on that one from start to finish (but I had a contract before I had a manuscript, which is unusual). I loved the writer-editor relationship I had with JA Tyler at Mud Luscious Press—not only because we saw eye to eye on major editorial decisions, but also because it was my first book and Mud Luscious’s first full-length title, so there was only excitement and hope between us, without expectations and stress or fear about sales numbers or other realities of publishing. It was always about the art, about the writing, and it felt pure and real in a way that writing doesn’t often feel to me anymore. Desire, I would say, was a cathartic book, for me, and Jason Cook at Ampersand Books always understood that about it (again, I had a contract before I had a manuscript, because he also believed in the vision, my process, and in our collaborative writer-editor relationship). There was never any pressure from him, either, to sell books. Only to make the best words on the page. I can say with some objectivity that Fit is more interesting on a craft level than either of those books. But I don’t know how I feel about it yet. Without the pressure of tenure, I probably would have just let the manuscript die a quiet death—although, I’m not sure if this is true or something I’m just saying because I’m scared that the book will fail.
RL: I’m certain there are plenty of writers who have felt and continue to feel the exact same way. That you worry is part of what makes you the writer/artist/educator/person you are. It’s lovely and endearing. I’m never plagued with such thoughts and in this way I might be sociopathic. Once I’m finished with a book I never think about it again, never think about anyone reading it or what they might think. It never occurs to me that anyone might read the work or might talk about my classes or any such et cetera. It’s true that I say writing is a conversation in my classes and in interviews and thinking of writing as a conversation with a few select peers is a healthy way to enter the work, but I try to turn the conversation off once it’s over.
MG: Has anyone ever asked you: Why do you write? I’m curious what your answer might be, given that you’re able to write a book and forget about it and move forward. (And I don’t think that’s sociopathic; lately, I’ve watched a lot of Hollywood Reporter actors’ roundtables on YouTube, and it seems exceedingly common for actors to not want to watch their own movies.)
RL: I can’t quite remember if anyone has asked why I write, though I suppose the answer would be that it’s always seemed like what needed to be done at the time. There was a sense of urgency, although I don’t know where that urgency emanated from. It’s always been about language for me, not a desire to express any sort of idea or feeling. I’ll ask the same impossible question to you, why do you write and more importantly, who do you keep at it? What’s next for you now that you’ve completed this trio of books?
MG: The strength of my desire to “avoid the question” of why I write surprises me, actually. It’s funny, though, because now we’ve come full circle in our conversation. I think in lieu of a direct answer, I’ll include instead the first epigraph of Fit Into Me, which is from David Mura’s A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing: “We start to write a book in order to become the person who finishes the book.” What I can say about that line in response to your question “why do you keep at it?” is that the person who finished Fit Into Me: A Novel: A Memoir became the person who was able to conceive of and finish the manuscript that came after, titled The Time Loop: A Speculative Memoir: A Novel (which is currently on submission). In some ways, I think Time Loop is the novel that should actually be intermixed with Fit Into Me, the memoir, but that’s a topic for a different conversation. For now, looking ahead, I don’t know what’s next. But it’s refreshing to think that maybe it’s time to rest a bit and fill the well, and to be okay with that.