Fourteen Ways of Looking

by Erin Vincent

In this genre-defying blend of memoir, poetry, and history, writer Erin Vincent offers meditations on time, grief, psychology, and numerology.


When Erin Vincent was fourteen years old, both of her parents were killed in a traffic accident. Almost forty years later, the number 14 began haunting Erin, appearing everywhere–in the books she was reading, in films, TV shows, and on the news.

The repetition felt significant, so Erin began to explore the number beyond her personal understanding. The result is Fourteen Ways of Looking, a memoir of magisterial fractals and a profound meditation on grief, memory, numerology, and the creative process.

Genres: Memoir, Poetry, Nonfiction

131 pages, Paperback

Published March 3, 2026

About the author

Erin Vincent has worked as a journalist, fashion designer, creative consultant, theater actress, photographer's assistant, waitress on a paddle steamer, bartender, and served pies and mushy peas late at night from a roadside van. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Adam, and a pet crab named Charlie.

Reviews

[Marcus (Lit_Laugh_Luv) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vulnerable, moving, and experimental. Vincent uses pop culture references related to the number fourteen and a fragmented style to convey the devastating loss of her parents and the lingering effects of grief. It's a memoir unlike any other I've read, and I appreciated how it feels much less curated or packaged than other comparable books. It doesn't shy away from being a little messy and breaking the fourth wall, and the final product ends up being all the better for it.

Few readers will ever be able to fathom this kind of loss, but the experience of grief is universal. There's a little something in here for everyone. Some sections do feel a little scattered or lacking cohesion, but I think it makes the message feel all the more heartfelt. When we talk about grief, we too often rely on hindsight and distance to help us communicate our feelings, and this is a welcome departure from that. It's earnest and unflinching in its depiction of loss.

Highly recommend if you're looking for a slim read that experiments with form and style. Thank you again to the author for the early copy.
---
Thank you to the author for a lovely early copy! So intrigued by this premise

Substack | Bookstagram | BookTok | BookTube | Bookshop.org Store | Libro.fm Bonus Offer

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Raymond Queneau’s book “A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems” plays with the form. In the tradition of humorous children’s picture books that contain pages cut in horizontal strips that can be lifted to reveal another image underneath — thus creating a new picture such as a man with cat legs or a duck in high heels — Queneau decided to cut ten pages into fourteen strips, one strip for each line of each sonnet. By simply turning just one strip, the sonnet is altered.”

“At fourteen I decided I would be hard as a stone and burn bright as the sun.”

When she was fourteen, Erin Vincent lost both of her parents in a traffic accident in Western Sydney. Decades later, the number fourteen starts appearing in her everyday like a stubborn little omen, and she decides to collect these instances and write them all down in a special notebook.

In a piercing constellation of quotes, random and not so random facts, scenes from films and books and art works, memories of her own childhood, Vincent dances in and out of her fourteen-year old self and weaves a blazing narrative out of the beauty of coincidences. Or what Paul Auster called “the music of chance”.

We choose patterns to deal with the enormity of life. Grief might (or might not) fit inside a shape.
Happenstance and fate give certain numbers a mythology all of their own. We follow in their midst.

And so fourteen becomes the silver thread holding incongruities together, the meaning-making heart at the center of this book. Fourteen is the prism. Fourteen is the hatchet slashing away at the jungle. Fourteen is the foil-backed paper for Vincent’s strange and sublime origami.

There is a scene in the Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov’s “Burnt by the Sun” where a little ball of fire suddenly appears, a small burning sun passing swiftly through fields, into the rooms of a house, out the window and straight into the pines at the edge of a forest, setting fire to a tree.

Preorder this knockout. It comes out April 7th.
A little ball of fire will show up at your door.

[Curtis · Rating 4 out of 5]

in Frank Sinatra's voice:
When I was fourteen
it was a very bad year...

////////////

14 Things This Book Taught Me About The Number 14

1. It has the number 1 in it.
2. It has the number 4 in it.
3. 1 + 4 = 5
4. There are fourteen days in two weeks.
5. There are probably fourteen people out there who hate you.
6. It's hard to think of 14 facts about the number 14...
7...
8...
9...
10...
11...
12...
13...
14. And that's how you list 14 facts about the number 14!

[Thomas Claiborne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I didn't know what to expect when I cracked open Erin Vincent's Fourteen Ways of Looking, but after reading the first few pages, I fell easily and immediately in love with this beautiful, surprising book.

When she was fourteen years old, Erin Vincent was left home alone for the first time. That night, her parents were involved in an accident that killed her mother instantly, and her father shortly thereafter.

Many years later, the number fourteen began to appear to Vincent everywhere...In books, TV shows, movies, and cultural references. She started recording these instances of fourteen. Vincent used these findings to create the book's structure and narrative pace, while weaving her own story at age fourteen throughout. The result is bewitching: a smart and lucid mélange of heartbreak and healing. For Vincent, the number fourteen becomes a personal touchstone and a medium for locating community within the ongoingness of grief.

This book is just stunning. Read it and love it...

[Farah Farooq · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is in the same vain as the one book i read in my experimental writing class which was just a collection of descriptions of dresses mentioned in other books. was that great writing? no. was it experimental? yes?

[Lucy Treloar · Rating 5 out of 5]

Extraordinary, beautiful, original, devastating.

[ritareadthat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Take a moment. Breathe. Set yourself aside. Place your fears, anxieties, and distractions into their box. Are you listening? Do you hear the rhythm that is all around us? The synchrony of thoughts traveling across time—the words that are reaching for you—that know where you are and when you are meant to find them? Do you hear?

Stepping into Fourteen Ways of Looking by Erin Vincent is a journey in a time machine, traveling from past to present, propelled forward and back, understanding pain, heartache, and grief mixed with those sounds of the universe calling you home.

Can you feel the energy in my words when I truly, truly love a book? I would hope, if you are a regular reader of my reviews, that you can sense it by now. The frenetic, unabashed energy that seeps from my brain into my fingers and into words on this screen. They flow fast and furious and don't know what to do with themselves; they can't keep up with each other. I think faster than I can type or write, and the words—the words yell to slow down; it's ok, we can wait. But no, no, you can't wait, because I'll forget all of the very pertinent things I want to say about this magical, soul-gripping book that I just read.

Ok, Rita. Take a breath.

There, that's better. You're getting lost in your head, and that happens when you read something like this. This book is a conglomeration of so many of your favorite genres. It's memoir, narrative nonfiction, poetry, and a dash of literary criticism thrown in for good measure.

Erin Vincent's parents both died as a result of a car accident when she was 14. In these pages, she illustrates how the number 14 has revealed itself as a life force. Is she seeking patterns, or is this a powerful metaphysical anomaly?

With utterly remarkable and uncanny research, she connects her life events—fragments of time in her universe that occurred the year she was 14, as well as other important events through the years—with those of famous creatives worldwide in various passages and vignettes. These shine a light on how we are all connected, in minute and sometimes unseen ways, to each other—in the present and across time.

This book is of the kind that I found myself shaking my head at time and again, on almost every page. There was a feeling of great transcendence. I feel so privileged to have the opportunity to read books like this; writing of this quality and intent is a kindred spirit to my own grief/trauma and way of thinking and processing. It makes me feel not alone and very seen.

I wanted to highlight almost every passage, which in reality felt unsustainable because I also wanted to savor what I was reading. I ended up flagging only the passages that shouted their importance at me—the ones that were aching to be remembered acutely.

The ending was just as strong as the beginning, and every word in between was unfathomable in its mysticism. This is a game changer. I'm really in awe right now and honestly, completely blown away. The only other book that is somewhat comparable to this that I have read is Bluets by Maggie Nelson, and yet it reaches beyond what Bluets achieves. (And I loved Bluets.)

It is pure magic. There are no other words. The attention to detail with compiling this book is completely mind-blowing and awe-inspiring. You may be thinking, "Now come on, Rita, it can't be THAT good. What's so special about it?" But really, it is one of those that you really have to read to understand.

I'm going to do some name-dropping here, but only because it's hard for me to comprehend how a book can connect ALL of these great creatives together in one tiny 131-page book. Where else are you going to find the names of Jeanette Winterson, W.G. Sebald, Charles Bukowski, Edvard Munch, Georges Perec, Tove Ditlevsen, Greta Garbo, Dorothy Parker, Hans Christian Andersen, Norman Rockwell, Bram Stoker, Stanley Kubrick, Jorge Luis Borges, Charles Dickens, Marguerite Duras, Vincent Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Gertrude Stein, William S. Burroughs, Emily Dickinson, Arthur Rimbaud, Dante, Franz Kafka, Leonora Carrington, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Diane Arbus, Lars von Trier, Degas—and the passage on Degas' Little Dancer almost made me cry; thank you, Erin, for your raw emotions—Sylvia Plath, J.R.R. Tolkien, Jean Rhys, Kurt Vonnegut, Michael Jackson, Jean Genet, Colette, Zelda Fitzgerald, Fernando Pessoa, Roland Barthes, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Muriel Spark, Joan Didion, Ernest Hemingway, Anna Kavan, Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Egon Schiele, and Dostoyevsky in the same book?

How can you go wrong? This is a veritable buffet of artistic history. And the best thing? There are yet more names than this. This might be half of everyone that is a spark igniting the fire that is this book. Erin Vincent's interpretation of her pain and grief is the most unique I have ever read. Don't doubt for a second that this is a book that EVERYONE should be reading. And that is the first time I've ever typed those words in a review. Yes. Let that sink in.

Many thanks to Deep Vellum for the ARC!

[Samantha]

“At fourteen I decided I would be hard as a stone and burn bright as the sun.”

In the face of loss, grief can be more persistent and long-lasting than we sometimes want. It doesn’t always look the way you expect, it washes over you suddenly and repeatedly and without warning. When Vincent loses both her parents in a car accident at age fourteen, she is left with little more than her own thoughts and grief. When the number fourteen starts popping up repeatedly in her daily life, she eventually grabs on and leans into it to an obsessive degree.

Once Vincent noticed the recurring number fourteen in the wake of her parents’ deaths, she started researching all the ways the number featured in history, literature, and pop culture. The result is this hybrid offering from Deep Vellum, one of my favorite small presses and favorite indie bookstores. In a series of fragments, we read facts and events involving fourteen, as Vincent makes attempts at some kind of movement through her grief.

“Sometimes I imagine what it would look like if I could cut the number fourteen from my life and create a whole new story. So many possibilities, but maybe not a hundred thousand billion of them.”

I think the fourteen connection is both an attempt at movement and an entrapment, actually. Vincent initially isn’t looking for the number everywhere, it just shows up and happens to coincide with her being fourteen when she is orphaned. This feels out of her control and her leaning in and researching fourteenish events is a move to gain some of that control back. It’s also maybe a comfort when she has lost the most familiar comfort of all: her parents. The grief won’t leave Vincent so hanging on to the number fourteen is the vehicle she tries to ride through some of it.

Generally positive feelings all around. I like the genre-bending hybridness of the work, the fragmented format, and Vincent’s exploration of numerology outside of her immediate perspective. There’s an obvious nod in the title to the Wallace Stevens poem, ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird’, a work that also explores perspective and connections between humanity, nature, and emotions.

I’m interested in the grasping on to a number that, to an outsider, seems like a more random connection to make to this catastrophic loss. Easy for me to say; in grief, we are more apt to gravitate toward any pattern, metaphor, connection, etc. It was hard at times not to see this as a frequency illusion that then used a confirmation bias to validate into this work. To what end? Maybe nothing more than the significance itself of fourteen’s ubiquity, the universe’s way of offering comfort in a time of need.

[Leah Rachel von Essen · Rating 4 out of 5]

14 is my lucky number. It is not Erin Vincent's. In Vincent's life, 14 is a recurring, ever-present curse, all calling back to when she lost both her parents in her 14th year, enduring a year of grief, anger, and conflicted, difficult feelings. Fourteen Ways of Looking uses a combination of verse, essay, and memoir to explore all the ways the number 14 has infiltrated her life, the artists, quotes, and moments that have dug their way into her system, and the complicated process of grieving and remembering. Sometimes a little scattered or overworked, Vincent's memoir is nonetheless richly emotional for the way it paces out moments of rawness, the painfulness of some of life's darkest coincidences.

Content warnings for sexual assault & harassment, self-harm, suicidal ideation, ableism, grief, parent death, and mentions of rape, suicide, disordered eating.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of ideas, quotes, anecdotes, and memories centering around the number/age 14. For the author, it is about her grief, her memories, her processing. For the reader it is a glimpse into the way her mind works, the connections it forms, the things she shares, the things she doesn’t share. Grief is there, though not worked through to any conclusion in the process of writing/reading, If you want a memoir/narrative structure, this is not for you. If you like books like Ongoingneas (Manguso), Alphabetical Diaries (Heti), or Aug 9- Fog (Scanlan), then you may appreciate this way of approaching something that may otherwise be unapproachable.

Thank you to the publisher and Tertulia for the early copy.

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 5 out of 5]

(Note: I read the UK edition from cbeditions which is not listed but already published as I write this.)
Fragmented works like this depend on a coherence which Vincent executes so beautifully moving from personal recollections of her response to her parents sudden an tragic deaths when she fourteen, to literary and historical references all bound by the number 14. It is not only moving and intelligent, but in reading one is inevitably inclined to recall ones own connection to pivotal moments in our own lives—at 14 or any other age.

A longer review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2026/04/05/a-...

[Kat Flynn · Rating 3 out of 5]

poignant. The writer struggles to make sense of her loss and grief through the context of others, history trying to find meaning through the number 14. She threads her story through the strands of others beautifully.

[Carly-Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Haunting, raw, generous, exquisitely written. I read this in one afternoon and it was like the most delightful fever dream.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘Well into adulthood, I believed I had escaped unscathed’.

[Marc Nash · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJCJ...

Superlative take on working through grief with reference to David Markson's 'shoebox triology'

[Rania T · Rating 5 out of 5]

Erin Vincent toys with the idea of numbers, especially the number fourteen which was the year her life changed as highlighted in her memoir, "Grief Girl."

[Kortney Knight · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautiful depiction of grief including all the uncomfortable parts that people don't like to discuss. Read this for a book club and am happy that I picked it up.

[Tip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Received galley from the Deep Vellum Bookstore in Dallas, TX.

Rarely have I ever read a book that resists traditional form that is this compelling. So often do "experiential" books feel rank with affect that they miss me entirely.

However, Erin Vincent has managed the feat of breaking with traditional storytelling WHILE conveying the purpose of that break to the reader such that, this reader anyway, cannot imagine the story being told any other way.

This great little book set me down in the mind of another who I have little in common with, yet I feel like my mind works not so differently. It's for fiction such as this that I am so dedicated to reading. I read to learn, but I also read to understand others and understand myself better.

I really enjoyed my time with Fourteen Ways of Looking, read in two sessions, one at the bar, one in the backyard.