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Fourteen Ways of Looking
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.
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.
131 pages, Paperback
Published March 3, 2026
About the author
Erin Vincent
4 books12 followersErin 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.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
April 27, 2026
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
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
April 1, 2026
“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.
“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.
April 12, 2026
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!
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!
June 26, 2026
This is an oddly compelling, obsessive, and poetic memoir (of sorts), looking at the number 14 and the way it shows up repeatedly for a woman whose parents died when she was 14. Kaleidoscopic, fragmented, and incredibly captivating. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
June 1, 2026
This is an incredible book. When Erin Vincent was 14 both her parents were struck by a tow-truck. Her mother died instantly and her father a few weeks later. This book is written years later with what feel like a lifetime of incidental links to the number 14. People aged fourteen when something happens to them, things found on page fourteen, things that happened on the 14th or in 1914. So many links. In between all these facts come the descriptions of how Vincent felt at the age of fourteen, trying to deal with what had happened. Or how she still feels forty years later while compiling this book.
What I like most are when these linkages run together, to make a slightly deeper story:
Numbers dominate the whole narrative, and are sometimes used to frame bare facts, such as this list:
One of the things that makes this book so incredible is the way a short sentence is suddenly added, amongst the facts and literature, and simply knocks you for six.
Other revelations are harder to understand:
Here is another heart breaking observation:
As we approach the end of the book, the linkages to fourteen keep coming but the author’s reflections become more current, sometimes about the difficulty of writing this book:
I have not done justice to the amount of literature that is quoted in this short book – but as a measure there are seven pages of bibliography at the end. I cannot stress how good this is: remarkable, confronting and thought provoking.
What I like most are when these linkages run together, to make a slightly deeper story:
When I was fourteen Virginia Woolf told me I needed a room of my own.
At fourteen, in my quest to escape, I went to Rivendell. Not J. R. R. Tolkien’s homely valley of sanctuary, but a convalescent hospital that, from the outside, looked like McLean Psychiatric Hospital where Sylvia Plath once resided. They would not let me stay. I was not the right kind of crazy.
On November 14, 1904, Tolkien’s mother died, leaving him and his brother orphaned. Their father had died years earlier when the future author was four.
At fourteen I did not read The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, for despite wanting to escape, my need was for books grounded in reality. I was already living in a weird other world.
Arriving at the Front on July 14, 1916, two weeks after the Battle of the Somme began, Tolkien lost two of his best friends. He was invalided out in mid-October, around a month before the battle ended.
Numbers dominate the whole narrative, and are sometimes used to frame bare facts, such as this list:
10 = month of the accident and month my mother died
23 = day my mother died
11 = month my father died
24 = day my father died
1983 = year they both died
41 = age my mother was at her death
43 = age my father was at his death
3 = my brother’s age
14 = my age
17 = my sister’s age
One of the things that makes this book so incredible is the way a short sentence is suddenly added, amongst the facts and literature, and simply knocks you for six.
At fourteen adults started telling me that it was time to ‘get over it’ as though I’d lost a pet and not two parents.
Other revelations are harder to understand:
In 2007 I visited our family home for the first time in 22 years. Nothing had changed; not the pebblecrete on the front veranda or the white cast-iron furniture. Sneaking over the fence and going into the backyard I saw my father’s unfinished barbecue was exactly as we’d left it. Even the unused bricks were sitting in the same sad pile. I took photos with my phone to prove I hadn’t lost my mind.
Here is another heart breaking observation:
At fourteen I noticed that white people loved African orphans via the post, putting money in envelopes and sending them to UNICEF to ‘adopt’ a black child who, in return, would send them a colourful crayon drawing and a smiling, grateful photo the white people could stick on their fridge. These same people could not bear to be in the presence of the orphan who looked just like them.
As we approach the end of the book, the linkages to fourteen keep coming but the author’s reflections become more current, sometimes about the difficulty of writing this book:
As I try to out this book together I am in a jumble; I can’t keep my thoughts straight. It’s as though someone has thrown an old, faded 5,000-piece puzzle on the floor and told me to solve it without seeing the picture on the box. Oh, and they’ve said I have a limited time to put it together and if I fail I’ll be failing myself and my past and my mother. Now go. The clock is ticking.
I have not done justice to the amount of literature that is quoted in this short book – but as a measure there are seven pages of bibliography at the end. I cannot stress how good this is: remarkable, confronting and thought provoking.
June 21, 2026
How do I review this book Fourteen Ways of Looking when, at first, it appears to be just fragments arranged haphazardly? Of course it isn’t. It is grief and association arranges the pieces. This is not a book to read quickly, the realisations of what Vincent endured as a fourteen-year-old keep piling up until the reader wonders how did she endure all this? This book is one of the ways how although the actual writing of it caused more grief. How brave the author is!
I couldn’t read the book in one go, aside from all the grief, because I kept looking up all the things Vincent was referring to. All the books she has obviously read and all the facts she has assembled. I think I’ve added about ten books to my To Be Read pile.
At first this reader believed it was just a tragic accident involving the death of both her parents. Her father some weeks after the almost instant death of her mother. But no, it is much worse than that, as Vincent looks at the behaviour of those around her. Her whole experience to me is horrifying and I applaud her struggle to overcome what has happened to her. Here are some of the glimpses which pile up and pile up to form a devastating childhood that she is still trying to come to terms with.
“At fourteen my parents crossed the road. They did not get to the other side.”
“At fourteen I thought of all the ways she died. Crushed under wheels? Thrown into the air like a circus performer? Blood flying, painting the sky.”
“In the 1960 film Psycho, fourteen stabs were reduced to three in the editing studio because the British censor John Trevelyan, thought it was too sadistic.
“At fourteen I quickly discovered that the whole school knew the one thing I wanted kept secret. There had been a group prayer in assembly the week before.”
A searing incantation of grief. Five stars.
I couldn’t read the book in one go, aside from all the grief, because I kept looking up all the things Vincent was referring to. All the books she has obviously read and all the facts she has assembled. I think I’ve added about ten books to my To Be Read pile.
At first this reader believed it was just a tragic accident involving the death of both her parents. Her father some weeks after the almost instant death of her mother. But no, it is much worse than that, as Vincent looks at the behaviour of those around her. Her whole experience to me is horrifying and I applaud her struggle to overcome what has happened to her. Here are some of the glimpses which pile up and pile up to form a devastating childhood that she is still trying to come to terms with.
“At fourteen my parents crossed the road. They did not get to the other side.”
“At fourteen I thought of all the ways she died. Crushed under wheels? Thrown into the air like a circus performer? Blood flying, painting the sky.”
“In the 1960 film Psycho, fourteen stabs were reduced to three in the editing studio because the British censor John Trevelyan, thought it was too sadistic.
“At fourteen I quickly discovered that the whole school knew the one thing I wanted kept secret. There had been a group prayer in assembly the week before.”
A searing incantation of grief. Five stars.
April 22, 2026
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...
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...
December 1, 2025
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?
April 27, 2026
Extraordinary, beautiful, original, devastating.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
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!
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!
Read
May 16, 2026“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.
May 28, 2026
Interesting, but I read encyclopedias when I was 12, so I am not likely the most reliable reviewer for this one. I also don't remember what I did last week, through no known medical fault I am aware of, so calling into question what Vincent remembers of being 14 seems, well, unseemly. Does writing about proximity to death, parental in this case, render critique impossible, or just meaningless? I tend to think memory is constantly, and inconsistently, created, so what one thinks or believes they recall from the past is likely to be unreliable, or unlikely to be reliable? Whichever, I struggle with adults writing, as an adult, about their youth. In a similar way I struggle with adult actors/actresses assuming teenaged roles. What you feel and think and understand at 23 or 28 is well past what one would 14 or 17, regardless of one's perspicacity. As to the rest, I am all about numerology, obsessive focus, pattern recognition, lists, and historical facts. Gathering those fascinations all into a book? Even better. Still, with enough time and interest, many could do the same, and some already have. It is hardly avant la lettre at this point in the book universe to do such. Fun, I guess, but not much more. Anyway. Vincent is dealing with death her way, so I will merely say it feels off, a bit too polished and academic, but if that works for them, then you do you. I was left feeling rather not a lot of emotions which in the general run of my life would be unsurprising, rational man am I. Still, my father recently passed and I figured another's thoughts on death might be intriguing or even helpful. Alas, as they say, no. I am glad to have read this - obesession! - and the cover art is beautiful (both the "yellow dots version" and the "blue profile version", and who looks askance at beauty in this world of ours?
July 7, 2026
This book is a hard won hope. It’s a canny glint of self discovery. A meditation on the journey of grief and (maybe) acceptance. Incomparably brilliant. At fourteen, Erin Vincent’s parents die and what follows is her fixation to the number 14. Like she’s haunted by that number and has then formed a bond with it.
“I have loved a dead mother longer than I have a living one.”
With a devotion to the number fourteen, she consolidates interesting data and facts of writers, poets, philosophers, inventors associated to that number which says a lot about the profound intelligence and grief that sits at her heart and head. Some people belong to the emotion of grief more than they belong to themselves. These are the ones who direct it in the best possible way.
“I am beginning to wonder, will I always be in a kind of holding pattern, trapped, condemned to write about them forever.”
So complete is her inventory on this number, It seems like spotting the number fourteen and germinating it in memory came to her as natural as breathing. Like she had turned her entire thoughts from over the years to this destination, the number 14.
“At fourteen I could see there was a kind of glamour to grief.”
Books like this are quieter wins for the author. Maybe for the reader too if you can bask in its uniqueness.
“I have loved a dead mother longer than I have a living one.”
With a devotion to the number fourteen, she consolidates interesting data and facts of writers, poets, philosophers, inventors associated to that number which says a lot about the profound intelligence and grief that sits at her heart and head. Some people belong to the emotion of grief more than they belong to themselves. These are the ones who direct it in the best possible way.
“I am beginning to wonder, will I always be in a kind of holding pattern, trapped, condemned to write about them forever.”
So complete is her inventory on this number, It seems like spotting the number fourteen and germinating it in memory came to her as natural as breathing. Like she had turned her entire thoughts from over the years to this destination, the number 14.
“At fourteen I could see there was a kind of glamour to grief.”
Books like this are quieter wins for the author. Maybe for the reader too if you can bask in its uniqueness.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
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.
Content warnings for sexual assault & harassment, self-harm, suicidal ideation, ableism, grief, parent death, and mentions of rape, suicide, disordered eating.
Review of advance copy received from Publisher
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.
Thank you to the publisher and Tertulia for the early copy.
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May 24, 2026 “I have loved a dead mother longer than I have a living one.”
To be consumed by grief for decades is a phenomenon one hopes to never experience. Erin Vincent lost both her parents at the age of fourteen. Since then, the number fourteen has become a constant, a premonition, a number that’s more than just a value.
“Fourteen Ways of Looking”, is a collection of literary fragments, reflections and interesting facts surrounding the number fourteen.
Raw, emotional and experimental, I read this memoir in one sitting. I don’t rate memories on a star rating scale, but can say that this one had moments that struck me deeply, causing me to pause and really ruminate with the words.
Thank you to @mcclellandstewart for a copy of this book. All thoughts are my owns
To be consumed by grief for decades is a phenomenon one hopes to never experience. Erin Vincent lost both her parents at the age of fourteen. Since then, the number fourteen has become a constant, a premonition, a number that’s more than just a value.
“Fourteen Ways of Looking”, is a collection of literary fragments, reflections and interesting facts surrounding the number fourteen.
Raw, emotional and experimental, I read this memoir in one sitting. I don’t rate memories on a star rating scale, but can say that this one had moments that struck me deeply, causing me to pause and really ruminate with the words.
Thank you to @mcclellandstewart for a copy of this book. All thoughts are my owns
May 26, 2026
|| FOURTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING ||
#gifted @strangelightbooks @mcclellandstewart
•
I really enjoyed this memoir. Vincent explores grief, loss and acceptance in such a unique way. Losing both her parents in a car accident at the age of 14, decades later the number 14 is haunting her. It is seemingly everywhere she looks. This book collects all thoes fragments, from pop culture, history, literature and her own life as she weaves through decades of grief and acceptance. Her writing is beautiful, poetic, melancholic and compelling. I tried to read this slowly because I enjoyed it so much. The fragmented structure really worked for me. Grief is such a universal yet personal experience and I found the layout really complimented that. Such a lovely ebb and flow, highly reccomend!
#gifted @strangelightbooks @mcclellandstewart
•
I really enjoyed this memoir. Vincent explores grief, loss and acceptance in such a unique way. Losing both her parents in a car accident at the age of 14, decades later the number 14 is haunting her. It is seemingly everywhere she looks. This book collects all thoes fragments, from pop culture, history, literature and her own life as she weaves through decades of grief and acceptance. Her writing is beautiful, poetic, melancholic and compelling. I tried to read this slowly because I enjoyed it so much. The fragmented structure really worked for me. Grief is such a universal yet personal experience and I found the layout really complimented that. Such a lovely ebb and flow, highly reccomend!
June 11, 2026
Those who have experienced trauma can probably relate to the feeling of being preserved in amber at the age in which it occurred. Erin Vincent had been 14 and living in Western Sydney when her parents were killed. Decades later, with this book, she decided to use the number 14 as her guide, to be open to whatever signs it sent. Memories of her 14-year-old self are spliced with haunting, sometimes devastating examples of the number in literature, art, science and historical news stories, from Degas to Dante, Alan Turing to Marguerite Duras, Emily Dickinson to Edvard Munch. Sometimes it’s a page number, sometimes a date, sometimes the number of letters in a name. Beautifully done and startlingly effective.
May 18, 2026
a worthwhile experiment, completely exhausting the number 14. everything you can think of with the number 14: page numbers, ages, years, etc. it's interesting, and it doesn't overstay its welcome. but the book really is a list of aphorisms. you don't even get paragraphs; you're lucky to get more than one sentence on each subject. add onto that the fact that there's little narrative or emotional movement. everything stays pretty much the same, which i guess fits the subject, but makes for a bit of a one note reading experience for me.
June 21, 2026
Intense fragmentary literature that I think deserves a careful 2nd read with google at the ready to help me more fully appreciate all of the references. I think she captures the trauma of loss and grief and the confusion of all that in the midst of forming one's identity and carrying the unresolved burdens into adulthood. It scares me that my own grief could re-emerge so messily... and inspires me to be more deliberate in my own unravelling.
Review of advance copy
(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-...
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-...
April 18, 2026
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.
Review of advance copy
Haunting, raw, generous, exquisitely written. I read this in one afternoon and it was like the most delightful fever dream.
March 21, 2026
‘Well into adulthood, I believed I had escaped unscathed’.
April 20, 2026
Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgJCJ...
Superlative take on working through grief with reference to David Markson's 'shoebox triology'
Superlative take on working through grief with reference to David Markson's 'shoebox triology'
May 5, 2026
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."
June 10, 2026
similar to Bluets by maggie nelson but better (bluets too pretentious)
June 16, 2026
my favourite kind of genre, unravelling and knotting up all at once
June 27, 2026
Read in one sitting, so good ❤️
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