In Run Away with Me (Scholastic, 14 years and up), Brian Selznick brings his signature mix of text and immersive black-and-white drawings to his first book for young adults. Two teen boys meet in 1986 Rome for a summer of mystery, art, and of course, first love. For more romantic recommendations, see “What Makes a Good YA Love Story?” from the May/June 2013 Horn Book Magazine and the Emotions--Love tag in the Guide/Reviews Database.

1. What brought about your first foray into writing for young adults?

Photo: Brittany Cruz-Fejeran.

Brian Selznick: The evolution happened pretty naturally over the last thirty-four years. The main character in my first book, The Houdini Box, was ten years old. By the time I was making The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Wonderstruck, and The Marvels about fifteen to twenty years later, the main characters had aged up to around thirteen years old. As I began to think about the story that would become Run Away with Me, I just knew the boys would be sixteen. I’m not sure why, it’s just the age they were. Often, I have the ages of my characters, as well as the genders, before I know anything else about them. It takes me a while to piece together their personalities, needs, and fears, all of which usually come out of the plot I create as I write. Since the boys were teenagers, I knew I must be writing a YA novel, and therefore I found myself addressing situations I’d never really directly written about before, but that was part of the joy of the process.

2. How do you decide how to structure illustration versus written sections in your books?

BS: It depends on the book. For The Invention of Hugo Cabret, my original intention was to write a novella with one drawing per chapter. I had almost the entire story finished before I had the idea to try to tell parts of it in images to parallel silent movies, which were part of the plot. I had to go back and take out text I could replace with images, and the book grew from there. For instance, a three-page written description of the train station and the introduction of Hugo became twenty-one drawings — forty-two pages that allow the reader to move through the station with Hugo, so instead of telling the narrative I’m sometimes showing it. For Wonderstruck, I knew from the outset one of the two parallel stories would be told almost entirely in images, but I still wrote the story first, and then made lists of what I imagined the drawings could look like before I started to sketch. For Run Away with Me, the intention was to have no illustrations at first (which would have been radical for me), but my editor, David Levithan, thought we could find a good reason for images, and sure enough we came up with the idea of opening the book with a silent walk through the (nearly) empty city of Rome. This allows readers who have never been to the city to be introduced to it, and then when you get to the text, everyone will feel like they have a memory of having been in Rome.

3. The story takes place at a very specific place and time, but it has several outside-of-time feelings and encounters. What made you choose this particular setting?

BS: In 2021, my husband [David Serlin] won something called the Rome Prize, and we got to leave the U.S. six days after the insurrection and live in Rome for nine months. All of the Rome Prize winners were doing projects about the city and shared their research with us. I learned about the history of obelisks and mosaics, and the many excavations in Rome. History came to life around us, and because it was the height of the pandemic, no tourists were around and most Italians weren’t going out. I went to the Sistine Chapel many times, and usually I was the only person there besides the guard. It was an extraordinary and very strange experience. I wanted to get across this sense of emptiness, but I didn’t want to write a pandemic book.

Near the back of the Pantheon is a famous sculpture of an elephant by Bernini on top of which stands an ancient Egyptian obelisk. This became a central location in my story, and I wanted the boys to encounter a real elephant somewhere in the city. I could have created a zoo, but that didn’t seem interesting enough. There’s a movie studio on the outskirts of the city called Cinecittà, which we’d visited, and I knew that when animals are used in movies there’s often a holding area where they’re kept during filming. I figured there must have been an elephant used in a movie at some point, so I started with the films of Federico Fellini who seemed most likely to have used one. Sure enough, a movie released in 1987 called Intervista had an elephant, so I set the story in 1986, when they would have been filming. The other Queer love stories, one in the 1940s, one in 1900, and one in the 1600s, all developed from this main narrative.

4. Did you know what artistic and cultural references you were going to include from the start? What, if anything, surprised you in the process?

BS: I had no idea where I was going at the start! After I left Rome I had built a kind of imaginary map of the city in my mind made up of all my favorite places I’d visited. I also knew there would be two sixteen-year-old boys, and my goal was that somehow the two boys would connect all the places on the map. I did not write in order. The first scene I wrote, before I knew anything about the boys, was them climbing a staircase in an old building. Why? I did not know, I just wrote them climbing. Then I wrote them meeting at the elephant obelisk, and when I had about seven or eight scenes, I showed it to David Levithan. He suggested I next write the scene where they kiss for the first time, which I set on the grave of the poet John Keats in the Non-Catholic Cemetery, because where else could that happen?

5. What makes a good summer reading book for you?

BS: My summer reading is usually no different from my year-round reading. It often is tied to whatever new story I’m working on, and it’s often from the nineteenth or early twentieth century. When I’m crosshatching the final art for my books, which can take from three to nine months, I listen to audiobooks the entire time and wind up feeling like the most well-read person on the planet by the time I’m done. While I was doing the art for Run Away with Me, I listened to several histories of Rome; The Marble Faun by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which I’d read already several times; and, for some reason, all seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, which took a few months to finish. I loved it. It’s very Queer!

From the April 2025 issue of Notes from the Horn Book: Summer Reading. For past years’ summer reading lists from The Horn Book, click on the tag summer reading.