Interview by Millicent Penner
Portrait by Amelia Golden

MP Why did you choose to write the book in a first-person, intimate way, formed as a collage, rather than a linear history? 

JF When I started writing this book, first as a college student and then in 2013 in the form of a proposal that I hoped would sell, I had in mind what I thought of as some expectations around what sort of thing a book like this, particularly one written by a young woman, should contain. Meanwhile I really wanted to write a “nonfiction novel” that was actually as good as fiction, that was my young girl’s dream, and it seemed obvious that since I wasn’t going to have access to other “characters’” “interiorities”, the inclusion of myself as more than a reporter in the story was going to allow for a kind of suppleness and a pathos and a capacity for reflection that I didn’t feel I could risk foregoing. There are examples of reported books told in the third person, like Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, but as the years went on I found I was coming to rely utterly on the first-person voice – that of the American girl in Paris who’s been drawn to this adventure with its heady dose of danger – as an integral part of the book’s truth-telling apparatus. It was a way, I came to feel, of GPT-proofing nonfiction, holding it to transparency’s higher standard for honesty than that of fact.

MP It took many years to research and write this book. Why did it take so long? 

JF This insistence I have described on creating something that would be all the way journalism and all the way literature – in literature you say what you want to, in journalism you say what’s true – created just a mountain of work to be tackled. I was going to have to have a lot of material if I was going to make a selection of it that was going to be on that level. So I kept on following up; sources became friends and then something more; our story unfolds over some five years. Meanwhile in my life there were entire years when I worked from just the one direction, or just the other; it was like the process of literary translation, which can involve discrete periods of translating literally, looking up words, essentially translating as a way of researching the source text, and then of working with the translation as a text in its own right. A first or “practice” novel often is abandoned, but I had this reality to keep returning to. Journalists often sell books “on proposal”, but Precarious Lease was not sold on proposal, or for a sustaining amount of money, ever; it was its own precarious lease, a promise to continue. The book’s thematic inquiry into the uses of art, or art used as a front, developed alongside years of miscellaneous activities completed to get the resources or residency in France that I needed to work on it. 

MP In London, there are approximately 38,000 vacant homes, yet the city is always building more. Why do we build new homes when thousands of existing ones are vacant?

JF I think you’re right to point out the paradox there. And the approach of the local authorities contrasts with that of the squatters at Le Bloc; they were ingenious in devising an immediate solution to the problem of a lack of housing that didn’t require a long wait for buildings to be built, but could be immediately implemented by people in the neighbourhood. It was an environmentally friendly solution. But just to play the politician, I learned from my reporting that it’s not a panacea; Le Bloc was having a lot of problems by the time of its eviction, it was falling down, there were leaks everywhere, and people deserve more salubrious shelter than that. What was interesting at Le Bloc were these emergent benefits an opportunities that arose from a group of people taking action jointly to get their need for shelter met.

MP Did you mostly use audio recordings, photography, or did you transcribe interviews from handwritten notes?

JF Nothing in the book is invented – that might bear clarification. It is the opposite of a memoir in that everything I documented. It’s told mostly in scene, and the scenes are real; rather than a labour of narrativising or doing storytelling or inventing around the edges for “colour” and palatability, I had wanted to attend to what I saw. So as you can imagine, I took a lot of notes, and most of them weren’t formal interviews, though I did plenty of interviews too, amassing several days of tape. I took notes in situ. A collaborator, one of the book’s artists, once called them croquis de pensée. And actually, many of the book’s surviving images were written down on the fly; these images tended to beat out other images I tried later to conjure by staring at the photos I had taken, or imagining how things had been. Audio recordings were also helpful. Certain long exchanges of dialogue were captured thanks to taping – though there were incessant problems, during checking, when the language encountered by playing back a tape conflicted with what I found in my notebook. With the first-person way the book was told, we’d understood that dialogue to be something I was hearing – I mean something that the first-person narrator is hearing – the processes of transcription, translation, listening had been legible at the level of the language, I’d tried for that in prior versions, they had been invited to encroach upon the voice of this narration, I’d tried for a kind of free indirect in nonfiction, so: is it truer to relay what I heard, what the narrator is hearing, better represented by what I had written down in the notebook, or is it truer to relay what was actually said? The second is journalism’s no-brainer choice, but again: why should this random person in Massachusetts, listening to a tape in 2024, be trusted over someone who was there? Becoming too literal would cause larger truths to be lost, in the end – but not in the way that we’d feared.

MP Did you have to cut a lot?

JF I had to cut so much! But you know, that’s a point of pride for any reporter. Someone on Goodreads gave me flack for having interviewed someone for a whole five hours only to share, out of the entirety of that interview, a few lines. Of course, it would have saved me a lot of time to have pleased this person by transcribing the five-hour interview and publishing that as my three-hundred-page book, but that’s the position that you want to be in, you want to be kind of queenly and to have a lot of options. .