Retta, the protagonist of Finding Frances, Kelly Vincent’s 2020 young adult novel, knows that something is off with her overprotective mother. After years of home schooling, Retta is starting classes at her local high school. But her mother keeps her on a tight leash, and Retta’s getting home from school late can send her into hysterics. Retta starts investigating the story she’s always accepted about their past—a devastating car accident that killed her father and grandparents—and when she tries to get a copy of her birth certificate, she learns that everything she has been told is a lie:

This was not what I expected. At all. My finger fell out of my mouth and landed on my lap.

The letter said there was no such birth on record in the vicinity of the date I had given.

What? How could that be?

The letter fell to the floor.

I’d never been born? Certainly not where Mom claimed I’d been born.

My mind was an Arctic wasteland.

When it started to thaw, I knew this just proved with absolute certainty that Mom was a liar.

“Vincent intriguingly chooses to focus on the young protagonist’s feelings of anger, grief, rebellion, and helpless bewilderment when she finds out that nothing she thought she knew is true—including her own name,” writes the book’s Kirkus reviewer. In fact, Retta has spent most of her life on the run from an abusive father thanks to an underground network of activists that helped her mother escape her violent marriage.

Domestic violence prevention is “something I’m quite passionate about,” Vincent says. “I wrote this book to teach people to look for some of the signs.” 

Part of the inspiration for Finding Frances came from watching friends and co-workers contend with their own violent relationships. “When you’re not used to seeing that kind of thing, it’s quite shocking,” she says, remembering one incident from her waitressing days when a colleague’s abusive partner came into the restaurant, in violation of a restraining order, putting everyone at risk.

Vincent’s waitressing days are now behind her, and she divides her time between writing and her day job in data science, which, she describes, she arrived at after a “long, circuitous journey.” Her undergraduate degree was in history, and she developed a fascination with languages after studying Scottish Gaelic. “I became really interested in minority and disappearing languages” beyond Gaelic, she says, and when she went back to school to learn programming, she found an overlap between her interests. 

“I was a software engineer, but we were working with language,” Vincent explains, which led her into data science. She is particularly interested in the ethical implications of her work. “I find it really interesting, because you can do so much good with it but also so much bad.” 

Working from her home in the Seattle area allows Vincent to transition easily between analyzing data and finding words that flow. “I’m ready to work on my writing as soon as I stop working on my day job. Usually I will just change computers and start writing.” That, she notes, is the ideal balance between her professional and personal interests. “I kind of work all the time on something,” she adds, and she chooses projects that inspire her.

As a writer, Vincent sees reading as an essential part of her work, crucial to developing her storytelling skills. But she was a reader long before she became a writer. “I grew up reading science-fiction and fantasy,” she says, citing DragonLance and Ender’s Game as early favorites. (She has turned away from Orson Scott Card in recent years, though, due to his homophobic statements.) “I read all the time,” Vincent says of her teen years. “There’s even a picture of me at prom, sitting in a chair [and] reading a book.” 

After high school, her tastes shifted toward literary fiction, and then she discovered YA, with Eleanor & Park drawing her into the genre. “I like the angst,” she admits. What appeals to her more, though, is the sense of potential she finds in YA books. “Teenagers are at that point in their lives where almost anything is possible.”

When Vincent was in her 20s, she first started submitting her writing for publication. She received one particularly brutal rejection early on. It hurt deeply, but it also helped her to realize what she needed to work on. “I hadn’t learned you have to develop your craft,” she says, and she turned her attention to building the skills she would need to succeed in creating a book.

“I finally understood how it worked, and I threw myself into it,” she says. In 2013 she participated in National Novel Writing Month and wrote the first draft of the manuscript that would eventually become Finding Frances—after “many, many drafts” as she worked with critique partners and further developed her writing abilities.

At the moment, Vincent is working on Uglier, a sequel to her young adult novel Ugly, which she calls “a really personal story.” Ugly is the story of Nic, a gender-nonconforming teen girl who realizes that her home will never be the supportive place she needs as she develops an understanding of who she is. “She’s pretty much confused through the whole book,” Vincent says. “The fun thing I’m finding with the sequel [is that] she’s completely different because she’s put herself in a new situation.” In Uglier, Nic deals with the lack of family and community support when she leaves home for a public boarding school, something Vincent also did as a teen, where she discovered “the way you can change things by changing your environment.”

“I’ve been writing a scene a day for the past few weeks,” Vincent says. She is also continuing to refine her craft as a writer, developing new skills, and is working on studying art with the goal of being able to illustrate her own picture books, another genre she has been experimenting with. “I take my writing seriously,” she says. “I love having created something that I think is good,” and she enjoys hearing when readers feel the same way.

Sarah Rettger is a writer and bookseller in Massachusetts.