Every time Brian Selznick sets pencil to paper, he breaks the mold.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret (2007) combined children’s historical fiction with picture book, graphic novel, flip book, and cinematic elements; it spent 42 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, won the Caldecott Medal, and was made into the Oscar-winning movie Hugo.

Baby Monkey, Private Eye (2018), written with his husband, David Serlin, might be the first 200-page hardcover for beginning readers to feature a full bibliography, index, and image key. In a starred review of the bestseller, Kirkus wrote that Selznick “manages to do for the early reader what he accomplished with the picture book: reinvent it.”

When the idea for his first young adult novel arose—a love story between two 16-year-old boys, Angelo and Danny, set in Rome in the summer of 1986—the visionary of visual storytelling considered reinventing himself as a prose stylist.

“When it came time to actually write the story, I became very excited about the text, and how I could describe through words what I see in my head,” Selznick says, speaking from his home in La Jolla, California, via Zoom. “I came to feel like there was no purpose for drawings in this book. Having a book without pictures, for me, would be the most radical thing I could do.”

Scholastic editorial director David Levithan agreed that it was a radical—perhaps too radical?—move. “David, let’s say, felt strongly that there might be some use for pictures in the book,” Selznick recalls, “and I fought him on it—for a little while.”

The result is Run Away With Me (Scholastic, April 1), an affecting tale told in lyrical language…and approximately 100 pages’ worth of Selznick’s majestic pencil drawings. The combination offers an inimitable reading experience to lovers of YA.

“Selznick’s vivid line drawings…capture the mood of loneliness and longing,” Kirkus writes in a starred review of this “intricate and wondrous” novel. “Much like Rome itself, Danny and Angelo’s story, revealed in poetic prose, is layered in stories and history, each one essential to the whole.”

Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

I understand Run Away With Me is deeply inspired by your experience of living in Rome with your husband during the Covid-19 pandemic.

I knew I wanted to write a young adult book. The boys were going to be 16. They were going to be falling in love in a way that I haven’t really approached in any of my other books. Even though I’ve had gay characters and gay love stories, they weren’t the main focus.

I had been thinking about walking through the empty streets of Rome during the pandemic—seeing the beauty of the architecture, the sculptures—the atmosphere—and began to imagine [the boys] walking through a version of Rome that paralleled that experience. Even though this isn’t a pandemic book, I wanted to convey that weird emptiness, a sense of strange possibility. That was a very powerful experience, and it stuck with me.

I admired the nuanced handling of privacy and secrets in this novel. I mean between Danny and Angelo—but also, perhaps especially, between Danny and his mother, an itinerant American book conservator and scholar. She seems to have some idea that he’s made a special connection with another boy, but she doesn’t press for a confession.

One of the things I knew when I started writing the book was I didn’t want to write a coming-out scene, and I didn’t want there to be any violence. I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I didn’t want there to be any bashing. These feel like very common tropes for books about queer characters—and they’re tropes because they’re real. We have been hurt through history and are currently being hurt. There is violence. I don’t wish to underplay that or deny it, but I was very interested in the idea of creating a world of danger in which these two boys happen not to have a direct experience of danger themselves.

In fact, you give them a secret refuge within a dangerous world. A place for them to be alone, to safely reveal what they want to one another.

A lot of my books have secret places that the main characters find or create for themselves, in which they can be safe, in which they can make their own rules and hide out from the rest of the world in some safe fashion. That room that I gave to the boys is a real room at the American Academy in Rome that I found while I was there with some friends. Pretty much every place I describe in the book has some basis in reality—but I’ve kind of mushed up the details and mixed them all together.

Throughout their peregrination, Danny and Angelo share—and discover—queer histories that overlap and intersect with their present-day lives.

For me, a lot of the writing process was spent contemplating our connections with each other, connections with the past, connections with people we will never know, people we will never meet. There are three other gay love stories that we follow in Run Away With Me. They’re historical, but they were all living in present tense for themselves. There was no future yet. There was just what they were experiencing, and that was everything. For them—people in the deep past—what we’re living in right now might seem like a utopia in many ways. And we are becoming the historical past as we’re living our present tense lives. Looking back into history, weaving those stories together through time, can help us make sense of our lives, which feels very empowering.

You’ll be on a national book tour for Run Away With Me, with events in 11 cities. Are you looking forward to discussing this book with readers?

The idea that I’m about to go out on a tour around the country to talk about this book with audiences—hopefully with lots of young people in the audiences—is really thrilling to me. Having that sense of purpose, that solid ground to stand on right now, is really important. What’s giving me stability is the knowledge that I’m going to have the chance to go out and have conversations with other people. I want to be able to just talk about what you and I are talking about here—talking about history, talking about erasure, talking about time, and the idea that that things last even when people don’t want them to or try to suppress them. I want to listen to the ways people are scared right now and worried right now. Anticipating those conversations is giving me a lot of hope right now, and a lot of actual pleasure and joy. Of course, some are going to be very hard conversations; these are very hard times, absolutely. But we can’t live in grief all the time. We have to live in joy, and we have to live in curiosity and foster those connections.

Editor at large Megan Labrise hosts the Fully Booked podcast.