PHOTO: Francesca Zappia, author of Eliza and Her Monsters and Katzenjammer, whose stories delve deep into emotion, identity, and the surreal.
Young Adult Stories With Heart And Imagination
Francesca Zappia discusses her unique approach to young adult fiction, from mental health and masking to surreal worlds and fairy-tale retellings, blending emotional authenticity with bold narrative imagination.
Francesca Zappia writes with the rare precision of someone who not only sees the world differently, but who also understands the deep emotional terrain of trying to survive in it. Her stories inhabit that often-invisible borderland between reality and imagination, grounding the surreal in sharp emotional truth. Whether she’s exploring mental health through the lens of unreliable narrators or building eerie, mutable worlds like the one in Katzenjammer, her work is unmistakably intimate, richly layered, and deeply human.
Raised in Indiana with a mind for both code and creativity, Zappia brings a unique structure to her storytelling—an almost architectural attention to cause and effect, to the way one emotional beat sets off another. Yet for all her analytical clarity, her characters are tenderly drawn, often caught in the act of hiding or transforming—gestures familiar to anyone who’s ever felt the need to mask some essential part of themselves.
Zappia’s world-building is striking not only for its inventiveness, but for its empathy. From the haunted woods of Greymist Fair to the fragmenting psyche of Made You Up, she invites readers into spaces that challenge the boundaries of genre while holding fast to emotional authenticity. Her work doesn’t ask for easy answers. Instead, it creates room for ambiguity, strangeness, and connection.
In doing so, Zappia offers something rare and necessary: fiction that sees you—not just as a reader, but as a person still in the process of becoming.
What inspired you to explore mental health so deeply and authentically in Made You Up and Eliza and Her Monsters?
I’ve lived my whole life with autism and anxiety, and a good portion of it with depression. Sometimes I wonder if I’d had a book that explored those things when I was a teenager, I would have understood myself better and gotten help earlier. I hope my books can be that understanding for someone else.
How does your background in Computer Science and Maths influence your storytelling or the way you approach writing?
I’m a pretty logical person—I like when there’s a clear delineation between cause and effect, one thing leads to another, and you need the appropriate setup to get the payoff you want. Outlining a book is a lot like coding—but I don’t know if I have space to get into that here!
Katzenjammer has such a unique, surreal setting—what was the process of creating that world like, and what challenges did you face in writing it?
Writing Katzenjammer was a lot of putting down the first thing that came to mind. I had a base concept—girl stuck in her school with her classmates who are mutating—and I let my mind make up what it wanted. I had a big piece of white paper where I wrote down things like “cardboard body,” “five finger fillet,” and “field of flowers,” and built something with all those pieces.
The challenge was all in the theme. How do I convey that the point is the senselessness without just confusing the reader? How do I get the reader to take seriously a story that feels like a fever dream? I hope I managed to do it, but I know it’s still very strange for many people (including my dad).
Many of your books feature characters who live double lives or hide essential parts of themselves—why do you think that theme resonates so strongly in your work?
I’m not sure I even noticed that myself until this very question! I’ve been thinking a lot lately about autism and masking. Masking is when you control or alter what parts of yourself you show other people. I grew up masking. I still mask. It’s exhausting, but it makes some situations easier. It’s been a huge part of my life, so it makes sense that it would come up often in my work.
How did your experience with visual art influence the decision to include illustrations in books like Eliza and Her Monsters and Katzenjammer?
My publisher actually suggested adding art to my books! For Eliza and Her Monsters, it was a no-brainer: I wrote that book because of my love for Monstrous Sea, which I’ve been drawing pictures for since I was very young. And Eliza is an artist, so readers would want to see her art. Cat is also an artist, but a very different kind, and Katzenjammer is so visually specific and strange that including art served to enrich the story.
I think Katzenjammer would make an excellent graphic novel, actually, but I don’t have the patience to draw it myself!
Greymist Fair draws from darker, lesser-known Grimm fairy tales—how did you decide which tales to include, and what drew you to retell them?
I sat down one day and read through a compilation volume of Grimms fairy tales, marking the ones that felt the most interesting or emotional. From there, I picked out a handful that seemed like they could work as a string of stories that tied together.
I had wanted to do a dark, cozy holiday story set in a spooky forest for a long time, and Grimms fairy tales fit that so well. They ask us what we value, who our families are, and how we treat other people.
What do you enjoy most about writing for a Young Adult audience, and how do you balance fantastical elements with real-world emotional truths?
I love the heightened emotions in YA, the way that everything and anything can be world-changing. I like that maybe I can use my experience to help someone younger through a bad situation. The balancing isn’t so difficult when I approach the story from the emotional core: there is no story without the characters and what they’re going through, and fantastical elements have to be built on top of that.
What advice would you give to other authors who want to blend genre fiction with deeply personal or emotional storytelling?
Be vulnerable. The best stories are the ones that are the hardest, emotionally, to write. Even in your fantasy, your sci-fi, your horror—what human emotion are you trying to spark in your reader? How are you trying to connect?
