An Interview with Ryan Gattis, author of “All Involved”
By Laurie Winer, Ryan Gattis, Seth GreenlandApril 29, 2016
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Today marks the 24th anniversary of the Rodney King riots, a wound still healing in the collective psyche of Los Angeles residents. When author Ryan Gattis first started his latest novel, All Involved, he didn't think the riots would be his backdrop, but over the course of his research he felt increasingly drawn to the painful event as both a compelling story and also as a kind of ever-present ghost that no Angeleno, especially those living in or near South L.A., can every truly get rid of. In this interview, Gattis talks about how he approached Los Angeles as an outsider and how his research subjects gave his fiction a sense of urgency and empathy that he didn't expect when he first set out to write an L.A. novel.
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LARB Contributors
Laurie Winer is a founding editor of LARB and the author of Oscar Hammerstein II and the Invention of the Musical (2023). She now lives in France and is at work on a book called The Hitler Tour.
Ryan Gattis is the author of the novels All Involved (2015), Safe (2017), and The System (forthcoming: July 2020). He is a member of L.A. art collective UGLARworks, and a mentor in PEN America’s Prison Writing Program. He lives in Los Angeles.
Seth Greenland’s first memoir, A Kingdom of Tender Colors, will be published in 2020 by Europa Editions. He is the author of five novels. His 1997 play Jungle Rot won the Kennedy Center/American Express Fund for New American Plays Award and the American Theater Critics Association Award. He was a writer-producer on the Emmy-nominated HBO series Big Love.