After growing up in Washington, D.C. and graduating from St. Albans School in 1986, Johnson moved to New York City in 1990 and spent twenty-one years there, living in Morningside Heights, Manhattan for seven years, then the West Village, where his first son was born. Johnson writes that, on September 11, 2001, he and his wife "watched the Twin Towers fall from Greenwich Street on our son's first day home from the hospital. When our second son was on the way, we decamped for Brooklyn..."