Photo by Eli Sinkus
Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff, recently named one of TIME Magazine’s Top 100 Most Influential People of 2024, is the author of five novels and two short story collections—including the wildly acclaimed 2018 tome, Florida. Groff has been recognized internationally as one of our generation’s most preeminent voices in fiction, exploring with lyricism and fearlessness themes of womanhood, environmental degradation, and spirituality.
Recently, I had the great pleasure of meeting with Groff to discuss the intricacies of her craft. Among other things, we discussed the particular richness of writing about the South, which she describes as “humid, moist, fertile” like a woman—full of contradiction and susceptible to the condescension and violence of misogyny. “I think any place that has a self-contradictory understanding of its own history and its own future, that place is going to be really, really rich for art,” she said.
Where do the ideas for your stories begin?
I realized like twenty years ago that if I were to sit down with the first initial idea of a short story, like the first thrill of the pulse when I read something or hear something or see something, that story is usually not ready to be told, right? So I learned to throw it into the back of the spinning, like, galaxy … you let the story sort of build for years or months, however long it takes. And then it’s usually the collision of that idea with another idea that the actual story is born. The hard part is really holding back and letting the story accumulate layers through time.
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Where do you collect your anecdotes, characters, histories?
The more you read, the more stories you get integrated into your soul. And when it comes to particularly the Florida stories, I think it’s just, you know, living in a place for long enough, talking to people, sitting at the boring dinner party when suddenly the person next to you turns and says something astonishing. It’s really just about living and opening your ears and your eyes. You're not looking for stories. They come to you. And that’s how they come to life. I think often, if you’re trying to push it, these stories won’t come.
You have a lot of recurring symbols and imagery that come up in your work, often illustrating tension between the natural world and the human one. Do you have certain symbols that you turn to, or do they emerge on their own?
Yeah, you know, one hopes that one never reuses things, but it’s inevitable. We’re limited people seeing through a limited filter. So, no, it’s not intentional. Well, actually, yes it is. Once in a while, it’s intentional, and it’s intentional for imagistic rhythm. Sometimes you need to take something, twist it halfway through, then twist it again at the end in a way that the reader will never notice. It’s almost like … it’s music, right? A leitmotif, that you change a little bit all the way through. So that there is a feeling of wholeness, of cohesion, and of change as well, at the same time.
“I think any place that has a self-contradictory understanding of its own history and its own future, that place is going to be really, really rich for art.”
When I read your work, the way you end stories is often a kind of gentle stepping back. I’m curious about when you decide, “This is where I leave them.”
My philosophy is that there should always be a window, all the way through the text, that the reader doesn’t know exists, in the room. And the ending is opening the window and letting the air in, letting a different kind of light in. So it lives there all along, but the ending is really just discovering the slight differential that’s going to change things.
I also think endings are musical in a way. And I’m not a musical person, I wish I were. But I know enough to sort of hear the melody and to know that the ending has to finish things, turn things a little bit, feel satisfying, in the way that a piece of music has to end.
Why do you think self examination through art is really important and worthwhile—maybe not for every writer but for you as a writer?
I love that you said not for every writer, because there’s nothing that I would say about my own practice that I would ever say is the same for the entirety of writers—that is ridiculous. So for me, personally, I think the universal resides in specificity, right? So the more specific you can get, the more attention that you can pay, not to the solipsism, not to the self, but to those larger urges in the work itself. You almost have to turn off the ego and turn on this idea of the work as its own autonomous creature, and pay as much attention as possible to this creature to allow it to grow. And then, when you do that, if you’re pushing hard enough into the specifics of this work at hand, the darkness resides within this, it will at one point crack open, I think, and break out into something that will speak to many, right? And not to many, to others.
That’s the purpose of art, right? Is to sort of almost take the material plane, the human body, and then take an abstract thought and implant it in someone else’s material body, so you’re coming out of the concrete plane into the abstract and then back down into the concrete. And the ability to do that comes out of specificity—making sure that everything in the work at hand feels right. Right? And even if it’s not aesthetically pleasing, or its difficult, or its hard, it still needs to feel right for the work itself.
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What makes the South, Florida, the Gulf Coast region a great source material for art and storytelling for you?
So, it’s incredibly rich. You know, a lot of the ways we talk about the American South are similar to the ways we describe women. It’s hot, it’s humid, it’s moist, it’s fertile. It’s all these things that, in some ways, are extraordinary. But I also think it can lead itself, especially in the Northeast, to condescension. And sort of this ingrained misogyny. This is a place of extraordinary contradictions and ambivalences. And I think ambivalence is one of the richest veins of art because it doesn’t mean wishy washiness, it means really strong feelings and directions pulling in multiple different ways. And that is tension, right? And what is a story but sort of playing with time and tension? And what is art but sort of speaking back into those tensions and those ambiguities and those ambivalences? So I think any place that has a self-contradictory understanding of its own history and its own future, that place is going to be really, really rich for art. And there’s no place like the South that is as contradictory, that has a less clear vision of what it is, that has many different voices saying many different things, all at once. And I think that is so magnificent. It’s, you know, it's a cacophony. And it takes a trained mind to sort of follow one thread all the way through, but that’s what art is, right? That’s what good art does.
In Florida, you have a story where a woman becomes so overwhelmed by the state of things, by the dying coral reefs, that her best friend can’t stand her anymore. How do you make space, living in the South, the first line for many of the major world issues like the climate crisis—how do you make space to hold the knowledge of what is happening, alongside your work as an artist, alongside just trying to live your life and be a person?
Yeah, it’s impossible. I actually think part of growing up for me was figuring out that I cannot do everything that I would like to do. I cannot fix the world, right. I’m going to be very lucky if my kids grow up being unharmed by me, not intentionally but because parents are difficult. But I think it’s a constant process of coming to terms with the extent of one’s failure and one’s longing. And that happens for me through writing. But it can happen through whatever, I mean it can happen through activism, through marching the streets. Or just—and it’s not just, it’s a glorious thing—raising a child to do this work, right? I mean, that in and of itself is enough of a project for a person, so long as we’re not, you know, sitting back and letting things happen. As long as we’re actually trying to move the needle. I think that’s all we can expect of ourselves.
That anxiety, it’s also this low lying sense of dread that almost becomes like a texture in your day. And you know it’s happening, and you can see it happening, but how can you stave it off?
This past spring, Groff opened up a bookstore in Gainesville, Florida to push back against book bans in the state. Learn more at thelynxbooks.com, and find more of Groff's work as an author at laurengroff.com.
