Amherst Reads Transcript

Lolade Fadulu: Lauren Groff is from Cooperstown, New York and she graduated from Amherst College in 2001 as a French and English double major.  She then went on to earn her MFA in fiction from the University of Wisconsin—Madison.  She has written three novels and two short story collections.  Her most recent short story collection, called Florida, came out in June and it’s that collection that she and I will be talking about today.  So, hi Lauren!  Thank you for—

Lauren Groff: Hi Lola!

LF: Super excited to talk to you.  So, I guess you can really just dive right in.  I was thinking about, you know, in the opening story “Ghosts and Empties,” the narrator has a moment where, you know, she’s recently moved to Florida and she says, you know, “I decided that if I had to live in the South, with its boiled peanuts and its Spanish moss dangling like armpit hair, at least I wouldn’t barricade myself with my whiteness in a gated community,” and I was curious to know sort of if that was something that you thought about before moving to Florida.  I think race is so strange down there, as someone who’s from Florida.  I’m just curious to know if…maybe where that thought came from.

LG: Yeah, so I was not necessarily prepared for a lot of the segregation that happens in Gainesville because Gainesville, Florida, where I live, is an incredibly progressive city, in fact, I think we might be the most progressive city in Florida, which is saying a lot.  But at the same time, there are these really weird stratified, like, divisions in the town.  And so, I came here—you know, and a lot of the book is talking about exploiting my own preconceived notions of what Florida is—but I came here and we stayed for about a month in my parents’ (?) house, they sort of live on a swamp that they call a lake and it has alligators and everything in it.  And I was like, you know, “I’ve been here in this weird gated community for, you know, two months now and I haven’t seen a single African American person but I know that they live in Gainesville.  What’s going on?”  And I started to realize, it’s because the town is almost like multiple cities sort of living uncomfortably together.  So, my husband and I, when we went to buy a house, tried very hard to live in a place that was much more urban, it has people of all different races, of all different ethnicities, of all different socioeconomic levels.  In fact, in the house that we moved into—and this actually comes out in that story, which is not autobiographical—there was a homeless person living under our house when we moved in, and we didn’t know what to do because it was their home before it was ours.  So, we just sort of let it happen for a while until they went away.  So, we actually—we tried really hard to find a place in Gainesville that seemed to be the nexus of all the different Gainesvilles that exist.  And, as you come from Florida, you know—right?—it’s just a very strange monkey bread state and these things happen all over the place. 

LF: Yeah, it was interesting sort of, you know, leaving Florida, going to Amherst, seeing how diverse it was, you know, racially, socioeconomically, and then going back home during the holidays because where I’m from is predominantly white, super religious, very conservative, so it was sort of the first time that I started to realize how, I guess, different and unique of a place Florida is.  So, I thought it was cool that you addressed that sort of in that first story.  But I’m curious…you said that when you and your husband first moved into your place, there was, in fact, a homeless person living under your house.  Did you have a relationship with them at all?

LG: Yeah, it was an interesting… [Laughs] but not really.  We were so…I guess, this was our first house that we ever bought, we had only lived in apartments and rentals before and we didn’t want to be the nasty people who buy a house and suddenly, like, knock on the neighbors’ door if they’re playing music past midnight, you know?  Like, we wanted to be good neighbors and we didn’t know how to act, so—and also, this person was actually really very sensitive to us, too, and so, they would leave really early in the morning and come really late at night.  So, it was this weird symbiotic relationship without, really, interaction.  I think they thought that we didn’t know…I don’t know, it was all very complex, so…I could have done better. [Laughs]

LF:  No, that’s [laughs] quite a story.  So, I guess I wondered—this is probably a good segue into another question I have—I know that you’ve said in other interviews that, you know, the unnamed writer who narrates many of the stories throughout the collection is not you.  And I’m curious to know, if you could maybe talk a little bit about what connects you to those writers, or, you know, maybe what makes you similar to them, what makes you different.

LG: So, one of the things that I realized when I published my first book, which was in the first person, so, you know, there’s that—it’s called The Monsters of Templeton, and there are multiple…there are many points of view in that book, it’s kind of a crazy book, it’s definitely, like…it was my fourth book I’d ever written, and I thought I was never going to publish anything, so why not just make it as crazy as you possibly can?  And when I went out on book tour with that book, I hadn’t taken into consideration that there’s this hysterical pregnancy in the book, and I was pregnant at the time I was on tour, and I swear to God, not only one person, but two people actually stood up in a Q&A session, looked at my giant belly, and asked me if I were truly pregnant.  So, there’s this feeling where…a certain sort of almost biographical fallacy that plays into readers’ minds, especially when the writer is a relatively young woman as I was at the time.  So, from that moment, I did realize that no matter what I was going to write, people were going to see me in it.  And I also think that’s one of the temptations of reading living writers is to see the life in the work.  So, I’ve been playing with that since that day, and it really is a lot of play.  I sort of see it as a dance that you make with the reader, you know, you and I are going out and we’re having a tango, and I’ll spin you out and then I’ll pull you back in, you know, like a top. [Laughs] And so, there are a lot of stories that seem to be from the perspective of the same woman, right?  She has two sons…in one story she’s a writer, and in the other one it’s not really clear what she is.  And, to be perfectly honest, she’s not not me, but someone from the inside of my life, like my husband or my children, would look at her and say she’s absolutely not me.  So, what I’m doing in this situation is sort of playing with the expectation of biographical fallacy, and I’m bringing the reader in tight in the dance that we’re dancing together.

LF: So, I guess I also wonder…so, in the last story, and I guess that’s the one where—I hadn’t realized it wasn’t very clear whether the…so, this is the one where, you know, a mother takes her two sons to France, and she wants to go to France in particular because she’s aiming to write about an author, and she wants to visit the places where he grew up and where he visited.  And so, I guess I did assume that she was a writer, but maybe this was the one where you said it’s not necessarily clear, you know, what she does.  But there was one point where, you know, she says, “The default voice in stories is male.”  And I sort of paused and was thinking about how, in your collection, the default voice is female.  And there were some times as I was reading where it was very clear that the female character was trying to shirk off traditional gender roles, but you sort of complicated it because sometimes, you know, they were shirking off these roles, but maybe to the point of hurting themselves or coming off as indifferent.  And I was curious to know sort of how much you were meditating on how these female voices came across throughout the collection.

LG: Actively!  And I have to say, at this point, I’ve given probably two hundred interviews, and this is the first time anyone’s ever asked this, and I’m so grateful!  Thank you so much! [Both laugh] (?) For educating people to ask beautiful questions like this.  Yes, I was!  I was very deeply invested in the sort of reconsidering expectations, gender expectations, and what it is that we just default to.  When we’re not only talking about mother- or parenthood, right?—because this is something that I chase again every single day of my life as a parent—but also about the voice of female creators.  And it’s something that’s in my day-to-day perception of the world, and how we just fall into these automatic positions of bias unless we’re constantly questioning what it is that we think and what it is that we feel.  Even the people who have the best intentions in the world fall into these biased ideas.  And it’s because we live in a society, right?  That’s what societies give us—a whole network of subterranean rules by which we all elect to play.  But, some of these rules are sort of predicated on historical eras that are not contemporaneous and do not actually speak to who we are as people now.  And so, pushing up against them, I find, is the job of not only a creative person, an artist, but is also the job of someone who likes to think a lot.  And it’s the job of someone, honestly, who’s had a liberal arts education because, yeah, it didn’t teach us to program computers or shoot rockets in the air, [laughs] but it did teach us to question the principles by which civilization has always gone forward, and to see if we can actually undermine some of the more painful and hurtful ones.  I was really invested in these questions in the book.  Also, what makes a good man, right?  Because the woman in these stories is raising two sons in today’s really terrible world of toxic masculinity.  And so, that’s another question that goes into the book, and it goes into sort of the anxiety and sort of attendance underneath the surface of each of these stories in the book.

LF: Yeah, that point where you said, you know, also asking the question of what makes a good man, I was immediately reminded of the…I think it was “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” the one where the dad is very, I guess, adventurous, and is collecting snakes and interacting a lot with reptiles, and it’s interesting to see how, I guess, he raises his son and his relationship to his father.  And I was curious, especially because this is in some ways related to Amherst.  You were saying that you have a liberal arts education and you’re taught to question and to think differently and out of the box, but at the same time, it’s pretty easy or common, I think, for people to—at least from what I’ve noticed—sort of have these questions but maybe still go down traditional routes.  And there’s a line in both “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners” and in “Above and Below” where their main characters are sort of mediating on whether they took enough risks.  There’s, you know, the line where…in “Above and Below” the narrator says, “But she’d been too careful in the end.  Unable to take the necessary scholarly risk, and they had withdrawn even that from her.” And I guess I am curious maybe what inspired you to I guess yeah write those parts where you have throughout the collection people questioning the world they live in but also maybe not acting on the answers they receive from those questions.

LG: Yeah Sometimes I wonder if the act of creating fiction in particular is the act of um sort of kinds of balance, tensions or maybe not tensions but forces that are pushing us towards security and forces that are pushing us towards maybe chaos or not chaos but breaking up of security in some way. And just the tensions between the individual and he community. The individual wats freedom and the community longs for you know laws and things to be in the right places at the right time and that’s really one of the inherent  underlying I guess powers I  any work of fiction is this idea between trying to push up against the invisible boundary of convention. And I do think that when it comes to most people if you’re going to look at them as fictional characters you do start to see in almost everyone there is a moment where there is a faltering fact into (?) because I think it is one of those things where I feel like is probably universal human need and there is a certain point where you can’t just see or stick for 24 hours a day you need to go home and go to bed *giggles* you need to conform and come back to the fold and renew yourself in order to go back out in ­­­­______and so I think that um in most of my stories there is a point where my characters get exhausted and they have to stop and they have to regroup. And I think that from my observations of humanity I see it all the time and I see it in myself so this is you know you just play with what you have.

LF: I see. And that actually, I wasn’t planning on asking you this question but now I’m thinking about it. When you were talking about your, I mean you just mentioned your observations of humanity and something that I really loved was this question of how precise your language was and just sort of how descriptive you know descriptive of parts of um where you know your characters were parts of the environment that I hadn’t even thought of existing. And yeah can you maybe talk a little bit about maybe how your observations turned into these incredibly rich sentences and phrases.

LG: I mean, so, I actually think that that’s one of the jobs of a writer or someone who’s a creator is to see things that are familiar and make them strange again. If you look at anything for long enough it’ll start to seem alien. I know you probably did this too because I also think it Is probably a universal thing but when you were a kid you probably took a word, any word, maybe even your name, until you were alienated from that word and it became sort of psyche and bizarre and sort of rich and strange to you but I think the fact Is, there is strangeness lurking  under familiarity everywhere you go and when I was at Amherst for the first two years I thought of myself as a poet even though Uh It was just really evident from the world telling me that I was not a poet and I take that from my early studies of poetry and uh not only the creation of poetry but also the understanding of (?) a lot of the ideas about attention to the singular thing until it becomes strange and you can describe it because for me I don’t know you know when  we write we try to fill our work with the thing that  pleases us the most and language is the thing that makes me get up in the morning other than my children *laughs* so you know I’m having a bad day I will pull George Elliot of the shelf and I will sit in her beautiful lucid limpid language and feel better because communication means different things to different people but for me it is a way of not only is again the tension between security and obliteration  and for me it’s that insecurity and at the same time seeing my normal grey wool life and seeing it and taking it apart and seeing the wonder underneath that and language can do that the most easily for me.

LF: I guess to sort of go to the destruction side and obliteration part of the tension, throughout the stories there’s overall many heat, there are a lot of storms, in Eyewall a woman is inside while a storm is wreaking havoc on her home. In Salvador, a woman is trapped in a store with a predatory grocer, she’s trapped because there is this crazy storm outside and I was wondering if living in Florida has sort of changed your views on Climate change and your relationship to climate change the way you think about it.

LG: Yeah, well I have been here for twelve years and I think twelve years ago even those of us who are the most perceptive about climate change would never have seen where we would be now. I think that was always the fear  but now it is just the reality so the thing about living in Florida as you well know is that no matter how you try you can’t really keep nature out it just comes inside with you with these gusts of humidity as you open the door. This sounds really gross but I live in Florida so you’ll get it, there’s  this lizard that lives inside the air conditining vent in my house and I wouldn’t ever want him to go outside because I kind of love him but at this point has been here for so many years and I don’t know why he has been here for so long but he’s kind of a bleached lizard and he only comes out at night and you know I wait for him sometimes and he reminds me that no matter how domesticated I think I am there’s this wildness lurking underneath. But to go back to your point I do go outside everyday on a run and I try to run every single day for mental health reasons and I go out to this beautiful place called Payne’s Prairie and there’s actually in the middle of Florida a giant prairie and I have been able to track with my own eyes, sort of the rapidity of climate change here in Florida. And it is so astonishing and frightening. I mean you know, Miami is not going to be around in twenty years if we don’t do something. The aquifer is going to get _____and we won’t have fresh water and I mean Florida really is one of the most vulnerable states but one of the richest state when it comes to the environment and botany and lizards, I want to save lizards so my perception of the vulnerability of the world and seeing the rapidity of what is happening through human greed. YEAH IT’S SAD!

LF: I like that you just said vulnerable because I don’t know I’m not often shocked while reading I don’t know im often shocked while reading and I don’t know if that means im not reading the right books, it likely does and the same with TV shows although Westworld is pretty shocking I guess there were so many surprises and unexpected turns throughout your stories and I am forgetting actually the name oh in Salvador when the woman is trapped in the store with the grocer and It just sort of…I thought I knew what was going to happen and then he put his hand on her thigh and I thought “oh no this is going to be assault­—I mean that is assault—I thought it was going to go even further and it  didn’t and then it changed in a different way and just happened so many ties throughout the story and I guess I’m wondering  you know as you wrote was it a gosal to shock your reader—or how much were you thinking about all of these twists and turns and surprises?

LG: The funny thing is that when I write a story I never think about the reader at all until the end and then I start to think about the reader and um I think that literary fiction in the later part of the 20^th century or actually in all of the century has sort of cast away from the idea of event plot as being as being of good quality but plot is how you seduce the reader who doesn’t want to read your work to continue to read it. So I do think of fiction as seduction right and eventually you’re going to carry the reader along the attributes that you value. I think plot has been scorned for far too long and I do find it important and it happens in our lives. And as much as I love the Virginia Wolff inferiority I also think that that happens in our lives but also crazy things jump out at you and storms happen more often these days and people disappoint you and it happens in life. Life isn’t all about sad thoughts of someone leaning on the edge of a cliff which is what literary fiction has been for so long. So I think choosing back plot in some way I see it—and this is probably ridiculous— but I see it as almost a democratic move away from academia as sort of the foundation of what we want in our fiction. And a way to engage people who don’t think that they need to reach your work and try to make them reach your work and see other humans and other people who are different from you as worthy of attention, worthy of love, and worthy of human kindness that one gets from reading about people who are different from you. I think that that’s really important.

LF: I’m wondering is there anything I didn’t ask you about Florida that you wanted to talk about in this interview.

LG: It’s so good! No you’re so good at what you do! You know I don’t even know you. You’re a young Amherst Alum and I’m proud of you!

LF: Thank you! I am proud of you too and I don’t know how much that means coming from a twenty-three year old but no, this is great. I'm so excited to have this connection with you!

LG: Yeah, Millenials are the best! You're going to save us--please save us!