{"id":126157,"date":"2018-06-05T09:00:43","date_gmt":"2018-06-05T13:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=126157"},"modified":"2018-06-05T14:31:26","modified_gmt":"2018-06-05T18:31:26","slug":"my-own-boundaries-seem-to-be-fading-an-interview-with-lauren-groff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/06\/05\/my-own-boundaries-seem-to-be-fading-an-interview-with-lauren-groff\/","title":{"rendered":"My Own Boundaries Seem to Be Fading: An Interview with Lauren Groff"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Photo credit: Megan Brown.<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

\u201cI still wouldn\u2019t choose Florida as my home state, but I\u2019m glad it chose me,\u201d Lauren Groff replied when I asked why she had chosen to live on the peninsula full of snakes and rains, marshes and forest. Still, the author, whose works include the Obama favorite\u00a0<\/em>Fates and Furies and the acclaimed collection <\/em>Delicate Edible Birds, named her new book after this unchosen habitat. <\/em>Florida brings together eleven stories written over the course of the dozen years Groff lived in the state, but she never intended to pay homage. \u201cThe fact that these are all Florida stories comes out of the fact that I feel ambivalent or unsettled about the place where I live,\u201d she said.<\/em><\/p>\n

It seems almost contradictory that ambivalence, as a mode, would be the seed for such potent fiction, but one of Groff\u2019s distinguishing skills is the ability to write within such contradictions. Her work is subversive, but quietly\u2014it captures what\u2019s mysterious about the inevitable, what\u2019s bizarre about the inescapable. This collection has some familiar motifs from her novels\u2014long marriages, frightful domesticity, foreignness, and the surreality of motherhood. And while most of the stories have appeared elsewhere and received big awards, brought together, these narratives of young families, divorced couples, and unconventional women vibrate with something new. These are stories about how human nature is an extension of the natural world, how our relationships are contoured by greater forces, and how time is delivered by nature\u2014regardless of the checks and measurements we superimpose.<\/em><\/p>\n

The rains in <\/em>Florida are biblical, to say the least. The margins between earthly and celestial routinely dissolve. From the little girls abandoned alone on a tropical island in \u201cDogs Go Wolf\u201d to the mother in \u201cFlower Hunters\u201d who reads the naturalist William Bartram while her children trick-or-treat in a storm, the characters in Groff\u2019s stories experience the fluctuations of the outdoors on an elemental level. Nature is eroticized in a way that is not quite sexual yet wholly sensual. I asked the author for a word to describe this writing technique, one that transforms humans into phenomena, creatures\u2014while at the same time placing, with precision, those characters in their environment. Her suggestion was <\/em>wilding.<\/em><\/p>\n

This call-and-response between domesticity and nature animates quotidian banalities, such as adultery in \u201cFor the Love of God, for the Love of God\u201d and \u201cEyewall,\u201d parenthood in \u201cThe Midnight Zone\u201d and \u201cYport,\u201d and aging in \u201cAbove and Below\u201d and \u201cSalvador.\u201d Groff takes the structures we mistake as essential to life and makes them look absurd before nature\u2019s implacability. The stories in <\/em>Florida suggest that the relationship between humans and our planet\u2014that home none of us chose\u2014transcends the power struggle of dominance and submission.<\/em><\/p>\n

I corresponded with Groff as she was bouncing between Iceland and the state that claims these stories. \u201cI love Iceland\u2014and yet I felt immediate relief on touching down here,\u201d she wrote. \u201cAfter twelve years, Florida has, despite everything, become home.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Many of the women in this collection are Florida transplants, once northerners \u201cdazzled by the flora and fauna.\u201d Do you still feel that sense of wonder?<\/p>\n

GROFF<\/p>\n

Most days, I have a moment or two of wonder. Yesterday, when I took the dog for a walk after dinner at sunset, there was a giant dead rat snake on the sidewalk that I marveled at, and then I came home in the dark through such a pungent smell of jasmine, which is in full bloom right now, and my head got a little swoony from the potency of the scent.\u00a0<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Throughout these stories, there is the sense of dazzlement\u2014and fear\u2014that the Floridian landscape elicits, but I noticed that the mothers incline toward an awe that is more fearful, while the childless women seem more resigned to their smallness before nature. Was that a shift in perspective you went through when you became a mother?<\/p>\n

GROFF<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t clock that, but I think it\u2019s a good observation. The first stories were written in Florida in the years before I had children\u2014the earliest story in the collection is from 2007, and my eldest son was born in 2008. I\u2019d say the way nature is described in the earlier stories is, in texture, a bit more granular, a bit oddball. The perspective takes a step back with the later stories, in which the characters tend to have children. It\u2019s an accurate assessment of my own changing vision of nature when I suddenly had children in the world whose fates I couldn\u2019t fully control. Nature went from something lived with intimately to something with a scope far beyond the boundaries of what I, as a human, could possibly understand\u2014from awesome to awful. There\u2019s awe in both, but in the latter, there\u2019s a great deal of dread too.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The first story, \u201cGhosts and Empties,\u201d follows a mother who roams her neighborhood at night and sees her neighbors lit within their windows as though they\u2019re in \u201cdomestic aquariums.\u201d It made me wonder if being a voyeur is about detaching from our humanity, an attempt to braid ourselves into our surroundings\u2014rather than seeking an understanding of humanity, and ourselves, by studying others. What do you think? As a writer, studying others has a greater role in your life than most.<\/p>\n

GROFF<\/p>\n

I wonder if it isn\u2019t more likely that there are multiple things going on at the same time when you\u2019re a voyeur. It\u2019s true that there\u2019s an element of distance needed to make observations while on the move, and you\u2019re not looking to engage with humans in conversation. But there\u2019s an intense curiosity at play, too, a sense that you\u2019re engaging profoundly with others, though you\u2019re doing so more invisibly than you would by other means. You\u2019re definitely engaging with humanity, and with yourself, when you\u2019re looking intensely at another person or at another person\u2019s life from the outside\u2014if you wanted to disengage, you\u2019d sit in a dark room and stare at a blank wall. Take, for example, reading. The reader of any book is a deep-feeling, deeply engaged voyeur\u2014she\u2019s not disengaged just because she doesn\u2019t walk into the text and sucker-punch the narrator, no matter how much she might want to! The writer has to observe, but it\u2019s observation in service of engagement.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Throughout the collection, there is also a sense of\u00a0dissolution between humans and nature. There\u2019s a heart-wrenching passage in \u201cDogs Go Wolf\u201d when the older of the two island-stranded sisters feels more like a cloud than a human, somehow of the atmosphere rather than of a body, and she is utterly content\u2014her future lawyer self will pine for this state. There\u2019s an echo of this in \u201cFlower Hunters\u201d when the woman says to her dog, \u201cOne day you\u2019ll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud.\u201d Do you think it\u2019s possible to find the freedom, maybe the bliss, of detachment and still engage with the day-to-day world?<\/p>\n

GROFF<\/p>\n

The older I get, the more my own boundaries seem to be fading, which is terrifying and fascinating in equal measure. If I live to be eighty (if humanity survives that long), I\u2019ll be transparent and able to walk through my neighbors\u2019 front doors, not just look through their windows. I think the feeling comes from the slow hardening of potential into reality\u2014you become stuck in a less kinetic form of personhood through the process of becoming who you will be\u2014and it can feel sometimes as though your deepest self turns into a piece of internal furniture, something lived with and sometimes overlooked because it can be taken for granted. Some of this is because I\u2019m in a long marriage, some because I\u2019m a mother whose relationship to her children will always be porous. In their different ways, my family will always consider me part of their own bodies. Some of it comes from the ongoing project of the life of writing, where the longer you write, the more the writing comes from the id and the less it comes from the ego. I wouldn\u2019t call the condition bliss. It doesn\u2019t always feel good. It\u2019s a condition of aging plus perspective.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

After I read the line \u201cRain unleashed itself\u201d in the story \u201cEyewall,\u201d I couldn\u2019t read the rains of these stories as happening any other way. Weather, particularly rain, consistently arrives with apocalyptic power. In both \u201cSalvador\u201d and \u201cEyewall,\u201d a woman is trapped inside during an epic storm and survives to find an object untouched by the storm. In \u201cEyewall,\u201d it\u2019s an egg, and in \u201cSalvador,\u201d it\u2019s \u201cone perfect orange, its pores even and clear.\u201d What is the significance of the objects and their survival?<\/p>\n

GROFF<\/p>\n

Natural forces in Florida assert themselves far more strongly than I\u2019ve experienced in other places I\u2019ve lived\u2014upstate New York, France, Massachusetts, California, Wisconsin, Louisville, New Hampshire. Here, in the summer, a day without a quick burst of rain will be relentlessly hot and humid, so you learn to long for the release of a storm. Though I\u2019ve never felt more as though rain could kill me than when we first put a metal roof on our house and a torrential downpour came through. The weather always holds an element of violence here. It reminds you that you\u2019re an animal. And I guess I\u2019m always moved by an object\u2019s life span, which often plays out on a different scale than the human. An orange blazes briefly before it\u2019s gone, but the piece of volcanic rock I brought back from Iceland for my little son will long outlive him and probably most life on this planet too. We think of pencils as ephemeral, but if they\u2019re not used, they can exist without disintegration for multiple generations. We live our daily lives among exquisitely varied timelines. I find this endlessly fascinating.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also fascinated by timelines and the units and constructs we try to impose on time. In your stories, time and nature are almost interchangeable forces. In \u201cMidnight Zone,\u201d you write, \u201cTime is impassive, more animal than human. Time would not care if you fell out of it.\u201d This opened up so much of the collection for me. In \u201cEyewall,\u201d you reference \u201cThe Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,\u201d by T.\u2009S. Eliot, which is a poem very much concerned with how to charter time, how to consciously live within it and acknowledge it as something outside of our control. Eliot\u2019s poetry became another key to this collection for me. \u201cBurnt Norton\u201d came to mind:\u00a0\u201cBut only in time can the moment in the rose-garden \/ The moment in the arbour where the rain beat \/ The moment in the draughty church at smokefall \/ Be remembered; involved with past and future. \/ Only through time time is conquered.\u201d Do you feel more subject to time in environments with more wildlife, more nature? I wonder if it\u2019s easier to avoid the weight of time in cities.<\/p>\n

GROFF<\/p>\n

Time is something I\u2019m acutely aware of, and I\u2019m so glad you saw this element in the collection. Humans are the most delusional species because we expend so much energy trying to deny the passage of time and its necessary changes. Art, in some ways, is the attempt to assert human control over time, despite the ultimate futility of the effort. I was definitely thinking of Eliot during different points in the writing of these stories. Only humans play with time, loop it and bunch it up and poke through it, in the service of trying to understand it. And what I find when I spend a prolonged period in nature is that these delusions are stripped away\u2014I think deer probably understand they\u2019re going to die someday, but there\u2019s nothing they can do about it, and so there\u2019s no agony in the knowledge. There are seasons, internal clocks in nature, that quietly insist on the rightness of time passing.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The stories are full of references to works that reckon with mortality and the cycles of time\u2014traces of Hansel and Gretel in \u201cDogs Go Wolf,\u201d the writing of the naturalist William Bartram in \u201cFlower Hunters,\u201d and elsewhere, ghost stories. But to name a story after one of John Donne\u2019s Holy Sonnets was probably the most explicit. \u201cAt the Round Earth\u2019s Imagined Corners\u201d centers on Jude, a mathematical prodigy whose father is obsessed with snakes and whose mother, a trapped renaissance woman, leaves Jude behind when she flees the prison of her marriage. Why did you reference this sonnet for this story?<\/p>\n

GROFF<\/p>\n

I think Donne is one of our truest prophets of sex and death. I love this sonnet deeply\u2014the fact that he apostrophizes the angels of revelation and God himself, the way he bows to the anxiety that his own sins are such he may not be among the redeemed, the way that he pleads to be taught how to repent. It was this last leap in the poem that I was thinking about in terms of Jude, how he has something vicious (in a very human way) in him and how his longing to be better is so deep that he can barely face it in himself.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a spirituality in these stories. How do you reconcile religion and\u00a0fiction, religion and the natural world? The Bible is, in essence, a collection of stories interpreted for a certain purpose. I think we\u00a0gravitate to fiction for a reason that is somewhat related\u2014to understand the world we\u2019re in, figure out how to live. There\u2019s a line in \u201cAbove and Below\u201d that reads, \u201cOne living thing lost among so many others, not special for being human.\u201d Is the distinction here about faith\u00a0systems and power, about choice?<\/p>\n

GROFF<\/p>\n

I was raised a pretty religious little girl within a strand of Calvinism that was paternalistic and harsh. I started to turn against organized dogma as a young woman, though the stories and moral code of my childhood are still printed on the insides of my bones. There\u2019s a lot of the Bible in all of my work, but much of it is hidden. But after I turned away from religion, into that void poured a sort of mostly hopeful\u2014if sometimes despairing\u2014humanism that found its deepest expression in literature and art and music, all of which I find click the same spiritual gears in my head that religion used to turn. The difference between religion and humanism, if both are lived somewhat passionately and ecstatically, is a question of form, to my mind\u2014religion seems (to me) to be about obedience, staying within a form, and literature is the way of constantly pushing against and opposing and testing the boundaries of the forms and institutions that bind us.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Lucie Shelly is the senior editor of <\/em>Electric Literature\u2019s fiction magazine,\u00a0<\/em>Recommended Reading.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  \u201cI still wouldn\u2019t choose Florida as my home state, but I\u2019m glad it chose me,\u201d Lauren Groff replied when I asked why she had chosen to live on the peninsula full of snakes and rains, marshes and forest. 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