Lauren Groff interview: the author on Fates and Furies, Obama and Florida (2024)

Framed on the wall of Lauren Groff’s home is a letter from Barack Obama. He explains why Fates and Furies, her third novel, was his favourite book of 2015. He wasn’t the only megafan: Groff’s subversive story of a marriage told from both sides was an instant chart-topper. Reviews were rapturous. Yet for Groff, accolades don’t get better than Obama’s. “I cried when the giant envelope from the White House arrived,” she recalls.

Recently, though, the letter has become a source of frustration. “Men in America didn’t feel like they wanted to read me until I got the imprimatur of a powerful man. And I am very, very ambivalent about that. I don’t need a man to reinforce that I am a good writer. Sorry to be blunt,” she says, talking over Skype from her study in Gainesville, Florida, without betraying a hint of genuine apology.

Defiance courses through the 39-year-old American and her writing. Fates and Furies was a knockout for her prose, described in one review as “precise, lyrical, rich, at once worldly and epically transfiguring”. “I aim to seduce and then destroy,” she cackles.

Her latest, Florida, is a short-story collection that is more serious, but no less subversive. A portrait of the state seen through the lens of an outsider, it is about living in a place that makes your skin crawl. “Socially and physiologically, this place is a wreck,” says the New York-born author, who never thought she’d wind up in the Sunshine State until the day her husband, Clay, decided to take over his family’s student property rental business 12 years ago. “I have to discover how to live here. The stories are continuous attempts to try to understand the place, which is incomprehensible.”

The result is an unsettling, stinging collection that feeds on Florida’s paradoxes. Segregation, racism, poverty and hellish numbers of reptiles, sinkholes and hurricanes crop up alongside lavish wealth, expanding universities and wildly beautiful prairies and swamps. Families fall apart, children are landed in nightmarish situations, bad men are a constant. I worry what the neighbours might think. Groff frowns: “I think talking about your ambivalence isn’t hurtful. It’s a way of asking questions and asking people to do better. I’m criticising Florida, but obviously I love it too.” Though that isn’t exactly obvious.

All the stories are drenched in dread, and many are autofictional. “This is the most personal book I’ve ever written — it comes out of very, very deep emotions.” Groff says earnestly. “I am fearful, which is why I need to write, I need to push that fear away.”

The concerns that hound her as a mother of two sons, aged 9 and 7, abound: how to “create good men” in a violent, macho America; how to push back against prescribed roles. The figure of an unmoored mother recurs. And a reflection in a story in which a mother whacks her head badly in the middle of a phone-signal-less Floridian nowhere, with only her two young sons, seems key: “While it’s true that my children were endlessly fascinating, two petri dishes growing human cultures, being a mother never has been ...”

“This is very much coming from me,” Groff says, nodding emphatically. “Female sacrifice is an offshoot of misogyny in a very real way. I am not a maternal mother, I love my children in a way that men in the past have chosen to love their children.” Clay is the chief “70%” parent. “Women have yelled at me for this, because they have been fed ideas that are hard to refuse.”

In a bid to stop herself being overtaken by rage, Groff doesn’t look at the internet or news until 2pm. But at the same time, she seems to get off on being angry and boldly nonconformist: “Our literary model is women turning their rage inward instead of out into the world, and that’s hideous. Right? I let it out intentionally.”

On Twitter she is a baiter, a prodder of trolls. In person she’s the same: at 6am in the gym, she used to get into horrific arguments with a group of wealthy white men in their seventies “who insisted they got their money on merit”. Naturally, Groff felt compelled to tell them the opposite.

There’s a feeling, I say, that the #MeToo movement will change popular fiction, that the long-established market for what Groff calls “the pretty princess” and “corrosive cowboy mythos” is dying. She shakes her head.

“These ur-narratives we all interact with have never been so powerful. And I think we’re going to get a lot of the same old ideas about what a woman is, what a man is.”

Exploding these, she says, is her role. “Especially since people seem to be calcifying within the narratives of who they are, who their people are and who their country is.”

Each of her three novels (The Monsters of Templeton, her 2008 debut, shortlisted for the Orange award for new writers, about an archaeology student who returns to her home town to dig into her past; 2012’s Arcadia, which looked at the failure of a utopian community; and Fates and Furies) was written “to rip down the previous one”. Short stories (Florida is her second collection) are interruptions of her novels: she carries them in her head for years, writing them down only when it becomes so urgent, she can’t see the novel she is working on.

Often she works in the manner of a flamboyant artist, writing on swathes of brown paper taped to the walls of her studio before tearing down the paper to start over. Complete drafts end up in the bin. “I cry a lot and begin again — though I have a feeling my husband keeps the drafts,” she says.

Groff started writing poetry as a teenager in upstate New York. For a long time, though, she had little success. At university in Amherst, Massachusetts, she was “so bad, I couldn’t even get published in the campus journal”. Still, she never gave up, writing three failed novels before Monsters of Templeton. Which came, ironically, after she had arrived in Florida. She might not be able to see a way out of the state — “I’m stuck, I’m caged here” — but it seems to work for her.

Florida by Lauren Groff is published on Tuesday (Penguin £15)

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