Lauren Groff

I am obsessed with Lauren Groff and her versatility as a writer. I’ve been following her short stories published in the New Yorker, which led me to Florida, a collection of weird and haunting stories, then the novel Fates and Furies.

When the story collection Brawler came out this year, I made it to a reading in San Francisco, where she generously shared her process and answered so many of our questions. Mine was, “When do you start sharing your work with other writers/readers for feedback?” She said she waits relatively late compared to other writers. And that she always writes her first draft by hand, then puts that draft away and begins the next draft on her computer.

At the reading, I bought the novels The Vaster Wilds and Matrix, one told in third person voice of a woman servant who escapes from a colony, and another in a third person voice chronicling Marie of France, a bastard woman who becomes the abbess of a bleak nunnery in England in the middle ages, and over the decades turns it into a thriving women-run community surrounded by a labarynth that they build.

Both these engrossing novels took me into the worlds of women enduring hardships that are unimaginable, yet fascinating and empowering. How Groff brings a reader into these obscure worlds and makes the characters relatable is ingenious.

I look forward to reading her earlier books, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Delicate Edible Birds.