Lauren Groff never wanted to live in Florida. “I mean, Florida is the biggest joke of all the states,” she says. “It is the punch line to every other state’s joke.” Nevertheless here she is: the acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and twelve-year resident of Gainesville whose husband works in his family’s construction and real estate business and whose two sons have only ever called the Sunshine State home. 

“It’s a struggle every day,” Groff says, biting into toast with preserves at Oxford Exchange in Tampa, where we’re having breakfast on the third morning of the 2018 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference. “We moved here because, well, family businesses—they’re impossible to get out of. We’re never leaving.” She smiles ruefully as she chews. “I haven’t come to terms with being a Floridian yet. This is not my vision of myself. I feel if I were given my druthers, I would live in Paris full time, but that’s not where life brought me.”

It is in Florida, however, where Groff has honed her writing voice—all of her books have been published in the years she has lived here—and it is in Florida, perhaps, where she has discovered her most powerful subject matter. Groff’s new story collection, appropriately titled Florida, published in June by Riverhead Books, is ambitious, personal, and dangerous. Made up of eleven stories, it begins and ends with narratives told from the perspective of a character at odds with her circumstances. “Ghosts and Empties” follows a woman, a mother, as she runs in the predawn darkness trying to both escape from and return to her spouse and children. The final story, “Yport,” shows the same mother on vacation in France with her sons and, in the last scene, crouching in fierce maternal protection over one of them.

“I believe short story collections have to be an argument,” Groff says. “The argument here is about my life in Florida. In the beginning you see my narrator prowling, trying to get away from her family. At the end you see her crouched in this almost unbearable neuroticism of motherhood.” Another crunch of toast. “So the argument about maternity comes full circle.” 

Yet Groff’s best work may not be in her starts or her finishes, but in her middles. She is an artist who knows how to pace herself, comfortable in suspension.

Lauren Groff grew up in Cooperstown, New York, a small town of fewer than two thousand that is best known for the Baseball Hall of Fame. She is the eldest daughter of a doctor and a biology teacher. She and her two siblings all participated in sports, were required to get good grades, and took after-school jobs starting at age fourteen. “It was pretty much a lovely, normal-type family,” she says. “But problems—we never talked about them. If there was a problem, we’d find out through other people who’d heard about the problem, not from the family member directly.”

Groff pauses for a sip of coffee. “They still do this. If my mom’s mad at me, she’ll never tell me. I’ll have to find out from my dad or sister what’s going on. My dad’s family is mostly Dutch, and they have a lot of that shunning tradition. When he’s mad, he’s mad. He really shuts down. He won’t talk. He gives you the silent treatment.”  

While she hastens to clarify that she has “the best parents; they’re really lovely people,” she also notes that her parents’ psychologies permeate her art. “Part of it is you need to find the stories people are keeping from you, but you also need to find the deep-down secrets you’re keeping from yourself,” Groff says. “There’s a lot of cowardice in not facing the things that keep you up at night.” 

“The things that keep you up at night” could serve as a tagline for most of Groff’s work, which includes three novels, The Monsters of Templeton (Hyperion, 2008), Arcadia (Hyperion, 2012), and Fates and Furies (Riverhead Books, 2015), and the celebrated story collection Delicate Edible Birds (Hyperion, 2009). But the line is a perfect match for Florida, whose stories all seem to inhabit the same dark world, one in which the physical dangers of hurricanes and snakes hint at the far deeper, more complicated emotional and psychological threats that lurk just under the surface of Groff’s characters.

“I’m interested in the cowardice and also in the deep beneath,” says Groff about her work. “I try to express these things and also express the ambivalence about them. I think parts of my new book where the narrator doesn’t ask questions that may reveal a worse story are important. It’s a very deliberate act of hiding. In ‘Ghosts and Empties’ my narrator is constantly trying to look into other people’s lives but not necessarily looking into the scary parts of her own life.” It is no wonder then that Groff chose the story as the first in her new collection. Each successive story digs deeper from there—the characters growing bolder, daring to look a little closer at the scary parts. 

Groff may have been too busy to look very closely into any parts of her own life while she still lived at home in Cooperstown: She earned fourteen varsity letters in high school, maybe not competing with but certainly keeping up with her younger sister, Olympic triathlete Sarah True. However, after high school and before enrolling at Amherst College in Massachusetts, Groff spent a year in France living with a family of caterers. “Between the wine and champagne and every meal with dessert and cheese, I gained forty pounds,” she says. “When my parents came to pick me up at the airport, they didn’t recognize me.”

She eventually took off half the weight—“My souvenir of France, the other 20 pounds”—and at college signed up for soccer and crew. Joining the latter turned out to be a significant event, because the team captain, Clayton, became her boyfriend, then her fiancé, and then her husband. They lived first in Philadelphia and then in Madison, Wisconsin, where Groff earned her MFA in creative writing at the University of Wisconsin, before grappling with their next move. Clay wanted to live and work with his father in his native Florida and eventually raise kids with Groff close to his family. Groff made a decision. 

“I had my husband sign a ten-year contract. I said, ‘I’m out of here in ten years.’” She pauses. “That decade is technically over, and we should renegotiate, but the most important part of the contract wasn’t about where we lived. It was about how we live. 

“I told him that if I made this move for him, then here were my demands,” she says, and it becomes clear that this was no hypothetical contract. This is on paper: “I’m a writer. I’m going to continue to be a writer. I will never be a full-time mother. You will wake up with them. I won’t see you or the children in the morning. In the afternoons we’ll get a babysitter until I’m ready to come out of my office.” 

She adds: “I understand that if I’m cornered, I get really resentful, and resentment just kills marriage.” 

Groff says she is glad she put her needs in writing because, no matter what people believe, American parenting remains a sexist enterprise. “My husband is the primary parent, but my kids’ teachers still call me first,” she says, which can lead to a complicated situation when Groff is traveling for author events. “Sometimes I have to say, ‘What am I going to do? I’m in California.’ You can hear them thinking, ‘Ohhh, so you’re that writer mom.’”

The contract may be clear to Groff, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t disputes. “Sometimes my husband takes it less seriously than I do, but regardless of your gender or parenting status, if you’re the writer you have to take it more seriously. It means you’re taking yourself seriously as an artist.”

Separating herself as a spouse and parent from herself as an artist works, Groff says, because she’s very good at compartmentalizing. “I’ve come to understand that there are multiple Laurens, not a single one who is better or worse than any other, and that they can overlap and even contradict one another. The writer in me is deeply hostile to the mother in me, and the mother in me is fiercely protective of her children versus her work.” She compares the two states to writing and giving a reading. “Those are two very different skills, and they need to be cultivated separately. It’s all a matter of listening carefully and maintaining a fine balance and, if something goes awry, attempting to reset.”

Every morning Lauren Groff wakes early, around 5 AM, to take a long run through the Paynes Prairie Preserve State Park, a 21,000-acre expanse set on a freshwater marsh. “The other day I was running in the silence of the prairie and the fog was coming off of the tawny grasses, and there were big rain puddles all around. Just glorious.” 

Now, Groff says, she finds it very spiritual to be in Florida nature, but this was not always the case. “When we first came to Florida, Clay took me through the Everglades by bicycle,” she says with a laugh. “At one point I looked ahead on the path and saw four giant alligators lounging in the sun, their jaws wide open. Clay had already ridden past them. We were separated by four giant alligators! I screamed and said I was sorry that he had to die this way. He rode back to me really fast. They didn’t even move.”

She was petrified to go back outside for a while, and she uses that brand of fear to great effect in the stories in her new collection, setting her narratives in snake-infested swamps and buildings covered in kudzu. When Groff saw Spanish moss for the first time, she says, “It reminded me of armpit hair.” Her remarkable gift for dark description can be seen in all of her books, starting with her debut, The Monsters of Templeton, but it took on more power in her first collection of stories, Delicate Edible Birds, in which one character describes depression as “this black sack filled with cobras.” 

One story from that collection, “L. DeBard and Aliette,” a strange twentieth-century version of Héloïse d’Argenteuil and Peter Abelard’s legendary love affair, caught the attention of novelist Elliott Holt, author of You Are One of Them (Penguin Press, 2013). “My reaction was, ‘Who is this person?’” Holt says. “At the time I was an editor at One Story magazine, and I asked to interview her; there are some people you feel like you’ve known forever, and Lauren is one for me.” 

Holt emphasizes Groff’s dedication to her work. “I don’t know a single person who works harder or is more disciplined or is harder on herself than Lauren is,” she says. “She’s incredibly focused, and her life is very structured but in a good way. I think the fact that she used to be a competitive athlete helps.” 

“I love the way running forces your thoughts into a different form,” Groff says about her current favorite athletic activity, “the same way a poem written in a strict form makes strange new connections between thoughts.” But she also admits: “In case it wasn’t already apparent, I’m an anxious person. My writing is all about calibrating anxiety so that I have enough to finish the piece I’m working on—but not so much that it swamps me.”

This may help explain why her books are so distinct from one another. She needs to finish each one and then put it away. “I need to be a completely different person than I was when I start my next book, every time,” she says. Each book is a reaction against the previous book, from The Monsters of Templeton, in which the fifty-foot-long body of a sea creature surfaces in a town’s lake while a disgraced student returns home to search for her father after his mysterious disappearance, to Fates and Furies, a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award in Fiction and President Obama’s choice for his favorite book of the year, which tells the divided story of a marriage—the first half from the perspective of a failed playwright named Lotto, the second half from the perspective of his wife, Mathilde—threaded together into a revelatory portrait.

Groff isn’t the only author to take such a stance on previous books, of course. At this year’s AWP conference she gave a reading with novelist Nathan Englander, who shares her perspective on past work. “We’re both oppositional personalities,” she says about the author whose most recent novel is Dinner at the Center of the Earth, published by Knopf last year. “So we were discussing how ready we each were to oppose the previous book we’d written. It actually is a revolt, a revolution against what came before.” She says she does this every time, no matter how successful her previous project. “I do it on purpose. And I think for me it’s a way to kill the previous book. I am invested in becoming a better person, and I don’t think I can do that by staying the same. As I write my way into my evolution, I become a better writer, too.”

Her agent, Bill Clegg, thinks Groff’s appeal is “something elemental and volatile in her sentences and plots, a tension between her capacity to create beauty and her impulse to subvert and destroy it,” he says. “She never lets you fully relax into a character or a story or even a passage, and that tension is exhilarating. Reading Lauren’s work, you have a sense that she writes first from a deeply personal place and is accessing these forces as they exist in her.”

And sometimes, Groff would be the first to admit, those forces can be quite explosive: She is not afraid of burning things up—literally. This past New Year’s Eve she threw the pages of something she’d been writing for twelve years onto a bonfire. “I’ve been struggling a lot with creativity in this ‘brave new world’ of Trump’s America, which is so vastly different from what I thought was my America,” says Groff. “Many artists right now are thinking about how to be creative when there’s so much to do. Creativity saved my personal life, but maybe it’s not enough to save our society. I want to bear down really hard on our responsibility to other people.” 

The irony of the twelve-year manuscript and her ambivalence about Florida is not lost on Groff. “Everything about me now is different, down to the cellular level, except for the house I live in. I had a bias when I came down here, and I wasn’t open to loving it.” She is glad to discard all of what she calls her “knee-jerk Northerner hostility, thinking Florida was all hicks or uptight retirees,” she says. “Gainesville is a university town full of everyone from students to farmers to hard-core punks to artists. There are good people wherever you land.” 

But “to escape the Florida heat for the summer, at least,” Groff and her husband have renovated a barn in rural New Hampshire. During the February cold they ran the woodstove and watched insects that had burrowed into vintage beams emerge, “falling into confusion onto our shiny new floors and walls.” Like those insects, she says, houses take on the personalities of the humans who live in them, humans who “remain pressed into the walls and floors like ghosts, even after they’ve passed.” Some of her unforgettable characters in Florida feel like ghosts pressed into its pages: a penniless grad student in “Above and Below,” two abandoned little girls in “Dogs Go Wolf,” and a bereft widower in “Eyewall.”

The cover of Florida features a golden panther on the prowl. “It’s a vision of danger and wildness,” says Groff. “Everything about Florida, every object and animal and plant, is translated through the characters’ mind-sets, an indicator of alienation or fear or anger—or anxiety.” Groff says that Florida bothers her, shakes her up, brings her to a new place. “It’s a set of contradictions for me. For a long time it was my nemesis, but it’s also my home, where I wake up every day and where my children were born and where my husband is from—and if it can give rise to the three best people I know, it can’t be all bad.”

We’re sitting on a bench beneath an enormous bush—or tree, or vine. Or something. Florida is multilayered in ways that are not always obvious, much like Lauren Groff, and as we talk an image occurs to me, one that may help explain the collective tone of the book. “It’s almost as if each story in this book is a horizontal layer, and when you stack them on top of one another, you can see a Lauren-shaped figure in the middle,” I say. 

“That was my working image for it,” she says, “but I never thought anyone would see it. Funny that it has to do with construction. I seem to be fascinated by community, houses, ambivalence, anger, other books, loneliness, and place. Turns out you can do a lot of different things with those elements.”

Others agree. A few weeks after this interview, Lauren Groff was awarded a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship. Past the beginning of her career and nowhere close to the end, Groff shows the kind of creative stamina and artistic endurance that will sustain her through the middle. As for whether or not the argument she poses in Florida comes full circle, Groff says about her current relationship with the state: “I’m pulled strongly in two separate directions, and they’re both valid, but I’m suspended within them.” 

In other words, she’s right at home. 

Bethanne Patrick is a writer and book critic who tweets @TheBookMaven [3]. She is working on a memoir for Counterpoint Press.