For Lauren Groff, Florida is both a state and a state of being. With her fifth book, Groff plunges headfirst into excavating her adopted homeland, a feral, fecund kingdom of snakes in the toilet, chickens blown off the ground in hurricane gales, and other things that go bump in the hot, humid night. In these masterful, unnerving stories, Florida’s inherent violence isn’t just natural—it’s human, too, as in the case of a jogger dragged off the street and raped, or a bloodied immigrant teenager abandoned by her assailants in an alley.



Yet amid the horror, wonder perseveres. Groff’s Florida has room for beatific moments of connection between strangers, between spouses, between parents and children. The hurricane always lets up, after all.

Esquire.com spoke with Groff about the allure of the short story form, the narrative influence of the Old Testament, and the fundamental importance of feminism.

Riverhead Books

ESQ: This collection wrestles with climate change, immigration policy, and feminism, among other political issues. How do you strike the balance of engaging with politics without being didactic or heavy-handed?

Lauren Groff: I think that if you engage with these questions in the consciousness of the characters, letting political issues or thoughts appear from the corner of the eye, it doesn't feel too polemical. It's a personal taste, of course, but engaging politically in art has never felt so important as it does right now, and I'm having a really hard time reading anything that feels insular or that seems to feed only on literature.

You write reverently about the natural world, and about Florida’s unique ecosystem. Is it cognitive dissonance for you, to live in a land of such fecundity during a time of rapid, alarming climate change?

Absolutely. Sometimes when you live within two startling, simultaneous realities like this—the fecund, steaming fertile Florida ecosystem, and the immense challenges of climate change—you hear a specific resonance rise up between the two. It's like a struck tuning fork. I was trying to listen to the reverberations and replicate them in the stories.

In an NPR interview, you said of a character, “She’s not not me… she’s not me, she’s a fictional character, someone that I know, made grotesque, basically, that’s what I think of. There’s no such thing as fiction that is not somewhat autobiographical. Likewise, there is no such thing as memoir that is not fictional. And it’s possible that some of the things that this narrator says and thinks are things that I myself have said and thought.” How do you walk the line between cultivating a personal presence in your work while also maintaining a helpful distance? Do you find that, through writing, you shake loose some catharsis about your own experiences and feelings?

Ah, well, it's always tempting for a reader to engage in the biographical fallacy, particularly when it seems as though told experience matches the author's lived experience. But I'm very intentional in my writing and I choose to write fiction, not nonfiction, for a reason: the contract with the reader is different with autobiography than it is with fiction, and I want the freedom to exaggerate, change, distort, and tell slantwise. Writing both clarifies and complicates what I feel; it never gives me a sense of catharsis.

"I'm very intentional in my writing and I choose to write fiction, not nonfiction, for a reason. I want the freedom to exaggerate, change, distort, and tell slantwise."

Much of your work is steeped in female rage, including “Snake Stories” and a number of other stories in this collection. I’m thinking also of your groundbreaking “By the Book” column, which was a triumph for women everywhere. Has feminism occupied a larger role in your life and work as of late? How has that rage shaped and changed you as a writer?

I've always been a feminist. Even as a little girl, I refused to countenance that my brother was better or any more inherently deserving than I am, and I burned whenever he was treated with favor or deference because of his gender. If it seems as though I'm growing more vocal, perhaps it's only because I have a bigger platform now. And rage gets a bad rap, seen as more a bonfire than a laser, but I try to make mine controlled, precise, and clear. White-hot anger, if understood and focused, can be a cause for change.

I ask this question for our male readers: What should men know about feminism? What steps should men take to be better feminists? After all, feminism is an all of us issue, not a women’s issue.

Men should know that feminists only want equality. We love men. We respect men. We want men to love and respect us back. And by "us," here, I mean all people treated as second-class citizens. Modern feminism means standing up for queer people, people of color, differently abled people, immigrants—not just women. That means that you stand up for all people around you the way that you feel you deserve to be treated; you make sure they are paid equally to you for equal work, that you give them a chance to speak, that you resist easy stereotypes and pay better attention. We are all the subjects of our society, and there's no one out there who is perfectly unbiased. We can all do better. Feminists are people earnestly and actively trying to do better. I think all humans should be vocal, constant feminists.

At many turns, this collection evokes the Bible—the punishing wrath of nature, the omnipresence of snakes, the dread one associates with an Old Testament God. What’s the relationship between religion and fiction, for you?

My first narrative love was the Old Testament: I was a pretty fervent little girl and believed in Bible stories, which are rich and beautiful and strange and often contradictory, everything that makes for great literature. Ever since I became an adult, though religion has been replaced by an equally deep (and despairing) love for humanity. Fiction--reading it and writing it--is the greatest, most beautiful exploration of humanity that I know of.

The children in these stories (and in earlier works like Arcadia) are so convincingly written—so very much themselves, still full of strangeness and incomprehension and wonder. How did you cultivate such skill in writing from a child’s point of view? What’s the key to writing believable children?

Thanks! You never look down to children, but try to inhabit their confusion and wonder and sense of dread. Writers get in trouble when they treat children as small, dumb adults; they're incredibly perceptive if not quite savvy in the ways of the world, and to a kid, proportion and time work differently. It's good to remember the sheer, overwhelming nature of the world in childhood when you write in a child's perspective.

"Florida isn't one great, massive single place. It's a collection of places all radically different from each other."

Was there a particular logic in distilling your relationship to Florida into short stories rather than into a novel? What was it about these narratives that demanded to be short rather than long? What are you drawn to in the short story form that you can’t accomplish in novels?

Florida isn't one great, massive single place. It's a collection of places all radically different from each other. Miami and Gainesville could be in different states, but so could Tallahassee and the Keys. I thought it might be interesting to think about Florida not only with the diversity that a story collection can afford a writer, but also as more than just geography. Florida to me acts in this book as a little more abstract, more like a linkage of dread. I don't know why narratives demand their particular space, but I don't usually try to write them until I understand their scope. And I love the story form because it feels somewhat more flexible and malleable than the novel does, being shorter and often more experimental.

You write the most splendid, meticulous sentences. Your work shows such a deep, adoring curiosity about language and the malleability of its boundaries. When you write, how deliberately are you tinkering with and pushing language? Is that a daily source of enjoyment for you?

I started as a poet, and though I failed as a poet, I love language like breathing. I deliberately don't let myself luxuriate in it until the last draft, after I understand the story that I'm telling. I think it's so easy to get discouraged in writing, and keeping language as a source of wonder and joy is what makes me happy to sit down every day and do my best.

During these trying times, what are your refuges, creative and otherwise? Where do you turn to rest your brain, to take your mind off the state of the world, to have a laugh?

I've been doing a lot of bad collages and acrylic paintings. It feels necessary to have an art form with zero expectations in it. I've been doing a lot of short, wild dance parties with my kids. Swimming and running exhaust the anxious brain, and I've come to the end of Netflix for now. Everything I haven't watched seems too grim. And there are always beautiful books to discover.

Adrienne Westenfeld Assistant Editor Adrienne Westenfeld is a writer and editor at Esquire, where she covers books and culture.

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