Groff has established brisk publishing pace
Author works on several novels at once, composes in longhand
ORFORD, N.H. — Lauren Groff, the three-time National Book Award finalist, was marching through the woods of New Hampshire, her pants stuffed into her socks to keep out the ticks. Two muddy dogs jogged ahead of her and a reporter trotted along behind.
The outing was unusual for an author interview. Typically, these conversations take place over coffee or lunch, at a publisher’s office or maybe in a writer’s living room.
But Groff had chosen something different: a 5-mile hike through the woods and a swim in a pond, followed by a lunch of chickpea salad and a beet slaw with pistachio butter, all of which she made.
A former college athlete who still runs, swims and plays tennis regularly, Groff, 45, has a physicality about her that is central to how she lives and writes. That attention to the body is also central to her new novel, “The Vaster Wilds,” in which a young woman escapes from Jamestown, Virginia, in the 17th century, and tries to survive on her own in the wilderness.
“In Lauren, the intellectual and the physical work together in her writing process — her body is involved,” said Sarah McGrath, her editor at Riverhead Books. “You can see that in this book in particular.”
Groff, whose work slides between historical and contemporary settings, has had three New York Times bestsellers and is unusually productive for a literary writer. “The Vaster Wilds”
was recently published almost exactly two years after “Matrix,” a finalist for the National Book Award. That story follows a woman who builds a penurious 12th-century nunnery into a seat of female power and wealth.
Three years before that, in 2018, Groff published “Florida,” a story collection that was also a National Book Award finalist. In 2015, she published “Fates and Furies,” a novel that examines a marriage from the enormously divergent perspectives of the husband and wife. That book, too, was a National Book Award finalist.
But novel writing is an endurance sport, and Groff said it takes her about five years to complete one. She keeps up her publishing pace by working on several projects, even several novels, simultaneously, holding entire, vibrant worlds distinct in her mind. She began “The Vaster Wilds” before “Matrix,” she said, but finished “Matrix” first.
Those different projects live in different corners of her office at her house in
Gainesville, Florida. When she shifts from one piece of writing to another, she doesn’t shuffle papers on her desk, but moves her body to another part of the room.
“I’m trying to Jedimind-trick myself into not putting so much pressure on any particular project by having them be really loose for the first really long span of time,” she said. “I’m writing toward — who knows? Letting it be exploration and joy, centered around either questions or a central thesis or an image.”
When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a cardboard storage box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.
“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density,” she said.
“Nothing matters except for these lightning bolts that I’ve discovered,” she continued, “the images that are happening, the sounds that are happening, that feel alive. Those are the only things that really matter from draft to draft.”
Groff, who has a goofy sense of humor and an unpretentious erudition, was raised in Cooperstown, New York, in a family of athletes. Her sister, Sarah True, was an Olympic triathlete. Groff played soccer at Amherst College and met her husband, Clay Kallman, on the crew team.
“She’s got a lot of restless
energy, she’s got a lot of motivation,” he said. “For her, writing has been a great outlet and so have athletic pursuits.”
Groff and her family remain close. Though she lives in Gainesville, where Kallman owns and operates off-campus housing for University of Florida students, she spends every summer in New Hampshire, close to where her sister and her brother live, and where her parents have a house. Her parents spend part of the year in Gainesville. (The New Hampshire house was the site of the interview for this article.)
When Groff agreed to move to Florida 17 years
ago, she did so conditionally. She would relocate, she said, only if she could travel as needed — for writers’ retreats, for book tours — and if Kallman agreed to reassess periodically. There is a physical contract stating those terms, signed by her and Kallman, somewhere in her files.
Groff said that in the midst of writing the books she had published, she had also started numerous projects that came to nothing — most of them now exiled to cardboard boxes behind a curtain in her office. But a few years ago, Kallman said, she brought a manuscript with her to a bonfire.
“She was like, well, this
isn’t going to work,” he recalled. “So she threw it into the fire and it went up in flames. There’s a lot of creative destruction.”
But Groff said that giving up on projects — or even setting them on fire — doesn’t feel like failure, because none of that time or effort is wasted.
“It’s practice, right?” she said. “It’s like going out there and running 5 miles. It’s the same idea. Some days, it’ll be really tough and awful. And some days, you’ll see an alligator gilded by the sun.”
And then, she joked, you’ll run away from the giant reptile and hit your personal record.