Just thought I’d toss these tour cards up here one more time. Momentary extroversion! By November, I revert to my furtive, squirrelly hermit self again.
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Lauren Groff
@legroff
Three-time National Book Award finalist for MATRIX, FLORIDA, and FATES AND FURIES. Winner of the Story Prize and the JCO Prize. She/her.
Lauren Groff’s posts
This afternoon at the grocery store when the cashier asked for my license (wine), I gave it to her, and she laughed, and when I asked her why, and she said it was because her grandmother was also born in the 1970s.
Late last night, I passed my teenager in the dark hallway and he reached out, tenderly touched my eyebrow, and whispered, “Overplucked in the ‘90s.” I’m dead now.
I don't know who needs to hear this today (I do), but the vast majority of the time one spends writing a book isn't spent in writing the book, but rather reading, dreaming, running, walking, experimenting, restarting, writing things that gradually bring you closer to the book.
After four days in Montreal, I’m wondering why the hell we don’t all live in Montreal.
My boys’ critique of The Lion King was SCATHING because “lionesses, actually, are the hunters, and animals don’t need to accept lion royalty because they can rule themselves,” and, lordy, I have raised feminist anarchists, my work as a mother is pretty much done.
Save me your hot takes about how Florida sucks, and remember that we’ve been gerrymandered so excessively out of actual democratic representation that what the GOP has done here to solidify their power should be considered unconstitutional.
I wrote hundreds of thousands of words this year, threw out nearly all of them, and barely published anything. It’s fine! It happens often. These bleak, dry, fallow years are necessary for the good work to begin to take shape in the periphery.
When I told my little boy to have a good day at school, he said, “Have a good day taking baths and crying and watching Italian movies,” HELP, where’s the aloe vera, I am never getting over that burn.
There are some years when I sit down to write every day and I create almost nothing that’s worthy of being published. It has taken me almost 20 years of a life in art to understand that this is not only fine, it’s necessary.
Mesmerized by the guy in front of me on the plane who spent two hours scrolling through Facebook, slowly and thoroughly enlarging the faces of his friends’ hot wives.
My National Book Awards Dress! Oscar de la Renta, and echoing my cover.
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Productivity is a capitalist lie, and deeply detrimental, when it comes to art. Make space for the opposite of productivity.
"Would you say this carrot soup is...experimental?" my younger son just asked at dinner, delivering the most devastating workshop I've had in YEARS.
I would never have consented for Meta to train AI on any of my books, let alone five of them. Hyperventilating.
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NEW: This summer, we reported on the contents of a controversial database used to train generative AI products from Meta, Bloomberg, and others. Many people requested an ability to search it. Today, @_alexreisner delivers. theatlantic.com/technology/arc
Writers avoiding writing.
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To avoid being eaten, the eastern hognose snake will writhe in fake agony, throw up, poo itself, and finally lie still, belly up, mouth wide open, tongue out, blood dripping from its mouth.
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Celebrating the US feels off this year for about a million reasons, but I'll never not get a kick out of my 68-year-old mom doing her fire baton routine.
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I see a lot of people wanting a “good billionaire” to resuscitate Bookforum, but maybe the lesson from this is that we need a model of a critical journal that’s owned by a collective of editors/workers, and not by a single whimsical rich person.
Now that I have a teenager in high school, I would like to issue a formal blanket apology to my parents for the years 1992 through 1996. Sweet baby Jesus.
Men! Reading books by women won’t make your brains dribble out of your ears.
The major side-effect of the pandemic on me is that I’m astonishingly slow in everything right now. I’m failing to get to every single book to blurb, it’s taking me two days to write 100 words, and even my runs are a minute per mile slower. I’m stuck in invisible mud.
Someone told me that they were at a literary conference a few months ago and all the editors and agents were saying that new writers absolutely must engage with social media. This is awful advice. Nobody has to be here. This place is a cesspit. Don’t do it if you hate it!
How strange, I looked for the high road today but it turns out there is no high road, only a rollercoaster splashing down into an infinity pool full of champagne.
Still so mad that you people tried to cancel the semicolon that I'm putting extra semicolons into my manuscript, like little daggers of spite.
Lots of coughing on this flight. I’m one of three people wearing a mask. I feel insane.
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And one more thing. I feel so full of love for Montreal because I was here for both Jazz Fest and the Circus festival and the insistent public commitment to mystery and beauty—to art—feels like a loud vote for humanity. I needed this. We all need this, right now, I think.
My only rule when reading fiction is “don’t bore me.” Anything else—anything that you can pull off!—I’m on your side.
My favorite person today is my nephew, who wrote a book called “Stuck in the Butt,” about a boy who is sat upon by a monster and gets stuck in its butt.
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I think it's important to commit fully to the work (daily, if possible), but that commitment can mean staring at a wall for an hour or listening to music or flipping through Pantone colors that bring you close to the feel of what you're trying to do.
Bowing in awe to anyone who can work for more than an hour right now or read more than a page before sense wriggles away. Solidarity to anyone who can’t. Fight or flight is real and we are tethered to these blunt animal bodies, dammit.
The expectation that fiction writers be piously good is genuinely hilarious.
I read a book by a writer who did me a dirty deed once, and the book was just spectacular, and now I have to let go of my grudge, goddamnit.
I spent all day chasing down this poem I half-remembered from 10 years ago. Turns out it was by Hafiz, translated by Matthew Rohrer, in , and it slayed me anew.
In the mornings, Olive sits for hours at attention in the single place in the house where all human trajectories converge, just waiting to be loved.
My husband just told me it was OK that members of our family had been struck flat with a stomach virus because, “It’s like a cleanse!” I have to deal with this relentless optimism on a daily basis, please pray for me in this difficult time.
Life is hard and humans are sweet, easily damaged little sacks of pudding, try to be as good and kind and generous as you can be. See you all shining in the new year.
For my birthday, I’d be delighted if you replied with a photo of your dog or baby or favorite flower, a poem you love or a book you recommend, and if all the above fail, and your cat is objectively a good one, I’d be glad to admire your cat (today only).
Gobsmacked. I didn’t even dare to hope for a finalist spot this year with my odd little nun book. 😭 washingtonpost.com/entertainment/
Just had a full-body flashback to the first day of college, when, after moving me into my dorm, my dad said, “Hey, I heard about this great new film on NPR!”—and that’s how I spent my first night in college, flanked by my puritanical parents, watching Boogie Nights, slain dead.
The doorman at a random building handed me, for free, a set of eight COVID self-tests, courtesy of the NHS. I can’t even find them in pharmacies for 25 bucks apiece in a US pharmacy. Goddamn, actual healthcare! It’s a travesty Americans are servants of capitalist health systems.
Someone needs to write a novel in the form of a neighborhood listserv. This shit has everything: drama, fury, casual racism, white men rushing to save white women who feel attacked for their racism, the realtor who once called my husband, drunk, at 3 in the morning, it’s gold.
Recently, at every single class visit, some new writer asks me why short stories are so depressing and I usually just fumble an answer about how stories need conflict and tend to be written in a minor key (as opposed to the novel’s span of keys). But honestly, I don’t know.
I have five books in thirty languages, two more slated for 2021 and 2021, and have written every day for the last 22 years, including the day I had an emergency C-section. But, sure, go off, condescending little man.
It absolutely drives me bananas the way they teach writing in middle schools. Formulas and taking off points for imaginary errors. Way to murder young people’s imaginations and love of language, damn.
Not a joke: this cover made me cry with joy when I saw it. Helen Yentus and the other geniuses at knocked it out the park again. t.co/H3t0COLNvk
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It’s fine if you’re friends with a writer and don’t like some of their work! Totally normal. Some things reverberate with you more than others. It’s fine. It’s fine! Fine fine fine fine fine. Fine. Don’t worry about it. They’re not crying. It’s totally fine.
Welp, I thought it'd either be the pandemic or climate change, but looks like irony is the thing that's going to get us all in the end.
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This place has EVERYTHING. Circuses! French! Cardamom ice cream! Mysterious shade gardens! Boat-spas where beavers rush you whilst you’re reclining in a chaise longue!
If you’re anxious and sad and feeling like a lowly amoeba on God’s playground in this political environment, I heartily recommend reading this book to reaffirm the truth that most people are inherently good and want to help.
Who are these monsters who have their shit so together they have already sent out holiday cards of their perfect happy families? (I have three photos of me this year and in all of them I’m either crying or eating, or crying AND eating.)
My kid won’t introduce me to his first girlfriend because, “Sometimes, Mama, you’re a little too much,” kind of devastating because it’s so accurate.
I am thrilled to finally announce an initiative that I’ve been working on with : ringing in the new year by asking geniuses to write and make art about climate change—on the Greenpeace social media over the next month. #ClimateVisionaries greenpeace.org/usa/stories/la
Just heard someone say the word “grody” for the first time since 1989, and now I am just whispering “grody grody grody grody grody” to myself in absolute fucking delight.
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It seems people hate the winter, potholes, and imposition of French. Valid points! But, like, in the US a tiny minority of religious zealots just took away fundamental human rights from over half of us, plus I’m afraid every day my kids are going to get shot at school, so 🤷♀️
I love airports. If you nurse a glass of wine long enough at any bar, a Jimmy Buffett Dad will eventually sit down beside you and talk so much that he will end up dissolving into tears. It it A+ storytelling entertainment.
I am beyond happy that the New Yorker is publishing this novella of mine online today. It took years to write, and one of my struggles was trying to force it to be a short story before I capitulated to its full (very long!) form.
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New Yorker Novella: "What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?," long-form fiction by @legroff. newyorker.com/books/novellas
The days between Christmas and the new year are for standing in your pajamas at the open refrigerator, spraying leftover whipped cream directly into your mouth while avoiding the censorious eyes of your dog and pondering the howling bleak void at the heart of existence, etc.
A gentle note to say that it is possible to take life, art, and the state of world seriously and to also make dumb jokes on this website. Humor may be the only way to survive. So if your response to a joke is fury, the problem is likely you. Take a walk around the block, buddy.
Oh thank god it’s daylight savings time, my dashboard clock is right again.
My husband did exactly one yoga video with me, and now every time he sees anyone in yoga clothes, he whispers reverently, “Chaturanga.”
To not have to hear that oleaginous voice again. To not have to see that sphincter mouth. To not have our days poisoned by the sheer toxic hatred and lies. To see the whole grifter family flee to Siberia, where during a blizzard one night they’re stalked and eaten by wolves.
Whoops. Didn’t mean to start an international incident with my praise of this fair city, yikes.
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Legit, at this restaurant (five course price fixe meal, tonight) I ate the best food I’ve had since before the pandemic. Spectacular, delicate, revelatory.
Can’t wait for this pandemic is over so that I accept every invitation as soon as it arrives, show up uncomfortably early, wait until the host is engaged in conversation with someone else, pour my drink into a ficus, and run home early to hide under the covers, hyperventilating.
In other news, someone told me that I look like Meryl Streep’s daughters yesterday and so I’ve been walking around all day as if Meryl Streep birthed me, and let me tell you, it’s a whole swagger.
There is no one right way in art. Whatever works for you is the right way. Experiment until you discover what works best for you. It’s all ok.
Heyyyy. My next book, MATRIX, will be out in September with and @WmHeinemann in the UK. I love my medieval mystics.
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You heard it here first: 2021 will be the Year of the Nun. lithub.com/were-getting-a
I saw a friend for breakfast whom I’d first loved when we were seven years old. We’re older now than our mothers were then. In all the photos we took this morning, we look exactly the way we looked when we were seven; we also, somehow, look exactly like our mothers.
My UK cover has jolly blue nun-beans. I love it—and them—endlessly, @hutcheinemann
I had drinks tonight at an outdoor bar with fully vaccinated friends for the first time in 14 months, and I think I’ve forgotten how to speak to anyone who doesn’t HAVE to speak to me out of love or work.
I’ve read many great books this year, but if there is any 2019 book that will be a classic in 40 years (if humanity lasts that long), I feel sure it’ll be Miriam Toews’s WOMEN TALKING.
“Existential crisis or just really low blood sugar” is apparently my favorite game these days.
Why is editing in Word with Track Changes so unbearably painful, and why, for the love of god and all things technological, is it still the most advanced tool we have?
Anybody else wake up in a panic in the middle of the night, dead sure that the fucker’s announcement that he wasn’t going to the Inauguration wasn’t him just being a petty narcissist, but rather it was a clear semaphore to his followers to bring all their firepower to DC?
What I wouldn’t give to be anxiety sweating in a corner, drinking acrid white wine way too fast at a literary event with you all right now.
Heyyyyyyyy
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Coming on September 12, a STUNNING new novel from @legroff, THE VASTER WILDS 
Check out the gorgeous cover here:
elle.com/culture/books/
Strangely broken up about Cormac McCarthy’s death. The man wrote exactly one believable (living) woman in his whole oeuvre but turned this incapacity into genius—his work is an acerbic damnation of the hyper-masculine mythology of the west. (That’s how I read him, at least 🤷♀️).
I was unprepared for how ghostly/dreamy South Bend, Indiana would be on a cold November morning.
My parents and my husband’s parents crossed paths at the same facility to get the first shot of the vaccine today. I’m so relieved, I’m actually shaking.
The surreal thing about giving a long talk on zoom is that you have no clue if your jokes are landing or if your audience is snoozing, doing calisthenics, petting their cat/themselves, whistling, etc; you’re just staring at your own dumb pasty face mouthing back at you in horror.
This nun you can take into the bathtub with you. The paperback of MATRIX comes out on Tuesday. Thank you,
Twitter hellscape has shown me the best thing I can do for my little boys is to make sure they understand when they’re wrong and how to apologize with sincerity. I’m fed up with bros swinging with aggression into the menchies then doubling down when they’re told off.
Lord, I love editing. It's almost as ecstatic as composition. Sometimes the work becomes so hermetically sealed in the transition from draft to draft that the application of another mind to the page is sudden and shocking, a hammer to glass. Splinter everything, let the air in.
God, I love the days when we all get cranky about short stories on here, I cackle in delight, I lick the screen like a rat on sugar water. Give me more, give me all of it, more fights about short stories, way fewer about testicles.
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Are they alive? (Yes.) Are they fed? (Sort of.) Are they naked? (Absolutely, but they like the wind on their nethers). Will it be the Lord of The Flies in about two weeks (Absolutely, no question, and I am Piggy).
Publishing a book is painful enough, no matter how many you’ve already published. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t get a little torqued pre-pub. That Torrey Peters has to suffer her debut being met with a wave of hatred and intolerance makes me want to scream for her.
I’ve listened to Florence and The Machine’s new album Dance Fever so many times at this point that one of my kids just sarcastically called it “Mama’s new religion.”
Absolute thrill. 🧡🧡🧡
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Replying to @nationalbook
Congrats to everyone on the list!
Anthony Doerr, @legroff, Jakob Guanzon, @LairdHunt, @BlkLibraryGirl, @SonofBaldwin, @katiekitamura, @elizmccracken, @JasonMott, and Richard Powers
My book has been out for two months now and it's still white-knuckle clinging to the Indie Bestseller list. This may be the last week, so I just want to say: You're the best, Independent Booksellers, I effing love you, thank you.
Naoise Dolan is so brilliant and funny. I love Sally Rooney like everyone, and they’re not in competition, but I do wish we had room in our collective attention for TWO blisteringly brilliant, shockingly young female Irish novelists.
