On Wednesday, the Edinburgh International Book Festival (EIBF) hosted one of its flagship events of the 2024 Festival. Festival director Jenny Niven spoke with author Lauren Groff about her writing process, nature, and faith.
Groff is no stranger to accolades. In 2017 she was named as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, the following year she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and just a few months ago she was named to the TIMES annual list of the most influential 100 people. She is the author of five novels and two short story collections. Her most recent novel, The Vaster Wilds, depicts a colonial-era servant girl’s escape from her settlement into the American wilderness.
Groff told Niven that “every book [she’s] ever written is about community.” The Vaster Wilds is about a young, unnamed girl leaving a repressive colonial community and growing closer to nature in the process. Groff described herself as an “Emersonian Transcendentalist.” Her work aims to explore the extent to which human society and the environmental world can be reconciled.
In The Vaster Wilds, our protagonist begins the novel by seeing herself as superior to the natural environment. Over the course of the narrative, Groff “collapsed the hierarchy” of human and animal. The girl sees herself and her environmental surroundings on the same, equal level. In Groff’s words, the novel becomes a “slow and bodily understanding of her relationship with nature.”
This bodily understanding is crucial to much of Groff’s work, which often examines the relationship between the physical and the emotional. Her fourth novel, Matrix, followed an abbey of nuns practicing medieval mysticism, a form of Catholicism “embedded in the body” and committed to experiencing pain as part of faith. Groff began and completed Matrix in the midst of writing The Vaster Wilds, and although their settings are very different, both novels are explorations of the physical body and its manifestation of emotional truths.
Groff then touched on her (somewhat infamous) writing technique. She begins by writing all of her books longhand in a spiral notebook, churning it out sentence by sentence. She immediately puts her first draft to the side and never looks at it again. She picks up a new notebook, and write the draft over again. By letting go of the original material in this “iterative process”, Groff says, she allows her subconscious to communicate to her which elements of the narrative are the most important. The words she writes over and over again become the core of the novel.
Much as human and nature commune as equals in The Vaster Wilds, Groff spoke of her writing as equal to herself, the creator: “The book tells me what it wants to be.” Groff said that the writer must listen to the book. For example, she struggled to finish the conclusion of The Vaster Wilds. She knew that the book didn’t want the same ending as she did. In the end, Groff said, “the book vanquished me.” So she wrote the opposite of the ending she’d wanted.
Although she is one of the greatest writers of her generation, Groff described herself as a reader first and foremost. She says she’s “embarrassing” about how much she loves books, and recalled spending a college spring break engrossed in Infinite Jest instead of partying on the beach with her friends. In an interview last year, she estimated she reads perhaps 300 books every year.
At the Book Festival, Groff described herself as an “fervent, earnest kid” who directed her childhood intensity towards religion and the Bible before later turning to literature. Both Matrix and The Vaster Wilds are works of literature that grapple with faith and spiritual connection. Niven and Groff both noted that faith has become a somewhat taboo topic in contemporary literature fiction, in part due to the harm that organised religion has done to individuals and communities. Yet Groff said that she thinks the existential questions of faith and spirituality are among the most important questions we can ask. After all, faith systems are an intrinsic part of human societies throughout our history, and Groff is above all driven to write about community. Niven’s discussion with Groff concluded with an eye to the future. Groff is working on several writing projects, including a short story collection which she anticipates will be her next release. She also recently opened an independent bookstore in Gainesville, Florida, where she resides. The bookstore specialises in selling books which are banned or being challenged in local schools and libraries by far-right conservatives. The evening demonstrated that Groff is not only one of the greatest writers of her generation, but also one of the most thoughtful and fierce. Her impact as an author and literary voice has only just begun.
Image via Katherine Coble