Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff
Lauren Groffis an American novelist and short story writer...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth23 July 1978
CountryUnited States of America
book school people
I have a feeling that books are a lot like people - they change as you age, so that some books that you hated in high school will strike you with the force of a revelation when you're older.
book writing thinking
In terms of writing, I think what most fiction writers treasure more than anything is the feeling that they're living for the length of a book inside another person.
book character writing
While writing, writers are living inside a character or characters, and when the book ekes into the world, writers are living inside the reader. That's more than connecting.
hurt book home
When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.
giving-up school kids
There is part of me that longs to have the back-to-the-earth life - make my own bread, grow my own wheat, just be really self-sufficient - but I am not, at the moment, willing to give up the luxury of modern life, and amazing schools for my kids, and things that I've come to rely on that are parts of society.
writing dark order
A lot of my work comes from a place of despair or fear. I often write in order to gain some sort of control over aspects of my life or the world that seem too dark to look at directly.
sex dirty dark
In my totally unscientific yet enthusiastic survey of Communal Experiments Throughout American History, I've discovered that the thing most likely to break up said experiments is: Sex, all that murky, dark, dirty gunk simmering beneath human relations.
children eugenics looks
If you look at communal experiments in general for any amount of time, you'll find a lot of horrors: raped children, sexual slavery, eugenics experiments, on and on.
sex starting starting-point
Sex is a good starting point for everything.
writing tasks fiction
Fiction is always a utopian task, in that there's an ideal you hold in your head as you write which inevitably fails in the moment of creation, in the insufficiency of words to convey meaning, or in the way the work is completed in the reader's head.
broken historical eras
Everything is cyclical. Historical eras go through times of intense cynicism, broken by periods of intense idealism.
thinking stories canvas
I think that writers have natural canvases, and my canvas, even in short stories, often seems to be the scope of a life.
wall character writing
I love writing from enclosed spaces: you really learn about your characters when they have tight walls to push against.
running character broken
As with most of my work, I started from the abstract, from research, building an intellectual model that slowly became internalized when the characters came alive. It's fascinating what happens to the model you've so assiduously assembled when characters are allowed to run rampant: things you thought essential are broken and other things are vastly improved.