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The Idea Of Legitimacy Is Something I Suppose I Deal With In My Fiction, And In Part It's Probably A Response To My Upbringing. When I Was Growing Up I Was The Middle Child, Pathologically Shy, In A Family With A Very Loud And Opinionated Older Brother, And I Felt As If I Never Had The Right To Speak. As A Result, I Simply Didn't Speak Very Much.

-Lauren Groff

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The Idea Of Legitimacy

Lauren Groff

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The Idea Of Legitimacy Is Something I Suppose I Deal With In My Fiction, And In Part It's Probably A Response To My Upbringing. When I Was Growing Up I Was The Middle Child, Pathologically Shy, In A Family With A Very Loud And Opinionated Older Brother, And I Felt As If I Never Had The Right To Speak. As A Result, I Simply Didn't Speak Very Much.

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Freedom Or Community, Community Or Freedom. One Must Decide The Way One Wants To Live. I Chose Community.

I Want To Be Identified As A Writer, Not A Southern Writer, Not A Woman Writer, Not A Woman From This Or That Place, But Unfortunately It Doesn't Always Happen.

I'm An Anxious Person In General, But Something About Being Pregnant And Awaiting The Release Of My First Book, The Monsters Of Templeton, Made Me Into An Insane Anxious Person. I Didn't Sleep At Night. I Ended Up Sleeping All Day. In A Strange Way I Felt Like The World Was Going To End. I Found Myself So Deeply Depressed At Times That I Started To Read About Happiness, And That Took Me Into Books About Idealism And Utopianism. Reading Books About People Who Tried To Build Utopian Societies Of Different Kinds Gave Me A Kind Of Lift.

I Think That Writers Have Natural Canvases, And My Canvas, Even In Short Stories, Often Seems To Be The Scope Of A Life.

I See History As Really Cyclical In Terms Of The Intense Idealism, And The Desire To Create A Better Life Outside Of Societal Norms.

I Love Twitter. It's Like Having A Closet Full Of Clever Friends That You Can Visit Twice A Day, Then Shove Back Into The Darkness When You're Tired Of Them.

I Try Not To Think Too Much Or Be Too Impatient, And Let The Back Of My Brain Do Its Mysterious Work.

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.

When I Write New Worlds, I Work In Layers, Building And Throwing Out, And Building Anew.

Even Still, We Run. We Have Not Reached Our Average Of 57.92 Years Without Knowing That You Run Through It, And It Hurts And You Run Through It Some More, And If It Hurts Worse, You Run Through It Even More, And When You Finish, You Will Have Broken Through. In The End, When You Are Done, And Stretching, And Your Heartbeat Slows, And Your Sweat Dries, If You've Run Through The Hard Part, You Will Remember No Pain.

Even The Presence Of My Kids Cannot, During Those Writing Hours, Disturb Me. Unless There's A Bone Sticking Out Of Their Arm, I'm Not Interested.

It's Wonderful That Nothing You Write Is Ever Going To Be As Beautiful As What's In Your Head, Because That Gap Is Where The Art Can Enter And Begin To Stretch Its Limbs.

If There's A Black Cat That Crosses The Street In My Path, I Will Turn Around And Walk 20 Minutes Out Of My Way To Not Cross It.

I'm Kind Of A Control Freak. But There Are Others Like Me.

When I Write A New Draft, I Don't Like To Feel I'm Tied To Any Previous Version. That's Why I Don't Use A Computer To Write. The Text Looks, On The Screen, Too Much Like A Book. It's Not A Book - It's A Bad First Draft Of Something That Could One Day Be A Book.

Writing By Hand Is A Way Of Letting Mystery Into My Writing. But I'm Constantly Trying To Figure Out How To Do This Job. It's A Work In Progress.

I Like People, I Really Do. I Like Meeting People. But Most Of The Time I Would Rather Be At Home Reading A Book Than Reading In A Bookstore. It's A Performance, And It Ends Up Being All Right, And Then You Have A Nice Shot Of Bourbon Afterwards, And It's All Good. I Want To Please People. I Want To Be Nice. I Want To Be Liked. As A Result I Say Yes To Everything. But It Takes A Lot Of Vital Energy Out Of Me.

The Triumph Of Writing Fiction Is That By Doing So, Writers Can Build A More Ideal World In Themselves.

I've Always Relied On Producing More Material Than I Need. With Each Of My Published Novels I've Written Around Four Times The Amount Of Material That's Ended Up In The Book.

My Childhood Was As Conventional As You Could Get.

I've Never Wanted To Chuck My Mortgage, Drop The Kids Off At Their Grandparents' And Run Gloriously Naked In Fields Of Flax.

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Magical Thinking

Sometimes You Have To Let Time Carry You Past Your Troubles.

When I Meet People I Try To Make A Joke Out Of My Occupation, Explaining That What I Do All Day Is Sit Alone In A Darkened Room, Flicking Through Some Pages, Jumping On A Treadmill Now And Then. I Keep My Serious Work As A Writer Private, But That Doesn't Mean It's Not Serious Work - Quite The Opposite.

Sometimes I Read A Biography Of Some Tempestuous Artist And Find Myself Longing For Fireworks! Booze! Bloody Fights!; I Do Think That Life Must Be So Much More Thrilling When You're Actively Miserable.

I Can Say That If You're A Writer Who Happens To Be A Woman, You'll Get A Book Cover That Depicts A Woman With No Head, Or A Woman Turning Away, Or A Pair Of High Heels. You Have To Fight To Not Get Stuck With These Covers. In The U.s. Women Are Chick-lit Writers Unless They Prove Otherwise, And That's Frustrating.

As Soon As You Publish A Book And The Reader Reads It, They're Making An Extension Of Your Brain With Their Brain.

The Novella Is At Once The Most Elegant And Demanding Form: A Writer Must Balance The Looseness Of A Novel With The Concision Of A Short Story, A Feat That Only The Bravest And Most Talented Of Us Can Manage. In Brazil, Jesse Lee Kercheval Proves, Yet Again, That She Is Exactly The Right Writer For The Job. A Wild American Picaresque, Brazil Snaps Along Briskly, Yet Feels Full-fleshed, And Brims With A Sly Wit And Grace.

A Female Writer Does Definitely Get More Attention If She Writes About Male Characters. It's True. It's Considered Somehow More Literary, In The Same Way That It's More Literary To Write About Supposedly Male Subjects, Such As War. You're Considered More Seriously By The Literary Establishment.

Research Is About Following The Gleam Into The Dark. It's Also About Being Sensitive Enough To Know Which Fact Is "the Creative Fact; The Fertile Fact; The Fact That Suggests And Engenders," As Opposed To The Fact That Deadens And Kills A Delicate New Project.

I'm Ambivalent About The Orange Prize. I Was Really Proud To Be Shortlisted Alongside The Other Writers, Whom I Admire. That Said, I Don't Know If It's Best Way Of Addressing Gender Inequality Problems.

Everything Is Cyclical. Historical Eras Go Through Times Of Intense Cynicism, Broken By Periods Of Intense Idealism.

The Gender Inequality In Book Reviewing Isn't Getting Better. Male Authors Get The Majority Of Review Coverage, And Male Reviewers Do Most Of The Reviewing. It's Kind Of Devastating.

Plays Are Just All Sort Of Playful Asides, And There's A Great Deal Of Reference Here To Greek Mythology, Plays, And Dramas. The Idea Of The Chorus Is Really Important In Greek Drama And I Loved The Idea Of Including That.

Depressing Thought: My Friends Were The Girls I Ate Lunch With, All Buddies From Kindergarten Who Knew One Another So Well We Weren't Sure If We Even Liked One Another Anymore.

But I've Married A Deeply Sensible Person Who Is Extremely Good At Talking Me Down From My Various Ledges, And Who Takes Care Of Me In A Billion Ways.

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At Least In My Case, A Very Simple, Regular, Happy Life Makes For Better Writing.

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Sex Is A Good Starting Point For Everything.

The Idea Of Legitimacy Is Something I Suppose I Deal With In My Fiction, And In Part It's Probably A Response To My Upbringing. When I Was Growing Up I Was The Middle Child, Pathologically Shy, In A Family With A Very Loud And Opinionated Older Brother, And I Felt As If I Never Had The Right To Speak. As A Result, I Simply Didn't Speak Very Much.

Amor Animi Arbitrio Sumitu, Non Ponitur; We Choose To Love; We Do Not Choose To Cease Loving.

Reading About Utopianism, And Eventually Creating Characters With Their Own Utopian Ambitions, Was The Way I Learned To Live With Being A Pregnant Person, To Stave Off The Sense Of Incipient Disaster. You're Bringing A Person Into This Overcrowded World, Knowing They're One Day Going To Die And There's Nothing You Can Do About It.

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Looking Forward

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Writing Is The Lonely Sport Of Sad Sacks.

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.

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.

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Song: Heloise And Abelard By Elizabeth Devlin. Beyond The A Propros Subject Matter, This Lady Can Really Play The Autoharp. This Song Sounds Like Something You'd Find On A Gramophone Record.

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She Would Always Feel This Wild Girl Was The Truest Of Any Of The People She Had Already Been: Adored Daughter, Bourgeois Priss, Rebel, Runaway, Dope-fiend San Francisco Hippie; Or All The People She Would Later Be: Mother, Nurse, Religious Fanatic, Prematurely Old Woman. Vivienne Was A Human Onion, And When I Came Home At Twenty Eight Years Old On The Day The Monster Died, I Was Afraid That The Baptist Freak She Had Peeled Down To Was Her True, Acrid, Tear-inducing Core.

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The Trouble Is That America's Become A Utopia Accessible Only To Some People. Others Get Trampled On. Perhaps It's A Problem Of Size. Robin Dunbar, An Anthropologist, Once Gave The Ideal Number Of A Given Community As 148. That Seems About Right To Me. There's Something Idealistic About That - In A Group Of 148 People You Can Get To Know Everybody.

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It's Not Easy To Make Friends When You're An Adult Writer Outside Of Academia, Especially When You Work Alone In A Little Room For Twelve Hours A Day, And So I Wrote Toward What I Most Longed For.

In This Moment That Blooms And Fades As It Passes, He Is Enough, And All Is Well In The World.

If The Literary Category Of 'mordant Fable' Exists At All, It May Be Because Brock Clarke Invented It. The Happiest People In The World Is Everything We Fans Have Come To Love From A Clarke Novel: Playful And Deliriously Skewed, And Somehow Balancing Between Genuinely Great-hearted And Gloriously Weird.

And She, The New Mother Of A Daughter, Felt A Fierceness Come Over Her That Seized At Her Heart, That Made Her Feel As If Her Bones Were Turned To Steel, As If She Could Turn Herself Into A Weapon To Keep This Daughter Of Hers From Having To Be Hurt By The World Outside The Ring Of Her Arms.

I See Ghosts Everywhere, And That Is Partially A Function Of My Being Incredibly Near-sighted And Reading Way Too Late Into The Night.

I Kept A Lot Of My Thoughts Inside Myself. So, Perhaps More Than Is Normal, I'm Always Questioning My Role As A Writer. I'm Always Stopping And Asking Myself: Do I Have The Right To Tell This Story? Is It A Story That Deserves To Be Heard? And As For Whether I Think Of Myself As A Writer With A Capital "w," I Very Much Hope I Never Do.

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