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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.

-Lauren Groff

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When I Meet People

Lauren Groff

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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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Writing Is The Lonely Sport Of Sad Sacks.

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.

I Feel Like In American Fiction We're Moving Out Of A Period Of Intense Irony, And I'm Very Glad About That. I Feel Like Irony Is Fine For Its Own Sake But Shouldn't Be The Sole Reason To Write A Book. It Has Been An Ironic World View: That's The Best Way I Can Describe It. I'm A Fan Of Earnestness. I Feel Like There's A New Wave Of Earnestness And I'd Be Happy If I'm Some Small Part Of That.

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.

Sex Makes Things Strained. There Are Lovely People In Oneida, But Everyone Was Married To Everyone Else. And You Had Fathers And Mothers Watching Their Twelve-year-old Daughters Being Inducted Into The Group Marriage By Sixty-five-year-old Men. There Are Creepy Aspects Of A Lot Of Intentional Communities When It Comes To Sex.

I'm A Private Person, A Shy Person. Sometimes, Reading For Eleven Hours Straight Feels To Me Like The Perfect Way To Spend A Day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

I'm Always Hungry For People.

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.

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.

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.

Sex Is A Good Starting Point For Everything.

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.

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

I'm Feminist In That I Believe That There Should Be Equality Between Men And Women. I Get Deeply Frustrated On A Daily Basis By The Enormous Gender Divide In The U.s. Literary World. But I Don't Know How To Deal With It, So I Don't Tend To Say Much About It.

I'm A Physical Learner. I Learn From Writing Drafts, Not Reading Them.

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.

I Do Like Twitter. Writing Is A Solitary Pursuit, And It Can Get Lonely. I Like To Go Into Twitter For A Short Period Of Time, Communicate With Clever Friends, And Then Switch It Off. That's Perfect For Me.

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

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.

I Won't Walk Under Scaffolding Or Under Ladders. I Wear Things Like A Baseball Player Wears Things That Are Supposed To Have Luck. I Am Superstitious About Everything.

Who, In The Midst Of Passion, Is Vigilant Against Illness? Who Listens To The Reports Of Recently Decimated Populations In Spain, India, Bora Bora, When New Lips, Tongues And Poems Fill The World?

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.

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

I'm A Writer, Not An Actor. I Want To Write Rather Than Perform. I'm Looking Forward To Disappearing For A While.

Looking Forward

I Love Writing From Enclosed Spaces: You Really Learn About Your Characters When They Have Tight Walls To Push Against.

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

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.

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.

You Had To Pick Up A Landline To Make Sure Your Best Friend Wore A Matching Outfit To School. I Do Remember People Talking More. Nostalgia Is Dangerous, Though.

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.

My Childhood Was As Conventional As You Could Get.

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.

Being A Writer Means I Sit In A Dark (and Pretty Dank) Room Off My Garage For Many Hours A Day, And In My Wallowing Moments I Can Feel As If I'm Already On The Outside Of Society, Peering Wistfully In.

Childhood Is Such A Delicate Tissue; What They Had Done This Morning Could Snag Somewhere In The Little Ones, Make A Dull, Small Pain That Will Circle Back Again And Again, And Hurt Them In Small Ways For The Rest Of Their Lives.

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.

I Don't Believe That Fiction Is Dead. I Know There Are Some People Who Believe That It's An Outdated Art Form, And That To Express Truth Today You Need To Work In Different Forms, To Write Books Where It's Perhaps Not Clear What's Fiction And What's Memoir. I Have Nothing Against Those Books And Love Many Of Them Very Much. But We Have Enough Space For Everyone, Traditional Realists And Hybrid Writers, And Experimental Writers All.

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.

Parenthood Means Becoming Comfortable With The Fact That There Are Things Outside Your Control, Things That End And Fail, Just As Most Utopias End And By Some Measure Fail. And Just Because They're A Failure Doesn't Mean There Isn't Value There.

The Darkest Period Of My Life, So Far, Arrived The Summer I Was Pregnant With My Eldest Son. The Future Was Growing In Me With All Of Its Terrifying Unpredictability, And I Found Myself Anxious, Unable To Work And Woefully At Sea.

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

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.

As A Person, I Do Ascribe To A Lot Of Magical Thinking Myself.

Magical Thinking

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.

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.

I Think I'm An Optimistic Person. Ultimately I Believe In People. I Believe They Can Be Robust. When My Collection Delicate Edible Birds Came Out There Were One Or Two People Who Read The Title As Being A Commentary On The Characters Within The Pages, The Women In The Book, Meaning That They Were These Fragile Girls Meant For Male Consumption. But I Had Meant The Opposite - These People Are Tough. Dark Things Happen To Them But They Get On With Life As Best They Can.

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.

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

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.

My Son Is Actually Named After Beck, The Musician. We Heard Beck On The Radio And Thought That Was A Good Nickname For A Child. We Named Our Son Beckett So We Could Call Him Beck - We Reverse Engineered. And Then After He Was Born And I Saw The Name On The Birth Certificate I Realized Beckett Was A Really Pretentious Name, Way Too Literary. Luckily He's Grown Into It. We Nearly Named My Second Son Dashiell. Can You Imagine? Beckett And Dashiell. It Would Have Been A Disaster Of Pretentiousness.

In The End, Fiction Is The Craft Of Telling Truth Through Lies.

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.

We Need The Skeletons Of Other Stories To Understand Our Own, Sometimes.

Our Human Impulse Is To Control Everything, But Fiction Seems To Me To Be About Allowing An Element Of Mystery Into The Text.

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

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.

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.

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 Had A Series Of Terrible Jobs, Whatever Would Allow Me To Write For Four Hours During The Day. During That Time I Wrote Three Novels - All Of Which Were Extraordinarily Poor. I Decided After That To Go And Get My Mfa.

It's More Like I Write Multiple First Drafts, Handwritten. So With My First Novel, I Wrote Whole Drafts From Different Points Of View. There Are Different Versions Of That Novel In A Drawer On Loose-leaf Sheets. I Won't Even Look At The First Draft While I'm Writing The Second, And I Won't Look At The Second Before Writing The Third.

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

I Feel Lucky. I Do Love It, Mostly. At College I Had It In My Heart That I Wanted To Be A Writer But I Didn't Want To Tell Anyone About It. Then I Graduated And Became A Bartender In Philadelphia, Writing During The Day. I Was The Worst Bartender In The World.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Think Attempting To Make Art Is A Utopian Process In Itself, Definitely. Nothing I Do Is Ever Equal To The Ideas In My Head. You Do The Best You Can, You Do It With Patience And Love, And Then You Give Up. The Moment You Give Up Is When You Know The Book Is Done.

It Seems To Me That If You Were To Take Almost Any Half-century In History, You'd Find A Grand Societal Tug-of-war Between The Community And The Individual.

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.

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

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.

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

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