Lauren Groff, MATRIX: A Novel
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[0:35]Okay, now back to this amazing podcast.
[0:38]Lauren Graff is the author of Matrix.
[0:40]She is a two-time National Book Award finalist, and the New York Times bestselling author of three novels,
[0:44]The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates in Furies.
[0:48]Plus, there's Ellen Brayden's short story collections, delicate, edible birds, and Florida.
[0:52]She has won the Story Prize, the Penn O'Henry Award, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award.
[0:58]Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Elsewhere, and she was named one of Granto's 2017 Best Young American Novelist.
[1:06]She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.
[1:09]Welcome, Lauren.
[1:10]Thanks so much for coming on Momstone Have Time to Read books to discuss your new books, Matrix.
[1:15]Very exciting.
[1:16]Thank you for having me.
[1:17]I appreciate it.
[1:18]So, for listeners who aren't familiar with your work, and particularly this one,
[1:23]would you mind giving a little synopsis for this book, and then we can talk about your whole career and everything else?
[1:28]Sure.
[1:29]So, I've been obsessed with this medieval poet named Marie de France since college, which was many years ago at this point,
[1:36]and I wanted to write a book about her because nobody knows much about who she was.
[1:41]Because women in the 12th century were not considered important, unless they gave birth to kings, or they were married to kings,
[1:50]or they were the daughters of both men.
[1:52]So, nobody knows who Marie de France was, but she wrote these incredible poems called Lay.
[1:58]I fell in love with them, and I got very, very excited a couple of years ago about writing about this time period,
[2:06]because I thought it would be a really interesting way to sort of see the contemporary world a bit slant.
[2:12]I felt overwhelmed by all of the problems of the contemporary world.
[2:16]I almost felt as if it was a moral issue that I couldn't actually write about them as deeply as I wanted to, but I could, if I were situating a lot of the issues at their roots in the 12th century.
[2:28]So, this is a book about my imagined life of later phones as an abyss in England in the 12th and early 13th centuries, and it is a wild book.
[2:40]It's probably my strangest book so far.
[2:44]But I like it. You know, I hope I hope others will.
[2:49]I love that. It's so funny to identify your own work as wild, which parts like when you're thinking about it, like what makes you say that?
[2:58]Well, Marie is a mystic, and so a lot of her mysticism is drawn actually from the actual mystics at the time.
[3:06]I went back and I looked at Hill the Guard of Bingdon, and I looked at Jillian of Norwich, and I looked at a bunch of other incredible mystics.
[3:15]And female mystics, one of the most astonishing things about them was that they were able to create power and space for themselves to maneuver by their mysticism in this time when they were just incredibly rigid, hierarchical structures, caging women in.
[3:34]So these mystics through their visions of God and Virgin Mary were able to sort of craft a safety even for themselves.
[3:42]So that part of it is really wild. The structure of it is based on a universal medieval labyrinth.
[3:49]So that the structure itself is also wild.
[3:51]We get to see the entire life of this woman.
[3:54]In many ways a misfits for her time, but it was also very powerful in both sides of the word power, right? She's powerful because she's very capable and very smart, but she's also, she has internalized some of the ideas about power that she then I guess spreads to her nuns under her care also.
[4:17]So she's a complicated figure. I think she's wild in that sense too.
[4:21]So this is like a massive undertaking. This, I mean, all the ways, all the things you did with this book.
[4:27]When you thought of it where you're like, totally, I'm totally going to do this or where you at all intimidated by your ideas when they came to like, what was that moment like for you?
[4:37]Yeah. So okay, I'm not going to pretend that I'm a mystic either, but I too, I hadn't been thinking about this for a long long time.
[4:45]So I went to this lecture by my friend, Dr. Katie biggest who teaches now at Notre Dame. And as I was sitting in the audience, she was, she was talking about the like, surgical practices of tall century nuns.
[4:58]I just sort of saw the book in front of me. It wasn't complete. Right. I hadn't didn't have all the details, but I could see the way that I could sort of filter my understanding of the contemporary world through this figure.
[5:12]It came to me. And it's not that it was easier than any, I don't think it's easy to write any novel, especially now my, my book, because I really don't know what I'm doing until four or five drafts in and we can talk about that later.
[5:27]Yeah, you know, I didn't have this very, very strong sense of the kind of book I wanted to write and it was immediate. And I just knew that sitting down every single day, I was just slowly bringing myself to that point.
[5:39]Yeah. So I wasn't cowed in a way that I have been in the past with other books, but I was I did know how I basically had to get a masters in medieval history.
[5:52]Wait, I want to talk about what you just said about the multiple drafts, but I want to also go back and figure out, well, first of all, how do you have such a beautiful French accent? Are you part French? Did you grow up? What is that about? Oh, this is very sweet.
[6:04]No, I spent a year as a rotary fellow in between high school and college and not France where I lived with a catering family. They had the fourth largest catering business in France, and I learned to speak French through them and through eating a huge amount of food and drinking so much alcohol.
[6:24]It was really spectacular. So I think when you're your feelings of shyness have been worn off by a couple of kill while you can you can start to speak with some ease.
[6:39]Well, I spent a summer, I guess it wasn't enough. When I was 14 or 15, I think I was 14 in France and I lived with a family. They owned a pool company.
[6:50]Oh, wow.
[6:51]So we were in the South of France and it was one of the only houses with a pool and it was amazing because the guy on the pool anyway is very excited.
[6:59]And I did start dreaming in French after that by the end of that summer. I was totally immersed. And now that I'm 30 years later or whatever, I can't even pretend to speak with an accent like that because I'm such an imposter.
[7:11]I can basically understand everything, but I can't speak anymore. I can't remember the words. I can't find them, but I can understand them.
[7:18]Anyway, I bet it would take you maybe a week before everything just sort of float back.
[7:23]The language is an amazing thing. Yeah.
[7:25]Language is so deeply embedded and here we are. And it's so beautiful to see it reawakening.
[7:31]So one of my sons had an au pair for a year from Spain and she only spoke to him in Spanish.
[7:37]He was about because between one and two at this point.
[7:40]And I think he thought that he forgot everything for years, nine years.
[7:46]And then we have spent maybe two days in Mexico City and he started responding in Spanish that this was deeply ingrained, very unusual pathways that he just hadn't used in a very long time. They just started coming back.
[8:01]So I think it'll come back. I don't know. I feel like those pathways are so buried under the like, you know, they're like the subway system of Manhattan.
[8:10]There's like giant buildings built on top of those pathways. This way it would take a lot of excavation to retrieve them, but maybe maybe we'll see.
[8:20]So and let's go back. Also, like, how did you become a writer? Did you always know you wanted to do this? Like, what was your education? Where are you even from? Like, what's your story? How do we get here?
[8:30]So I'm from Cooperstown, New York. It's a tiny little town and upstate New York. Most people know it because of all the faith.
[8:36]It's all the faith.
[8:38]Yeah, there's also a beautiful lake. James Benrock Cooper is from there. There's an opera called Glimmer Glass. It's like a very idyllic beautiful place to grow up.
[8:47]And my parents are extraordinarily hardworking people who basically left my siblings and I just up to our own business.
[8:56]So we spent all of our time doing sports and reading books basically swimming in the lake. It was a really beautiful childhood for a writer.
[9:09]I wanted to be a writer from the time I was 12 when someone gave me Emily Dickinson's collected poems and I thought I was a poet because she makes it seem so easy, which is hilarious.
[9:20]If you've ever written a poem, you know how hard it is for Emily Dickinson. But as a 12 year old I thought, oh my god, I can do this.
[9:27]And so secretly I was writing secret poetry through France and then I got to college. I tried to take a couple of poetry classes. They wouldn't let me in because my poetry is bad.
[9:37]And I finally got into a fiction class and up to that point I was a dual major in both French literature and English literature, but I hadn't actually really studied any contemporary work by anyone at all.
[9:50]I mean I hadn't read any books from after 1950. And suddenly in this course packet I get short stories by people like
[10:00]Chris Paley, Joy Williams, Laurie Moore,
[10:03]and my brain just sort of like shorted out.
[10:07]I mean, it was like, I was reading these people,
[10:09]I was hearing these voices that were so similar to my own.
[10:13]And I think for the first time in my life,
[10:15]I was always an enormous reader,
[10:16]but for the first time in my life,
[10:17]I thought, oh my gosh, wait,
[10:19]I don't have to be a secret poet.
[10:20]Maybe I could actually write fiction
[10:22]and be a living contemporary author of fiction.
[10:25]And after that, I spent three years trying
[10:30]to write at Nye Wells at Bartender,
[10:32]and then I worked as a admin assistant
[10:34]at Stanford University,
[10:36]and finally got my MFA, and from then on,
[10:39]I've been a full-time writer.
[10:40]So it was a process, but I'm very grateful.
[10:45]I'm grateful to my parents first of all
[10:46]for their benign neglect, for sure.
[10:50]So when you're working on your different books,
[10:53]like how long does it take you to write
[10:54]one of these masterpieces?
[10:57]Oh, very sweet.
[10:58]Well, it just depends on the book.
[10:59]So some books take five or six years.
[11:03]Some of it's actually matrix only took me
[11:05]a full year of writing eight to 12 hours a day.
[11:09]Wow.
[11:10]So yeah, so this one I worked on very intensely
[11:15]in a short period of time.
[11:16]A lot of them, so I work on multiple projects at once too,
[11:19]because I do believe that fiction requires
[11:22]a great deal of silence and darkness and time.
[11:26]They're like mushrooms, I have to grow in the dark.
[11:28]And often, if you're working on only one thing,
[11:31]you're just putting way too much pressure
[11:33]on that single thing.
[11:34]So when I work on multiple things at once, which is always,
[11:38]they sort of cross-fertilize in the darkness,
[11:40]in my subconscious.
[11:42]And the ones that don't have as much energy or juice,
[11:47]I can feel good about walking away from for the moment
[11:50]and focusing on the ones that are sort of shouting at me
[11:53]and feeling very excited and ready.
[11:56]So it's a beautiful slow process for most of my work,
[12:00]to be honest.
[12:01]I mean, a lot of times, I'll start something,
[12:03]put it aside after a draft, because I know it's just
[12:06]not working in the way that I chose to tell it.
[12:09]And then a few years later, don't pick up what I've done,
[12:13]but pick up the idea and try again for a different draft.
[12:17]They do a lot, a lot of drafts.
[12:19]And as this is before when you said it was like four or five
[12:21]drafts to reach, but yes, exactly.
[12:24]Well, yeah, but piece of view, so my last novel before matrix,
[12:28]I was 13 full, totally rewritten drafts from the beginning.
[12:32]And I write them from the beginning and long hands primarily
[12:35]because I cannot actually read my own handwriting.
[12:37]It's so egregious that, and I don't want to,
[12:40]until all of the foundational issues have been figured out.
[12:45]I don't want to pretend as though my book is anything less
[12:50]than the immensely flawed and failed thing,
[12:53]that it has to be for the first however many drafts,
[12:56]until I understand sort of the iceberg underneath the surface
[13:01]and the structure that I'm going for in the tone
[13:04]and the sort of the language that I'm trying to use.
[13:06]All of these things have to be figured out for us
[13:09]before I even attempt to try to write something that will remain.
[13:13]Wow.
[13:14]I feel like you are like, it's not surprising
[13:17]that you wrote that matrix is from almost 1,000 years ago.
[13:21]It's like you seem like not other, other worldly sounds.
[13:24]Like you're like such a literary,
[13:28]you know, I can't even think of the right word.
[13:31]Like word Smith, like I don't know,
[13:33]you just seem so gifted and talented in a different way
[13:36]than most people today.
[13:37]Like that you're like not of this era or something
[13:40]in the way that you're talking about literature
[13:42]and craft and you know, there's this like magic.
[13:47]I don't know, it's very cool.
[13:48]I hope you recognize it in yourself
[13:50]that this is not like the typical contemporary author,
[13:53]which perhaps is why you're getting nominated
[13:55]for all these words and all this other stuff,
[13:56]but it's really easy to think to listen to you.
[13:58]It's great to be honest.
[14:02]I'm a really really anxious person
[14:04]and I get in my own way all the time
[14:07]if I don't find ways to get around myself
[14:10]and to put my ego so far away in the ocean
[14:15]that I can't even see it.
[14:16]And part of it is coming back to this idea
[14:19]that the work of the heart is work
[14:22]that we do, simulating the play that we did as children, right?
[14:27]And when you, if you watch your children play,
[14:30]playing with Legos, playing with friends out on the street,
[14:33]playing, there's just this feeling of surrendering
[14:37]to the joy of the moments that we lose.
[14:40]I think if we put too much pressure on ourselves.
[14:43]So, and I'm a person, I have OCD issues,
[14:46]I have anxiety issues, I've like, I've done gamuts of issues,
[14:50]but the way that I've got about figuring out
[14:52]how to get beyond these issues
[14:54]is really just to remember that I'm just,
[14:56]I'm having, I'm just trying to create joy, right?
[14:59]This is what we're doing.
[15:00]So sometimes that means dealing with the immense frustration
[15:04]of having to write a full draft of something
[15:06]that you think maybe, maybe you said,
[15:09]and then being like, well, no, it's not.
[15:11]It's starting over again, right?
[15:12]And that is really frustrating,
[15:14]but it's also really cathartic
[15:16]and coming back to the beginning
[15:18]with a sense of just pure pleasure, right?
[15:20]This is what we're doing.
[15:21]It's not brain surgery, right?
[15:23]What we're doing is just joyous.
[15:26]And it should be the way that we felt
[15:29]when we were making mud patties with rare kids,
[15:31]you know, it should be beautiful.
[15:33]And so resetting expectations,
[15:36]not for, I think, the end result before the process
[15:40]and for trying to dig deeper into the sentences
[15:43]and find the beautiful spark
[15:46]at the heart of every single good sentence.
[15:48]That's where you have, I have to
[15:51]just to be a sane human on this planet
[15:53]with all of my many mental issues.
[15:55]I have to be able to be sane and do this work.
[15:58]Yeah, it's not caring about,
[16:02]it is caring eventually,
[16:03]but it's not caring at the moment
[16:04]about the external issues, right?
[16:07]And I think that this goes back to
[16:09]most of the things that we do.
[16:11]And I can't maintain this for anything but my work.
[16:14]I mean, I am the worst cook on the planet
[16:16]because I'm very impatient
[16:18]and people just gonna eat it anyway.
[16:20]And like, I mean, I might have to love
[16:22]just make a lasagna and eat it for 40s.
[16:25]That sounds like great cooking to me.
[16:29]That's way more than I do.
[16:30]So, you know, just making a lasagna and kidding,
[16:33]that's like, I haven't made a lasagna.
[16:35]I don't think of my life.
[16:35]So anyway.
[16:38]Yeah, well, so we're vegetarian.
[16:39]And so it's really hard, actually,
[16:41]especially in Florida,
[16:42]where we are to find good food external to the house.
[16:46]So like, we have to cook.
[16:47]But yeah, but like, but okay.
[16:50]So just to give back to the point,
[16:51]which is, it's just playing.
[16:53]We're just playing.
[16:53]And trying to remember that we're playing
[16:55]is sort of the basis of my practice.
[16:58]Wow.
[16:59]Well, I love that self awareness.
[17:01]I mean, this is like, you know,
[17:03]whatever mental issues you may have,
[17:04]it sounds like you're working with somebody amazing
[17:06]because you are harnessing it all.
[17:08]I need to get that phone over, please.
[17:11]Yeah.
[17:12]I feel like I don't know what percent.
[17:14]I have to like go back and do a survey
[17:16]of all the people I've interviewed
[17:17]because I feel like I don't know.
[17:19]80 to 90 percent of all authors have anxiety.
[17:22]Like, that's why.
[17:23]Yes.
[17:24]If not 100.
[17:25]If not 100.
[17:26]And so I don't know.
[17:29]That's why this podcast is hard.
[17:30]Like, makes me feel so like I found my people, right?
[17:34]Cause everyone has some of the stuff
[17:36]that I have that like maybe I didn't talk like, you know,
[17:39]I don't know.
[17:40]It's just, it's very comforting in a way.
[17:43]Damn.
[17:43]Yes.
[17:44]And this is one of those beautiful things.
[17:45]The more you talk to writers, the more you're like,
[17:47]oh, we're all messed up.
[17:48]Yeah.
[17:49]Yeah.
[17:51]This is great.
[17:52]Yeah.
[17:53]So it's a weird thing that like,
[17:54]I live half my life in somebody else's life
[17:57]by reading about it.
[17:58]Really?
[17:59]Like, like reading itself is like the craziest thing.
[18:03]I mean, you know, I'm putting my brain anyway, whatever.
[18:06]So it's true.
[18:07]You're allowing your brain to be colonized by another brain.
[18:10]Yes.
[18:10]You know, you're really letting someone else's ghosts
[18:13]speak into your ear for the time it takes to read a book.
[18:17]That's an incredible
[18:20]dissolution of the borders of self, right?
[18:22]I mean, it's really weird.
[18:23]We're dissolving the self into another person.
[18:25]That's beautiful.
[18:26]It's wild.
[18:27]It's science fiction.
[18:29]Reading is amazing.
[18:30]Yeah.
[18:31]Wow.
[18:31]OK.
[18:32]Well, that's my description of reading ever.
[18:33]Yes.
[18:34]Like science fiction.
[18:35]I always say it's like magic, but that's not.
[18:37]You're right.
[18:37]Science, that's a better way to describe it.
[18:40]Excellent.
[18:40]You must be a writer.
[18:41]This is great.
[18:42]Great.
[18:42]I like it.
[18:43]So I'm sure you have 57 projects going on.
[18:46]Do you have any idea what's coming out after this book?
[18:49]I do actually.
[18:49]So I was working on a different book
[18:51]when I started Matrix.
[18:53]And that one, I think I'm finishing.
[18:55]And that will be the next one.
[18:56]And it deals with some very similar issues.
[18:59]It's women within the confines of the religion
[19:03]that they were forced to be in coming up against the boundaries
[19:09]of nature.
[19:10]So that's what happens with Marie as the Abyss in Matrix.
[19:13]It's what happens to my character set in 1609 in Jamestown
[19:18]in the next book.
[19:19]So I think, I think I hope, not done what,
[19:21]it might be out in 2023.
[19:22]But who knows, right?
[19:25]Who knows if there will still be a publishing by that?
[19:27]There will.
[19:28]There will.
[19:29]I think I've booked until then.
[19:32]So I'm getting it.
[19:35]I'm getting it.
[19:36]OK.
[19:36]Well, you've already given so many pieces of advice along the way.
[19:39]But as a final question for advice for aspiring authors,
[19:43]because I ask everybody this each time,
[19:44]what advice would you have?
[19:46]So the only advice I would ever give to any author
[19:50]is something that I tell myself every single day.
[19:52]And it goes back to what I was saying earlier,
[19:54]which is find the way to play, right?
[19:56]Find the way to take yourself less seriously.
[20:00]and let the work itself just feel joy.
[20:03]And sometimes that means taking a step back
[20:06]and doing things that's the only slant wise
[20:10]involved in the work.
[20:11]So some days, I cannot actually write.
[20:14]I cannot actually put a word down, but I show up.
[20:17]And those days, maybe I'll take out my large container
[20:23]of pea chips or pea, you know, swabs from the Home Depot.
[20:29]I can go through them and find the color toward which
[20:31]I will write a scene, right?
[20:33]And so maybe that the tone of the color will somehow
[20:37]seat back into the scene and show me something new.
[20:41]Or I'll do an exercise in olepo exercise.
[20:45]Or I'll go for a run and sometimes in just being an animal
[20:51]in our animal bodies, that's where the work actually comes in.
[20:55]So remember that play is just as essential to the work
[21:01]that we're doing as the work itself of being faithful,
[21:05]sitting down as often as we possibly can daily if possible
[21:09]and taking ourselves and our work seriously.
[21:13]But it's also, it's joyous, right?
[21:14]And it's this give and take between seriousness and joy
[21:18]that we have to try to always hit.
[21:21]Have you written this in an essay or something?
[21:24]Well, sort of.
[21:24]I mean, Michigan quarterly review, I give a lecture
[21:28]for the zell writers that I think it just came out.
[21:31]And I do go into it for a good pre-cheese spin.
[21:36]But it is the way that I try to try to approach all work.
[21:40]And I do think that if we remember that what we're doing
[21:43]is an absolute privilege, then maybe if everything else
[21:47]feels really hard, maybe gratitude will get us to the desk.
[21:51]That's also good.
[21:52]Wow.
[21:52]Well, if you, in your spare time, want to write an essay
[21:56]for moms and have time to write about either the science
[21:58]fiction of reading or writing as play, we would love it.
[22:03]So I would love to read it.
[22:05]I would love to refer back to it.
[22:07]I would love to keep it as I would like to print it
[22:09]and put it in a little picture frame on my desk.
[22:11]So that would be awesome if you feel like it.
[22:15]But I'm sure you would love to.
[22:16]Oh my gosh, I actually had a small panic attack this morning
[22:20]about the things that are happening that I have to finish.
[22:22]But yes, I will keep it on the burner.
[22:25]And maybe some of it.
[22:27]First of all, the author I interviewed
[22:29]before you today, her name is Bethany Crandall.
[22:30]And her book was about middle-aged women snapping.
[22:35]And we were trading what we did to manage the chaos.
[22:39]So I was literally saying, breathing for me
[22:41]is not like meditative feeling.
[22:43]It's like, I have to put my hands on my chest
[22:45]to hold myself down and I'm like, so when you're
[22:51]talking about like, panic attacks this morning,
[22:52]I was also having like, it was right there with it.
[22:56]Not trying to add anything to your plate.
[22:58]Anyway, it was more just a compliment.
[23:00]I don't get it.
[23:01]You don't get this morning just to get
[23:02]through the panic attack.
[23:03]So yeah, I hear you.
[23:05]I hear you.
[23:06]I think we're all here.
[23:07]Yes, I don't know a single person who's not.
[23:10]It's true, we're going to get a really stressful time
[23:13]for particularly anxious people.
[23:15]That's right.
[23:17]That'll be the chapter title of this phase of life.
[23:20]I love it.
[23:22]Awesome.
[23:22]Well, Lauren, thank you so much.
[23:24]I'm so glad we got to chat.
[23:25]This has been such a joy.
[23:27]I feel like I just did into like a really interesting book
[23:31]for a few minutes or whatever.
[23:33]So I'm going to enjoy Florida.
[23:35]And I hope to meet in person someday.
[23:38]Good luck with it all your time.
[23:40]Thank you.
[23:42]Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms.
[23:44]Don't have time to read books.
[23:45]Don't forget to follow me on Instagram, ads and be Owens
[23:49]and ad moms don't have time to read books.
[23:51]Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbowens.com
[23:53]and sign up for my virtual book club
[23:55]and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week.
[23:57]Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan.
[23:59]In fact, texture sound for the sound editing.
[24:01]And thank you to Morning Moon Productions
[24:03]for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.