The writer speaks with PEOPLE about her new book, drawing inspiration from real life and the important of patience
NEED TO KNOW
- Author Lauren Groff speaks with PEOPLE about her new short story collection Brawler, out Feb. 24 from Riverhead Books
- The title follows Groff’s acclaimed 2018 collection Florida
- “These short stories have all come over me as an urgency, a passion,” Groff tells PEOPLE in an exclusive interview
Author Lauren Groff writes everything by hand. Whether it’s novels like the 2015 National Book Award finalist Fates and Furies, or the short stories compiled in her acclaimed 2018 collection Florida, the process allows the author to “go more deeply” into her prose.“When the ideas have started to congeal and the characters have started to live on their own, that’s when I really start to care about the language,” Groff explains to PEOPLE. “I find it’s more liberating, because you’re just playing.”The nine stories that encapsulate Groff’s latest collection, Brawler, out Feb. 24 from Riverhead Books, are vivid portraits of those lives. In one story, a woman grapples with the loss of her family after a natural disaster, and turns to a new kind of motherhood. In another, a young girl, jealous of her half sister’s new relationship with a boy, intervenes in a cunning way.“These short stories have all come over me as an urgency, a passion,” Groff says. “I needed to write it for some reason. I still don’t know why, but I’ve had to do it.”
Brawler has been in the making for years. The collection’s opener, “The Wind,” follows a mother and her three children as they flee her abusive husband. It was inspired by a story passed down to Groff from her mother and grandmother, and took over two decades to get right.
“If I were to say enough in one direction, it would’ve been a betrayal,” Groff says of the writing process. “And then if I said too much in a separate direction, it would’ve gone away from the homage that I was intending to write.”
“Sometimes, when there’s material that really terrifies you personally, it’s often hard to look at the material directly and to look at it long enough to do it justice,” she continues. “It was only through time and growing older that I was able to do it.”Other stories pay tribute to Florida, a setting that features prominently across Groff’s books. In “To Sunland,” a young woman prepares to leave her disabled brother in an institution after their mother’s death. The real-life residential facility featured in the story, now called Tacachale, is just a few miles from Groff’s Gainesville home.
“It’s such a good sport for people who are anxious; all you can do is stare at the bottom of the pool and start to dream,” Groff says. “I’d start to tell stories to myself. That was a way of passing time that was somehow also related to the rhythm of the body, moving.””Writing, all writing, whether it be fiction, or poetry or nonfiction, is dependent upon rhythm,” she continues. “I think that that really was an amazing way to become a writer.”…