Lauren Groff has enjoyed the successes of the literary world since her debut novel The Monsters of Templeton came out in 2008. Her star continued to grow with a short story collection and a second novel—2012’s Arcadia—before becoming a supernova in 2015 with the release of Fates and Furies. Everyone seemed to have a copy—from strangers on the bus to high school English teachers to President Barack Obama.
Whatever was going to come next was sure to come against high expectations and be criticized under a microscope. Groff knew that, so she’s technically still deciding what her full-length follow up should be. Instead, the writer decided to go back and collect her stories, which have been published in a variety of outlets ranging from Tin House to The New Yorker, in new collection Florida.
The collection takes place over the course of decades in various towns and features a variety of characters. The connecting thread is that they all take place in Florida and explore what the state really has to offer. 
I communicated with the National Book Award finalist via email to discuss what she’s been up to since Fates and Furies was released, why Florida is the perfect state in which to set a short story collection, and how she taps into characters with such precision.
The Millions: First, I was hoping to catch up with what your world has been like since the extreme high of Fates and Furies. A National Book Award finalist. Numerous “Best of” lists. Obama’s stamp of approval. What’s life been like?
Lauren Groff: Oh, life has been nice. I’ve been busy. I’ve been protected a little bit from the high winds of Fates and Furies by my extreme self-skepticism. I’ve written multiple drafts of three other novels, one of which went into a bonfire (RIP—you won’t be missed), two of which are still being thought through, one of which may work out someday. We’ll see. Each project needs to, in some ways, obliterate the previous project, so I’ve been waiting for the firepower to arrive.
TM: The majority of these stories were published within the past decade—give or take. How have you changed since the earlier stories (2012’s “Eyewall”) to now?
LG: I’ve somewhat resigned myself to the idea that I may live in Florida for the rest of my life, and that all the other imagined lives for myself have slowly withered away. It sounds sad, but there’s so much about this life that allows the writing to happen, and it’s where the people I love are, and where they’re happy, so it’s all pretty much at a balancing point right now. And I’ve grown a deep love for the resilient, teeming Florida wilderness that people who don’t live here don’t often know about.
TM: I feel like Florida is really this unknown entity to a lot of people who have never been there. There’s Disney. There are hot Miami night clubs. There are Everglades. But Florida is huge. What does Florida mean to you?
LG: Florida is giant. You can’t ever successfully define it because it’s not a single cohesive thing; it’s endless and changing and strange and gorgeous in its contradictory nature. My Florida is a pretty taut spiderweb of ambivalence; I’m stuck here but also lifted somewhat off the ground at the same time. There are things here that I despise; there are things I would lay down my body to protect. I would need the rest of my life to write my way out of Florida, the mental state, not just the actual state of the union.
TM: A lot of times readers assign autobiographical truth to writers’ novels. Your first novel was about a woman who didn’t know who impregnated her and I read in an interview that people asked you about that. I’m assuming people asked about your marriage after they read Fates and Furies. With short stories though, it’s different. Do you want to stop the buck here and answer if there is any Lauren Groff in these stories?
LG: Just a minute ago I read an excellent Tim Parks piece about this in the New York Review of Books, and now I’m convinced both that there’s no such thing as autobiographical fiction and that there’s no fiction that’s not entirely autobiographical. My answer for this question is the same with every book: There’s not not a Lauren Groff in it—whoever she is has been made a little grotesque by fiction.
TM: Your characters are wide-ranging in this collection. Is there something that you feel connects them somehow?
LG: Florida—both geographically and as a sense of bright dread—connects them.
TM: Other than characters, how do you know when a story or a novel is going to work? What is it about a piece that clicks for you?
LG: I’ve learned not to write stories when they’re new in my head, unless they’re so loud they need to be written so that I can go back to thinking about other things. A story is an idea that needs to build its layers in the subconscious for as long as it takes, until something sparks the story and it starts to come alive. The process of building a novel, for me, is a more physical and daily and laborious process, though in the end it’s the same kind of building, just out in the open. The difference is that it has to take place day after day on blank pages, instead of in the darkness of the subconscious, because of the scale of the thing. And I never really know either are going to work until I catch the tone and color of the prose it needs to be written in.
TM: The past few years have had some stellar short story collections published. What are some collections or just single-released stories in magazines that have caught your attention?
LG: I really liked Daniel Alarcón’s The King Is Always Above the People and am always interested in Ottessa Moshfegh’s work. And I thought Catherine Lacey‘s new story collection, Certain American States, out soon, was brittle and brilliant, particularly the story “Violations.”
