Lauren Groff Ponders the Bewilderment of Human Attachment

At Lit Hub, Lauren Groff discusses the existential issues within her latest novel, Matrix, which explores the life and struggles of Marie de France. “Human attachment is always so sticky and constantly bewildering; we’re longing for the impossible, to be less alone, which even in the closest relationships happens sporadically, not constantly,” Groff says. “It’s also why the hunger for god is so pervasive in human history, and why some of us choose—why I have chosen—to spend life writing and reading. Literature is folding another consciousness into our own, letting it overwhelm our own, so that we briefly become plural, bigger than that first small and singular self.”