Biography

Lauren Groff

 

Lauren Groff was so shy as a child that her parents had her checked out by a pediatrician. She preferred books to people and made daily trips to the public library, reading whatever she could get her hands on. “I really read everything, and I didn’t understand most of it,” Groff admitted. “You read Jane Austen when you’re eight, and you’re not going to get the sort of social niceties, but you’re bathed in the precise language and the sensibility, and that’s what matters. I guess it’s the tone that matters at that point.”

Groff was born in 1978 and grew up in Cooperstown, New York, one block from the Baseball Hall of Fame. She is the middle child of Gerald (a doctor and hospital administrator) and Jeannine Groff (a pediatric physician assistant). Her brother is a doctor/administrator specializing in hospice care, and her sister is the Olympic triathlete Sarah True.

She graduated from Amherst College with a dual major of English and French literature. After Amherst, she did brief stints as a bartender, a canvasser for the Sierra Club, a phone bank operator, a case reviewer for the Department of Human Services, and a college department office administrator. She then headed to an MFA in fiction at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where Lorrie Moore was one of her professors. Groff commented, "The major thing these jobs gave me was a hunger for my MFA, when I gobbled up the two years of paid time to write under the aegis of great teachers. I was writing all along, but exhaustedly, without a great deal of guidance, and it felt glorious to get to Madison and be able to stretch my wings."

Marriage and Children

Groff is married to Clay Kallman, a real estate investor. They met at Amherst, where they were both on the crew team. They have two teenage sons (Beckett and Heath) and live in Gainesville, Florida.

“When I married my husband, I said — I don’t actually necessarily believe in marriage, but I said okay, given these conditions,” Groff said. “One condition is that when we have kids, you’re going to be the primary caregiver to the kids … and the other thing is, I will not have any shame or guilt about my child-raising, because I feel like shame and guilt are the ways that a woman artist keeps herself from actually doing what she needs to do.”

“I put my work first, and my kids know it, my husband knows it. I’m a writer first and then I live my life second, and I know that sounds really sad, but that’s the way I organize things.”

“I feel like you have to protect this space around your work so fiercely and sort of resist the societal urge to make mothers feel bad for their decisions,” Groff explained. 

Writing is Physical

Once a competitive swimmer and rower, Groff runs, walks, or swims daily for her physical and mental fitness. She sees a relationship between her physical discipline and her writing, “I think writing is intensely physical…. I love the discipline of training; at a certain point, youthful zest gets spent, and what you have left is the daily discipline of sitting down with it, no matter what. And there’s nothing that gets me unstuck more than a very long run without music in the heat, because I stop thinking, and my subconscious is left to wander its own way….I go for a run or walk or swim, and by the time I get back, I have some small glimmer of truth to use.” Not surprisingly, running features in a number of her stories.

And she writes her first few drafts in longhand because of the physical connection. “Writing is physical…we are physical creatures and everything we know is taken in through the body. I like to smell the paper, I like to smell the ink, I like to see the pores of the paper. I like to be invested in the work in a closer, more physical way.” 

Writing and Inspiration

“I was raised a pretty religious little girl within a strand of Calvinism that was paternalistic and harsh. I started to turn against organized dogma as a young woman, though the stories and moral code of my childhood are still printed on the insides of my bones. There’s a lot of the Bible in all of my work, but much of it is hidden. But after I turned away from religion, into that void poured a sort of mostly hopeful—if sometimes despairing—humanism that found its deepest expression in literature and art and music, all of which I find click the same spiritual gears in my head that religion used to turn. The difference between religion and humanism, if both are lived somewhat passionately and ecstatically, is a question of form, to my mind—religion seems (to me) to be about obedience, staying within a form, and literature is the way of constantly pushing against and opposing and testing the boundaries of the forms and institutions that bind us.”

“In truth, unless I have a person I really truly deeply love embedded in the story, it’s almost like a lot of times the story just doesn't work. It is almost like you are hiding a piece of your own heart and the story has to live because you have hidden yourself in it.”

“I tend to keep a story in my mind for a long time—many years, in some cases—until it has resolved itself into a form, at which time I know definitively that it’s a short story. Novels come out of a dark shadow on the heart, something that you need hundreds of pages to shine light into; stories, for me, start from a smaller explosion of light. To put it another way, a story often asks a handful of questions; a novel asks hundreds of questions. Novel questions breed while you sleep so that you wake up in the morning with even more questions.”

Works

Groff’s first short story was published by The Atlantic during her first semester of graduate school. 

She has published four novels:

Her latest novel, The Vaster Wilds, was released in September 2023. Groff has described it as a a kind of “female Robinson Crusoe” story, set in 1609 Jamestown, in which a woman grapples with the constructs of religion and the compromises she has to make to survive.

She has also published two short story collections:

Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker (9 times), The Atlantic (twice), Harper’s, Tin House, One Story, and Ploughshares, and in more than a dozen short story anthologies. 

Awards

Her work has won The Story Prize, the ABA Indies’ Choice Award, France’s Grand Prix de l’Héroïne, and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. She was a three-time finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction and twice for the Kirkus Prize, and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Prize, the Southern Book Prize, the Los Angeles Times Prize, and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Fiction. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and was named one of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists.

Another Venture

In 2024, partly in response to growing book banning efforts, Groff opened an independent bookstore in Gainesville, Florida: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/books/lauren-groff-bookstore-lynx.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare



Sources: Eliot Holt, "About Lauren Groff," Ploughshares, Issue 127, Summer 2015.

"About the Author: Lauren Groff '01," Amherst College Alumni Features, December 2008.

"The Sounding Draft: Conversation with Lauren Groff," Juked.com, 2008.

Sophie Gilbert, "Lauren Groff's Uncanny Visions: The Writer Who Saw All of This Coming," The Atlantic, September 2021.

Laurengroff.com