Megan Brown
Lauren Groff is the author of two critically acclaimed novels, Arcadia and The Monsters of Templeton, as well as Delicate Edible Birds, a collection of short stories. Her third novel, Fates and Furies, which was published earlier this month, was recently longlisted for the National Book Award.
Why did you write your new book?
I wrote Fates and Furies because I wanted to think about creativity and how one goes about having the confidence (or the narcissism) to go about asserting for yourself a life where you create art in order to make other people pay attention. I wanted to think about the privilege of the storyteller; I wanted to think about privilege, in general. And I was fascinated by the contradictions of marriage, its simultaneous extreme intimacy and its equal and opposite public, somewhat performative aspect.
What's a book every 10-year-old should read?
In terms of sheer sonic joy, Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll can't be topped. They're deeply subversive texts, sensitive to the wildness and confusion inherent in being a child, and hilarious, to boot. The poem Jabberwocky gives a child permission to find her own meaning in nonsense; there's a profound pleasure in knocking down the rules of grammar and syntax and building your own.
Who's your favourite villain in literature?
John Milton's Satan is the most passionate, clever and charismatic villain in literature. William Blake, megagenius, saw this and said, "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it." Bad characters, or characters who have dark mysteries at their centres are sexy and seductive. They're also extremely fun to write about.
What's the best romance in literature?
I love the 12th century French romance of Tristan and Iseut, particularly because there are so many versions of the story that together they create a sort of wild Technicolored cloth. I don't know if an opera counts as literature, but Richard Wagner's astonishing, romantic music for Tristan und Isolde has come to colour the more antique story in my head. When you know more than one version of a story, a layering effect happens, you start to see shifting depths and complexities that may not be in any individual version of the story; you start to merge all the things you know and to understand the story as your own.
What's the best death scene in literature?
This is perhaps an anti-death scene, but the moment the reader learns of Mrs. Ramsay's death in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse is by far the most moving death of a fictional character that I can imagine. The book is split into three parts: In the first, The Window, the reader has spent the entire first part of the book loving the warm and generous Mrs. Ramsay, swimming into and out of her thoughts and those of the other characters as they vacation in their house on the Isle of Skye. Then, in the stunning, musical second bit, the focus is on the house where they'd been so happy as it slowly disintegrates in the family's absence, most of the characters blipping in and out of the scene in brief sets of brackets. After a short passage of burning prose in which the night and trees and waves are personified as both confused and destructive forces, we get this: "Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty."