BEACON OF LIGHT
Acclaimed US writer Lauren Groff talks to Philip Matthews about history and politics and why it was “beautiful and good” to hear from Barack Obama.
This is where the idea came from. It was 10 years ago and writer Lauren Groff was sitting in a doctor’s waiting room, looking for something to read.
“I don’t like touching things in doctor’s offices,” she says, “because I have a little bit of OCD and the one untouched magazine was the Smithsonian Magazine, which is from a beautiful history museum in Washington DC. I saw this extraordinary article about Jamestown, which was of course the first permanent English colony in North America.”
The Jamestown settlement was established in Virginia in 1607, as every US school student probably learns. But the settlement was nearly ended by a terrible period known as the “Starving Time”, which is what the article covered.
There was breaking news about the Starving Time. A forensic anthropologist revealed that starvation got so bad that English colonists were not just eating dogs, cats, rats, mice and even shoe leather, but people. The skeleton of a 14-year-old girl showed “marks of cannibalism”, Groff says, but that’s a polite way to put it. According to the article, her skull was split in half and the brain was removed. After the brain, they ate her tongue, cheeks and leg muscles.
“That shocked and sort of lit a fire in me,” Groff says.
That fire produced Groff’s latest novel, The Vaster Wilds, in which a teenage girl escapes from the starving Jamestown settlement and makes her way through inhospitable North American terrain, looking for things to eat, places to sleep and ways to stay warm, while avoiding people and predator y animals. It is ag rippy and beautifully written adventure story, but there is a greater purpose, even a political one.
Of course, everything is political in the US right now, especially history. Groff lives in Florida, where battles over history are not abstract or remote.
“In the state of Florida, because the Republicans are so solidly in charge of the education system, high school textbooks are presenting slavery as though it were a good thing. This is how far we’ve gone. It’s up to people who do know history and are thoughtful and care about the truth to start writing these stories, and questioning the dominant narrative.”
Groff sees The Vaster Wilds as the second part of a larger project that started with her novel Matrix, which was set in a medieval convent. Both books are critical of religion. In The Vaster Wilds, the focus is on “the way religion has brought us to where we are in terms of climate change”.
Yet it turns out Groff had a religious dimension herself.
“I was a very fervent child, a child in search of fervency in some ways, because I’m a middle child,” she says. “We’re not given enough love,
I think.
“I wanted so desperately to have something higher to believe in. My family went to church, a very, very strict Presbyterian church, from the time I was very little and I believed so deeply.
“One of the first books I read was the Bible and I didn’t even stop at the begats. Eventually, you get to the good stuff, to the sex and the Song of Solomon, all of the beautiful passages and the Psalms and the things you take away with you. I’m actually very grateful to this early religious fervency because it means I can go to any museum in Europe and understand most of the stories being told through the art. I did not give this to my children, alas.”
As she became a teenager, her religious fervour switched to a literary fervour, and she has hardly strayed from it in the years since.
As far as religion’s impact on climate change goes, Groff agrees there is “a dawning awareness” of how much the Indigenous people who were mocked as savages by Europeans knew about sustaining life in their environment.
“There’s a wonderful writer in the US named Robin Wall Kimmerer and she wrote a book that’s very big right now called Braiding Sweetgrass,” Groff says. “She’s Indigenous. It’s a very intelligent, life-changing book about human cultivation and not dominance.
“I think this is one of the points of The Vaster Wilds, the understanding that Western European religion created a false hierarchy in which humans are at the top and the rest of nature is beneath. It’s even embedded in the English language.
“According to Robin Wall Kimmerer, the Indigenous vision is of equity, humans on par with the rest of nature. If that were the vision of the world that we all would embrace, we would not be killing whales, right? We would not be putting plastic into the oceans. We would be taking care of things as opposed to imposing our will on the natural world.
“It makes me devastated to think about what we’re doing. And the only thing I feel like I can do is to try to make art, to try to change the narrative.”
Groff will be one of the international stars at the Auckland Writers Festival in May, where the programmers have put her in three sessions. She’s in one by herself, one with short story writers and one in a panel on book bans and literary censorship.
And you can guarantee that at every appearance it will be mentioned that her work has been personally endorsed by former US President Barack Obama.
Obama puts out annual lists of his favourite songs, books and movies, and The Vaster Wilds appeared on his 2023 list, just as Matrix did in 2021. But it gets better. When he read Fates and Furies in 2015, he called it his book of the year.
“He read my book while he was an acting president and took the time to write me a note about it, which is one of my prized possessions,” she says. “It did do something extraordinary and wonderful, which is that in the US, men tend not to read books by women all that often, until the woman is proven in some way. For a lot of men that was the proof that I was worthy of being read, which is bittersweet, of course. I want to be read for my own sake and not because a powerful man told other men it’s OK to read me. But at the same time, he made it possible for me to write other books.” Is there any downside to an Obama endorsement? “Downside? No. I’m sure people who hate Barack Obama hate me. I’m okay with that. It’s only beautiful and good.”
She was already a fan. In an interview that followed the shock of the endorsement, Groff talked about canvassing for Obama, which was a big deal because “I’m a huge introvert”.
Introversion may be related to her love of research, which she calls one of her favourite things about writing. One of the challenges of The Vaster Wilds was how to get into the mind of a girl born in England and living in North America in the early 17th century.
There were plenty of “gentlemen” writing journals but their reliability is questionable, as historians have learned about the accounts of Jamestown governor John Smith. His encounters with the Native American girl Pocahontas were embellished to say the least.
There was another source and that was Shakespeare. Groff re-read everything he wrote, to get a deeper sense of the rhythms and rhetorical devices of the time.
It feels convincing, as do the physical ordeals of the main character. That part has a personal dimension, as Groff dedicated the book to her sister, Olympian triathlete Sarah True, “who has spent decades pushing her body to the limits of human ability, and who, in the process, has made her soul radiant”.
“I think this is one of the points of The Vaster Wilds, the understanding that Western European religion created a false hierarchy in which humans are at the top and the rest of nature is beneath. It’s even embedded in the English language.”
Groff is pleased when she hears that her deep immersion in the mindset of the time seems reminiscent of the film director Robert Eggers, particularly his movie The Witch, set in New England a few decades later.
“Oh, he is truly a genius,” Groff says. “He does think himself into the language of the times he’s writing about.”
Coincidentally, Groff has just written an introduction to the published screenplay of Eggers’ “extraordinary” second movie, The Lighthouse.
Again, books are political. One reason Groff will talk about banned books in Auckland is because she and her husband Clay are about to open a bookshop in Gainesville, Florida, called The Lynx. It will feature books that have been targeted.
“Florida is the epicentre for reactionary political book banning,” she says. “The University of Florida in Gainesville just closed down their diversity and inclusion office which is incredibly devastating. Of course, the educational system is a public system entirely ruled by politicians. And they’re all right-wing now in Florida.
“There are a few parents who are doing the vast majority of book banning in Florida and school districts are terrified. They can be charged with a felony if they are seen to be giving students books that have queer representation. It’s really, really bad.”
According to The Lynx’s website, books banned in Florida include titles by James Baldwin, Isabel Allende, Judy Blume and Ian McEwan. Yes, even Ian McEwan.
“We are going to be a general interest bookstore with 8000 books in it, but we’re going to try to make ideas and diverse thoughts and acceptance of LGBTQI people reverberate outward from Gainesville, which is very progressive, and into the counties where we know there are children suffering because they are in a repressive environment.
“We’re very, very serious about this. We’re going to try to be a beacon of light in this really dark place.”