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Lauren Groff's name has been thrown around a number of times on this podcast as the author of some of our favorite books to read on vacation. Her latest, Matrix, is out this week—and was one of our most anticipated releases of the year. It's the fictional retelling of the life of Marie de France, a historical figure from the 12th century with no known backstory to speak of. In the lead up to actually writing the novel, Groff took a trip to live with Benedictine nuns in Connecticut to get a sense of abbey life. In fact, many of her novels and short stories have been birthed from family vacations, research trips, and even her honeymoon. We sat down with the Gainesville, Florida–based writer to learn more about her travels, writing process, and what books she's excited to read this year.
Thanks to Lauren for joining us and thanks, as always, to Brett Fuchs for engineering and mixing this episode. As a reminder, you can listen to new episodes of Women Who Travel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts, every Wednesday.
All products featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Read a full transcription below.
Meredith Carey: Hi everyone, and welcome to a new episode of Women Who Travel, a podcast from Condé Nast Traveler. I'm Meredith Carey, and with me, as always, is my co-host Lale Arikoglu.
Lale Arikoglu: Hello.
MC: We are both back from vacation and joined by a very special guest, whose latest book, Matrix, traveled with each of us on our recent trips. To chat all things travel, books, and more, we have Lauren Groff, author of Fates and Furies and Florida, an amazing short story collection. We've talked about her books many times on the podcast and are so excited to be finally sitting down with her. Thank you so much for joining us.
Lauren Groff: I am delighted to be here. Thank you.
LA: So Riverhead's lovely, lovely Jynne Dilling Martin gave us a glimpse of what to expect from Matrix on a recent episode, but now that it's officially out, we want to ask, what is this book about—and what do you hope readers take away from it? Starting with a small question.
LG: Matrix is about a 12th-century abbess who becomes Marie de France, who is an actual historical figure. She wrote a bunch of poems called lai, which are really exciting, fantasy short stories in poetry form. And we don't know much about her because women at the time were not necessarily all that interesting unless they birthed kings, or they were married to kings, or they were the daughters of kings. And we don't know who Marie de France actually was. So it was my way of grappling with some contemporary issues, but also being able to do it slant. I felt like the world in which I was writing was so overwhelming with so much going on that I wasn't able to do it justice at the time I tried to sit down to write, so this is my way of trying to trace some of these contemporary issues all the way back to their roots.
MC: Having Marie be based on a historical figure, but having her life essentially from start to finish be written in this book was so fascinating. How did you decide to choose her?
LG: I was in love with her. I was a French literature major and English literature major in college. And I took two tutorials in ancien français, which is old French. And I did some translations then and just fell head over heels in love with this idea of courtly romance, which is in many ways in opposition to a lot of the narrative frameworks that were prevalent in the age. So courtly love is this complicated idea where you hold one person so far above you, that you can never, ever come up to their level, right? They're always this mystical figure draped in mist. And I thought it was such an interesting, almost subversive way to be in a world that was dominated by a really patriarchal, really hierarchical, really intense Catholic church. It was almost a relief valve in some ways. So I just loved her. And I've thought about doing something with her for a really long time. I actually wrote a couple of translations with the lai. They never really became what I wanted them to be, but then two decades later, she's just exploded in my brain as the person that I wanted to spend time with.
LA: One thing that is so apparent so quickly when reading Matrix is that it is a cast of women characters. What was it like to be able to dedicate so much page space to women's conversations and women's interior lives?
LG: It was the secret joy of my life, this book was written in the middle of the Trump presidency. I was so tired of men yelling at me all the time. Men, you get into the car, you turn on NPR and there's this angry man who reminds you of your eighth grade math teacher who gave you nightmares yelling at you. I mean, it's horrendous. And I live in a house full of men. It's just also awful, right? Like my two children and my husband, and there are just too many men. So I wanted to live among women, but I also wanted to do something maybe a little bit slyer, which is to write the book the way that the vast majority of books have been written, but by men—which is making women characters into barely perceived entities, kind of misty entities at the corner of perception, as opposed to actual characters. So I can only do that in a woman's abbey, right? And only by actually playing around with paternity and ideas of the priests and Marie taking over a lot of the functions of the priests that she kicks out. So it was just joyous, right? My friends, when Donald Trump was elected, used to make these jokes about creating our own lesbian separatists' island somewhere where we just walk around naked all the time. And there are no men allowed. So this is my way of doing a lesbian separatist utopia.
MC: What environment do you create for yourself when you're writing to help create both a sense of place in your book and space for you to be able to end up with a book that you really like?
LG: So I get up in the middle of the night when nobody else is awake. I think this is really, really important for me. I get up every day at five, I make coffee, I go up to my room and I'm still sort of dreaming. It takes me a long time to wake up. And so if you start writing in the middle of a dream, your work is going to be less constrained by your conscious mind, right? You're just going to be able to flow a little bit more quickly into the work at hand and to sort of embody the dream logic that you want. And so, this is what I do: I create darkness around myself. I sit there with my notebook in this little beam of light with my coffee, and I try to steep myself in the place in the world where I am. I surround myself with images from the time, images that are sort of inspiring, too. I think I went to this incredible art exhibition by Hilma af Klint at the Guggenheim. It was the most extraordinary thing. She was this mystic in the 20th century and she made these huge, very colorful canvases. And they were very, very mystical. She was spoken to by the spirit. So she had this group of women who were “De Fem” or “The Five.” She was a Swedish woman and she became this painter who was translating these ideas that the spirits gave her into this incredible body of work. And I don't know if you saw it, but it made me just weep. I went, I cried. I was profoundly moved in a way that it was ineffable. And so I put over my desk a couple of Hilma af Klint posters and tried to reach for that feeling again. So you have to surround yourself with beauty or ideas or images that correspond to the work at hand.
LA: Talking a little bit more about creating that sense of place in your own environment. And then in your writing, I feel like all of your books share that. Talk a little bit more about what helps inspire you to create these immersive settings and this world building. And how do you think travel and moving around the world has played a role in that creative process?
LG: So the beautiful thing about writing is that nothing comes out of nothing, right? So you have to actually keep filling the well and keep gathering imagery, gathering experience, and gathering an understanding of other people in order to keep writing. There's not a single point at which you have enough for a life of literature. So for me, traveling is incredibly important in order to get into the space. I've never lived in the 12th century, right. I don't actually know what it's like. So I would have to do a huge amount of research, which is a kind of travel. But also I do travel research with most of my books and this book, I went to this Benedictine abbey in Connecticut, which was amazing. It's called Regina Laudis.
And the Benedictines, they're incredible—part of their code is that they have to give hospitality to people who come to them. And so they have these guest houses. And in fact, this may be a subject for another one of your podcasts where people just go from one Benedictine abbey to another one. But in Connecticut, in Regina Laudis, they have this beautiful, gorgeous little house. They welcome you. They feed you bread that they made that day and cheese and soup, and you get to work with the nuns. And these are the nuns who are in enclosure, which means that they're severely limited from the world. They work with each other and the guests are invited to come work in the gardens. And so my job when I was working with them—this was November at some point—was in the garden. I was ripping up all the old plants in the garden and then the next day we went out and we were splitting wood. And there was this, I want to say, 89-year-old nun, who's just the smallest human, probably five feet tall, maybe 80 pounds. who was splitting wood faster than I've ever seen a human being split wood in her life. Just the whole force of her being was put into this wood-splitting. So that experience went into the book also.
And then when you’ve finally gathered everything that you need, I like to do this kind of meditation before starting a scene where I just sit and I blank out everything. I close my eyes and slowly go through each of the senses for the scene that I'm trying to evoke. So first, for me, the auditory sense is the first one to come. So I listened, right? And I listened into the scene and I tried to hear as much as possible. And back in the 12th century, there were more birds. So you listen to more birdsong, and then you slowly go into touch and smell and taste and everything. And finally, what I'm doing then is I'm actually almost becoming an animal. And the way that we as humans—we forget this often—we think is that we take in sensory information first and then quickly—or slowly, depending on who you are—we process it. And then it becomes an idea, right? So if you just steep yourself in sensory information, if you become an animal, and if you respond to the world as an animal, you can eventually create something that leaps from the animal, into the idea, into the human.
LA: I have to ask. When you were spending all this time with the nuns, did they know you were working on a book?
LG: They did. Actually. They were so wonderful. They would sit me down and I would sit there and ask the dumbest questions. Right. It was basically from the beginning, I was like, "So what is the Benedictine code?" Or like, "So tell me, what are you thinking when you go to mass five times a day?" And they would let me go sit and listen to these masses, which is a capella chanting done in the same way they would have done it in the Middle Ages. And so in some ways, their lives are not that different, even though they do have computers, and if they have an abscess, they go down to the dentist. But at the same time, there's a very strong link to the past with them.
MC: When you think back to previous books that you've written, obviously this trip to visit the nuns and the art exhibit were major influences for this book, but for Fate and Furies or Florida, or your previous books Arcadia, what were the trips or things out in the world that really stand out as like, "Oh, this trip really like kick started that, or led me to think about this book in a different way?"
LG: My honeymoon trip to Argentina and Brazil actually gave me two stories. One was in Florida and the other one was in Delicate Edible Birds, my first story collection. The one in Florida is called “Salvador” and the one in Delicate Edible Birds is “The Wife of the Dictator.” Neither of them are about a newlywed, but the places sank so deeply in, and the way that I felt about those places actually took 5 to 10 years to process why I was feeling so profound about them.
And [actually],”Yport” in Florida was modeled on an actual trip that I took with my two very young sons to Normandy, to Yport in Normandy, which is this tiny little town near where Guy de Maupassant was born. And we rented a house, but they were six and four and I went alone and it was very cold. Normandy in the summer is incredibly cold and the beaches are full of rocks. So it's not even comfortable beaches. And I had no one to take over and watch the boys if I just wanted a glass of wine out, so I was slowly going mad in this Airbnb that was insufficiently cleaned. And so my OCD kicked in and I was just cleaning the entire time. It was fun.
And for Arcadia, I went to stay at Oneida. I don't know if you know about Oneida, but it's in upstate New York. It is a former, back in the 19th-century, utopian religious commune, where in some ways they were way more advanced than a lot of people even today. They're all vegetarian, men and women were equal. At the same time everyone was supposed to sleep with everyone else in the Oneidan community, which caused immense problems, particularly when there were 60-year-old men sleeping with 12-year-old girls. And so it was a disaster. But you can actually go up to Oneida and stay in the mansion house and let the ghosts pass through you as you're sleeping.
Every book has an element of travel in it, now that I'm thinking about it. Yeah. It's important to get to feel the place that you're writing about, to feel it all the way down.
LA: This feels like a question that I feel like I've asked too many people too many times on this podcast, but yet it still feels relevant, which is, talking about the importance of travel. Obviously the last year and a half has been quite absent of that, or at least absent of most international travel. How have you been seeking out those experiences or trying to find that kind of sense of reward?
LG: Well, during the pandemic, I actually spent probably a hundred hours looking up Montreal real estate. My two weeks in Montreal that I wanted to take this past summer before things closed down again didn't happen. Of course, Canada, being full of smart people, closed their borders to us for a very long time. But I had the restaurants I wanted to go to, the places that I wanted to stay, the festivals I wanted to visit. I was really excited about Montreal. But also I did, in the six week window that we had to travel, go to Italy, to Umbria, to Civitella Ranieri, which is this incredible artists’ residency in this 14th-century castle. And it's full of ghosts, talking about ghosts, but they also have the chef who makes cucina povera, which is the incredibly rustic, but beautiful, food dependent on the garden, the orto. And it was just the most extraordinary thing. And then as soon as I got back, everything started closing up again. But that was a very weird moment to be honest, because nobody had traveled and we were all feeling immensely hedonistic. And the only way to express these feelings of hedonism, even though it's a writers' colony and yeah, generally they're pretty awful, but I was with a lot of people who were actually quite well-behaved. The only way to express these feelings was through ping pong, drinking wine, and eating too much gelato, which is not a problem but I kind of wanted to see people blow up their marriages and have incredible affairs. And it just didn't happen.
MC: Something that we've talked about a lot on the podcast is that any book that you read can be a great beach read. And I took Matrix to the beach with me, and it certainly served as a great beach read. When you think about books that you like to take on vacation, what are your favorite beach reads?
LG: I'm going to tell on myself, because this is actually me being such a jerk in college, but on my senior year spring break, my friends and I went to Key West, which is lovely. It's the perfect place for spring break. But I took Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, which was so stupid, but it was the best spring break book because you feel like you're hungover while you're reading it already, before you're even hungover. And so sitting out by the pool and reading this book while you're hungover just intensifies the feeling that David Foster Wallace already creates. So that was awesome, that was really wonderful.
I think you're right, that any book is a beach read. I think I read Elena Ferrante on the beaches here in Florida and near St. Augustine. Crescent Beach is just this beautiful, flat pale white beach, which would be much better if people weren't allowed to drive on it. But since it's Florida, people have to drive on it.
MC: I was about to say, it's Florida, so...
LG: With their awful music and their giant trucks and Confederate flags, pew, pew, pew. So that's not great, but it would be great if they weren't allowed to. But yeah, so I read all of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan books on the beach there and those books actually feel very beachy to me because they're immersive and the language is just interesting enough to keep your eyes off the the ocean and to keep you sort of deep in the world that she created.
MC: I also feel like her books are hot to me. Like, so sitting on a beach just makes sense, because you are hot, the books are hot, everything is hot.
LG: I'll say the U.S. covers with the pastels scream beach reading, which I am on record for saying that I'm not a fan of them, but I can see why they were chosen.
LA: I am forever fascinated by those covers. I'm just going to leave it there.
MC: Your book is one of many amazing books written by women that are set to come out this late summer, fall, through the end of 2021. Are there any books that you are very excited to read or have already read but are excited to finally come out this year that our listeners should check out?
LG: There's so many, there's so many that I'm going to forget some and I feel apologetic in advance. So the one that I am most excited about because I think she's in my great trinity of living writers is Joy Williams' Harrow. I think everything she writes is astonishing and weird and ecstatic and in the greatest way. So I cannot wait to read that one. Elif Shafak has a new book out that I haven't read yet, [The Island of Missing Trees]. And I love her. Sarah Hall, who's this British writer, has a book called Burntcoat coming out that I'm really, really, really excited about. Let me see, oh my gosh, there are so many. Vanita Blackburn has a short stray collection called How to Wrestle a Girl. And I'm going to forget everything else, please forgive me.
MC: I feel like that's a pretty great starting point. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Lauren's latest novel Matrix is out now, so be sure to stop by your local bookstore to pick up a copy. If people want to keep up with you on the internet and what you are up to and future books and future travel, where can they find you online?
LG: Well, I've only got Twitter and I have a website too called laurengroff.com, but I'm at Twitter. It's @legroff, but please don't take me seriously there. People make a lot of mistakes when they take me seriously, because I'm just making jokes. Really. Honestly, I'm not being serious.
MC: Amazing. You can find me @ohheytheremere.
LA: And me @lalehannah.
MC: Be sure to check out @WomenWhoTravel on Instagram and subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter. Both of those links will be in the show notes as will links to buy Lauren's book, check out the books that she mentioned, probably check out the Benedictine nuns. Those will all be in the show notes and be sure to check them out. And we'll talk to you next week.