Lauren Groff on Matrix & historical fiction's freedom & challenges

In addition to publishing four novels – the latest of which, Matrix: A Novel, was recently released in the UK – Groff has produced two short story collections, writing several short stories for The New Yorker. And in 2017, she was named by Granta Magazine as one of the Best of Young American Novelists of her generation.

And if all that wasn’t enough to get excited about, in early October we’ll be welcoming the author here at the Southbank Centre for a special discussion with fellow novelist Elif Shafak.

Ahead of this we caught up with Groff about her new book Matrix, a reimagining of the life of the pioneering 12th century poet, Marie de France.

A great number of publications, including Time Magazine, championed Matrix as one of the most anticipated books of 2021. How does that make you feel as an author? Is there ever a worry you might not match the hype?

I try to wall myself off pretty completely from both hype and reviews; both praise and critique can injure any current work in progress. By the time a book finally does come out, I’ve put it so far outside of me that I don’t feel all that personally implicated in the reception of it. I want it to do well, of course, because I have a profound debt of gratitude to the people who worked hard and put their jobs on the line to support my book, and because I wouldn’t publish it if I didn’t believe in it or love it. It’s more as though the book is grown up enough to finally be going off to university – I know there will be some painful lessons out there, but, well, the book is its own separate thing, and it is ready.

Of course you’re no stranger to the highest of praise. Your third novel, Fates and Furies, was endorsed by the then President, Barack Obama. No doubt there was a positive impact from that endorsement, but did it also put a pressure on you in terms of what came next?

It did, a little. That said, I once answered this honestly, but incompletely, to a journalist which made it into print as though I had a severe blockage after Fates and Furies, which I didn’t, really. What I meant was that in terms of my own work, I don’t believe in the negative idea of writer’s block. I do, however, believe fallow times are necessary and important to make interesting art. I’m always working, always writing, but much of the time the writing is preparatory to the real event, which only comes in time. Art is the antithesis of capitalism; I try to have a healthy skepticism of the seepage of capitalism, the drive for mindless productivity, into an endeavour that needs space and time. I took some time after Fates and Furies, and it wasn’t productive in the classic sense, but it made me capable of writing the next book.

‘Art is the antithesis of capitalism; I try to have a healthy skepticism of the seepage of capitalism, the drive for mindless productivity, into an endeavour that needs space and time.’

Away from – or perhaps adjacent to – writing you’re a regular user of Twitter, something that isn’t always that common among authors. Do you find social media a help or a hindrance to your work.

Really? I think Twitter is fairly common among authors. Social media doesn’t really rate that highly in my days; I’m on it for five minutes at lunch, usually. It satisfies a longing for community while also being inherently antisocial, which appeals to the introvert in me.

Ah, perhaps we’re just trying to follow the wrong authors. Back to Matrix, which was recently released here in the UK. The book is about a real historical figure, that of Marie de France. What led you to her, and to want to write about her?

I took two semesters of Ancien français at university and thought, for some time, that I wanted to be a medievalist. I fell in love with the Lais of Marie de France then, and for the past 20 years, have sporadically taken them up to do a wilder prose translation, but this project never really panned out. Then the orange idiot was elected in America; there were constant daily waves of dread, and I didn’t feel as though I had the ability to address the vastness of the changes in contemporary American life with the moral attention and ability to analyse everything that was happening that I needed. So I found a way to do it slant, through Marie de France.

Are there additional challenges when it comes to writing fiction around a historical figure? How much freedom do you have as an author to expand on what is known?

It’s a gilded cage, a bit. Because there’s so little known about the actual person who had been Marie de France, I had some delicious liberty to invent, but at the same time had to be tied fairly tightly to the plausible, the not entirely anachronistic, or at least to things that were mentioned, or alluded to, in the historical record.

And when it comes to setting the scene and the landscape of the text, how do you approach envisaging and inhabiting a 12th century world in order to convey it?

I knew, because I had worked in historical fiction before, that even though I may not have lived at the time I’m writing about, I do know what it means to be an animal in a hypersensitive body, subject to itches and wind and hunger and diverse lusts. I know what it is like to feel cold stone on my cheek, even if I’ve never splayed myself prone in the shape of the cross on a chapel floor in penance. One takes the wisdom of one’s body and filters history through it.

Male characters are fleeting in Matrix. Is there an additional pleasure in writing a novel which offers up so much space for women characters to exist and be read through their relation to other women?

Oh, indeed. One of the great inspirations of this novel was the 1939 film The Women, in which there are only female characters, although it was a product of its time in that nearly every conversation is about the offstage men. Men do exist in Matrix, but they’re shadows at the corners of vision. Incidentally, the screenwriter for The Women was Anita Loos, whose novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is spectacularly funny, one of my favorite comic novels.

‘One takes the wisdom of one’s body and filters history through it’

We’re excited to have you join us at Southbank Centre for our Autumn literature season where you’ll be in conversation with Elif Shafak. Have the two of you met before? What are you looking forward to discussing?

I am thrilled to meet Elif Shafak – I’ve known her only through her brilliant work. I’d love to chat about her new book, The Island of Missing Trees.

The theme of this year’s London Literature Festival here at the Southbank Centre is friendship and what it means to be friends. Do you have a favourite book with friendship at its heart?

The first that comes to mind is Mary McCarthy’s stunning The Group. And, of course, there is the truly great The Door by the Hungarian writer Magda Szabo.