“I’ve read it, I’ve listened to it, I haven’t stopped thinking about it,” said Sarah Margolis-Pineo, program director at The Mount, as she introduced author Lauren Groff and her latest novel to a sold-out house on July 26. The large fans for keeping the tent cool were superfluous on this perfect, breezy evening, prompting Groff, who lives in Florida and was, incidentally, celebrating her birthday, to gush, “Is this not the most perfect day ever made? You’re so lucky to live here!”
The Mount has regularly been selling out, or nearly selling out, the large, 300-seat outdoor tent where the ongoing summer lecture series takes place. “We have an unbelievably devoted audience here. We’re so lucky,” said Margolis-Pineo, who claims it has become part of the social life in the Berkshires. “People have their standing appointments at Tanglewood; and Monday afternoon, Friday evening, people have standing appointments at The Mount. Most come in not being aware of the speaker; they just know it’s going to be great, and they come out ready to read.”
It was Groff’s second appearance at The Mount (she spoke here pre-pandemic to a smaller, off-season crowd). Margolis-Pineo was referring to “The Vaster Wilds” (2023), the most recent of the New York Times-bestselling author’s seven novels. “The themes, though situated in the past, are a due call to action for the present,” said Margolis-Pineo.
The book follows a servant girl who escapes a starving colonial settlement in the middle of winter, when some of its less honorable citizens are flirting with cannibalism. Margolis-Pineo sees the narrator as “forging space for herself within the natural world. She realized that civilization wasn’t the answer; civilization was actually the danger, and she was safer among the vaster wilds.”
During the Q&A, an audience member commented that “The Vaster Wilds,” with its “spartan nature and attention to nature,” put her in touch with herself during the pandemic. Groff responded that many assumed she wrote the novel during the pandemic, but she actually wrote it before.
But the novel was intended as a commentary on our times. “Fiction is an amazing way to talk about the urgencies of the now,” Groff told The Edge, “without having to go into the small things of the now that are really annoying to write.”
During her conversation with moderator Andre Bernard, Groff explained how she had been dreaming of opening a much-needed independent bookstore in Gainesville, Fla., for the 18 years she had been living there.
Last year, she was living in Berlin when book bans starting gaining steam in the U.S. Germans kept pulling her aside, she recounted, saying, “you know what happens if you let this go on.” Groff opened her bookstore, The Lynx, with an emphasis on books that are currently challenged or banned in Florida (now over 5,000, she said), as well as those by BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and Florida authors.
The bans, Groff contended, are “fireworks sent up into the night sky to keep us from seeing the really ugly things they’re doing to take away our autonomy, our bodily rights, our natural world. There are a lot of freedoms being stripped from us while people get excited about the banning of a book; this is very intentional on the part of those who enact the bans. It’s a massive distraction from the other things they’re doing.”
“Massachusetts is not Florida,” Bernard added, “but even so, last year there were 34 attempts to censor or ban books in schools or public libraries, so for us here that’s a big number.” He also mentioned the “Gender Queer” book controversy in Great Barrington. Groff noted it remains the most banned book.
Groff grew up in Cooperstown, N.Y., a hamlet of less than 2,000 people, which she called “the best training for a novelist you can possibly get.” Florida, she said, gave her “the tremendous gift of feeling like an absolute outsider.”
“To feel comfortable is a bad thing for a writer,” she continued. “You cannot make art from the center. One of the jobs of the artist is to subvert the status quo; you have to be at least a couple of steps away. Florida has been an alien landscape to me, a lot of the politics, the nature even; when I first got there I felt like it was about to kill me,” she laughed.
Because the descriptions in “The Vaster Wilds” are so viscerally physical, Groff said in response to one question that she definitely did not tramp around and sleep under trees like her narrator. But she confessed to being obsessed with survivalist narratives. And she wanted to understand her sister, who is a professional triathlete and Ironman athlete, and can take physical pain in a way that reminds Groff of medieval saints.
This, too, is alien to Groff; “so foreign to anything that I want to do,” she admitted. Of course, she added, “Anytime you wander in nature … you do start to have a kind of deep and profound understanding … there is a kind of transcendence within the body, but it takes so much faith and patience to find it. I was paying homage to the incredible ability of my sister to do that.”
Bernard also asked Groff about her changing writing style, downright “biblical” in “The Vaster Wilds.” Groff said she read and paid close attention to the King James Bible and Elizabethan literature, and “the way they unrolled their language, the way the clauses build.”
“It takes years to find the exact music of the text I’m trying to write,” she said. “Florida,” her debut collection, used “very human sentences: over-full, bursting at the edges, which is the way I see Florida,” she offered.
Groff talked about her diligent writing process. She writes every morning. “Then I feel like a human for the rest of the day.” She writes everything longhand in a series of fast drafts, letting her own handwriting be intentionally hard to read. And she writes multiple books at once, “to take the singular pressure off.”
Bernard complimented how generous she is with blurbs and introductions. “I think of you as one of our great literary citizens,” he said. He also mentioned how she had rescued unjustly forgotten short-story writers Nancy Hale and William Maxwell.
They talked about art and, specifically, writing’s ability to become “a vast net linking you to other people.” As Groff said, “It brings you out of the quotidian and into something more eternal, more mysterious … the fundamental loneliness of being a person is a little bit mitigated.”
Visit The Mount’s website for the schedule of remaining summer lectures, and other literary and family events.
