An escapist fantasy has comforted Lauren Groff and her friends since Donald Trump was president of the United States: “We joke all the time about dropping everything and setting up a women’s commune on an island. Without men, of course”, says this writer dying of laughter on a terrace in Barcelona in mid-September. “She understands that I am seduced by the idea, my house wastes masculine energy: I have two teenage children,” she emphasizes, always scathing and joking, on the first stop of her European tour on her latest book, The Matrix.
Finalist of the National Book Award and translated into a dozen languages —into Spanish by Ana Mata Buil in Lumen and by Míriam Cano in Catalan in L’Altra—, in this acclaimed fiction about a female abbey led by María de Francia in the s. XII, men do not paint anything. They are inconsequential, predictable footnotes. Males matter so little that each and every one of the animals that appear in the text is female. “One of the things that bothers me the most in the conception of history is to see how women have been marginalized from all narratives, even in literature. It’s devastating. They have turned us into shadows, so with this novel I set out to do just the opposite. This time, they would be and not us, ”she points out resolutely, with that halo that the anointed ones give off with the gift of being the smartest in the class and,
Invent the past
Almost a decade after Arcadia -a novel in which in its final stretch a pandemic ravaged the world from Thailand and killed almost a million people in 2019-, seven years after The Sound and the Furies -a sharp dissection of marriage and its privileges that raised it globally—, and four after Florida—the anthology of stories that best predicted the eco-anxiety that plagues us—; At 44 years old, the writer who saw the neuroses and ills of our era coming has opted for a book about nuns. Nobody start a yawn. More than saints eager for faith, under his pen, these sisters seem like vibrant Amazons: hot, awake, conquering. In The Matrix, Groff has set out to solve the riddle of Marie of France, a poet about whom little is known and about whom she fell in love at the University of Massachusetts when she read El lombro lobo, “a lais queer that made me understand that in that woman who barely left a trace of her origin there was an incredible human being ”. Here Groff flies free and imagines one of the theories that surround the poet —that of being an abbess and illegitimate daughter— because, as he justifies, “historical fiction opens those windows to topics that you think would not interest you, but you end up finding fascinating ”.
Writing, again, about the 21st century was not a particularly appealing plan for this voracious reader who gobbles up about 300 books a year (“Many are poetry or audiobooks that I play when I go running, actually novels understood as such I will read a few 80″, he says, as if that detracts from the achievement). If the contemporary stories that she has signed predicted our most basic anxieties, this novel is born from the urgency of escaping from the noise and cries of the present to warn us of how alone we are staying. “I needed a hinge fact, something that, from another time, would allow me to talk about what challenges us now.” She stands to reason that she ended up fantasizing about a thriving feminist utopia in a better past in the face of an era in which female liberties are receding and the cult of self isolates us for the worse. “There’s a wonderful poem by Emily Dickinson that says, ‘Tell the truth but tell it biased.’ And that’s what I’ve done with The Matrix. Marie arrives at the abbey to find it in ruins, everything is rotten, her world is starving. But she is capable of building a better world. She had the need to create something that she believed in in these dark times. Finding beauty in a life in community, learning to take care of ourselves”.
The author of ‘I told you so’
She does not deny that she feels some pride in having become the author of ‘I told you so’. “I am glad to know that what I warned is finally recognized, that after so many years feeling like a Trojan princess I have been listened to.” What does bother this New Yorker raised in a Presbyterian wasp community, daughter of a doctor, sister of doctors and an Olympic triathlete, is the inability of human beings to understand how the eternal return works. How history repeats itself and returns to what we thought was over. Perhaps she comes from living for years in Florida, where she says she has witnessed an acceleration of social detachment after covid. An anticipatory corner in which every man for himself has allied himself with a suffocating climate that looks like an imminent disaster. “Now we are stuck in a terrible loop. Fascism is also the rise of the individual over the community. And it’s connected to eco-anxiety. When we feel threatened, we withdraw into ourselves. I am very concerned. Maybe we should all move to Scandinavia”, she reflects, trying to lighten that visionary drive that she always gives off.
The helplessness in the face of this disaffection is transferred to her heroines, filling them with mobilizing rage. “I also did it in The Sound and the Furies. Culturally, we are asked to inoculate it, but female rage is probably the most powerful thing in the world. Especially against the oppressors. We have to get angry, use rage like a fine-tuned laser beam. I believe in controlled rage, not in the volcanic one that erupts and destroys. Rage is a force for good, it is the antidote against the vase woman, ”she points out, determined. She no longer prays, but she reads Middlemarch once a year to rediscover her faith. And she laughs every time she’s congratulated for making it onto Obama’s list of favorite books and being validated almost instantly. “It was great, it brought me so many new readers, but I have a close friend who always tells me.
