Lauren Groff: ‘I thought it would be interesting to write a book questioning marriage
by presenting wildly divergent perspectives.’ Photograph: Leah Nash

 

Lauren Groff on Fates and Furies: ‘I thought it would be interesting to write a book questioning marriage’

The author on the years of scribbling ideas on her walls that eventually became this novel

Saturday 10 September 2021

I

began Fates and Furies during the long, hot Florida summer of 2008. I was in a strange liminal space between the spring publication of my first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, and the birth of my first son at the end of August. My study at the time had been carved out of our rickety, uninsulated, un-airconditioned garage, and writing out there in 37-degree heat while enormously pregnant was excruciating physical work.

My misery was compounded because I was working on my second novel, Arcadia, a book that I undertook in order to wrestle with the moral implications of bringing a child into a world in which climate change was intensifying. Finishing this novel felt urgent but also staggeringly heavy. The fourth part of Arcadia was set in the near future of 2019, with a global pandemic and widespread environmental collapse, and when writing these imagined horrors became too devastating, I stopped working to dream of something that was in many ways the narrative’s opposite: a colourful, playful opera.

I had been married two years earlier, under duress, because I hate the institution of marriage for its ingrained misogyny, but my husband was being made unhappy by my dithering. Though I caved, I thought it would be interesting to write a book questioning marriage by presenting wildly divergent perspectives from within a long union. I threw huge sheets of butcher paper on the walls, one for the husband’s story, the other for the wife’s. It was a tremendous relief to leap up from the hard work of Arcadia with an idea for one wall, where I’d scribble a scene or observation, then waddle, sweating, to the other to write the same thing from a different viewpoint.

My agent summoned me to tell me gently that the two novels I had thought I had written were actually only one novel

The butcher paper stayed up for years, gaining torn-out images from magazines, short stories and poems, colour swatches from the hardware store, drawings, and tens of thousands of rubbish words. I had my son, published my first story collection, published Arcadia, had my second son. When we renovated the upstairs of our house, making a more civilised indoor study for me, I had to throw out the butcher paper because by then it was filthy, bug-gnawed, mildewed and totally indecipherable because of the humidity. It didn’t matter; the story had taken hold.

I began to rewrite the pieces I’d scribbled on the walls, and they became drafts that I rewrote obsessively. Over the years, the idea for the project had morphed from an opera into two novels that told a different story depending on the order in which they were read, with the (probably foolish) plan to sell them at the same time and leave it up to chance which book the reader undertook to read. When I thought I was finished with these two books and gave them to my agent, Bill Clegg, he summoned me to a vegan bakery a thousand miles away in Brooklyn to tell me gently that the two novels I had thought I had written were actually only one novel, which I’d have to rewrite from scratch. I wept. I did it. In both real life and in my work, I had been disgruntled at feeling forced to make a unity out of autonomous parts; in both, I’m delighted that my first impulses, dead-end roads that I followed fanatically for years, have been proved wrong.

 Matrix by Lauren Groff is published by William Heinemann (£16.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.

THE GUARDIAN