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| Lauren Groff |
Why Lauren Groff Decided to Venture Into The Vaster Wilds
The novelist on historical fiction, captivity narratives, and why we can’t get enough of survival stories.
BY DAN KOISA young woman steals out from a Colonial settlement in the dead of night, in the dead of winter. The vast wilderness of the new world is frightening to her, and the people of this forbidding land are terrifying to her, but the horror inside the settlement’s walls is much, much worse. Lauren Groff’s magnificent new novel, The Vaster Wilds, follows this girl as she makes her way into the wild, surviving on squirrels, mushrooms, duck eggs, and her own fierce determination. It’s a cosmic adventure story in which the state of the main character’s soul is just as important as the fate of her body. I talked to Groff about the power of history, writing a “captivity narrative” in which the heroine rarely encounters Indigenous Americans, and rereading My Side of the Mountain 500 times. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
