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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart, live from the WNYC Studios in SoHo. Thank you for joining us. I hope you either had a delicious lunch based on our conversation earlier in the show or planning to have one soon. I did want to shout out some conversations we're going to have later in the week.

Author Zadie Smith will join me in studio to discuss her new novel, The Fraud. Writer and actor, Rachel Bloom, has a one woman escapist comedy that tackles doom and dread, but funny-like. She joins me to discuss Death, Let Me Do My Show, which is now at the Lucille Lortel Theatre in the Village.

The author of the cookbook Jew-Ish, Jake Cohen, is back with a new book titled I Could Nosh: Classic Jew-ish Recipes Revamped for Every Day. He'll join us to talk about it and take your calls. That is in our future, but right now, let's get this hour started with three time National Book Award finalist, Lauren Groff.

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In Lauren Groff's new novel, The Vaster Wilds, the protagonist called The Girl is on the run fleeing an early American colony circa 1609, that has succumbed to disease, starvation, and violence. Once a servant, she knows and has seen too much and must leave. As The Girl attempts to make her way through the Virginia wilderness, harsh weather, fierce animals, and fiercer humans are constantly challenging her. The Girl's resourceful and determined. The land gives her sustenance, grubs, baby animals, but it's also an obstacle.

Groff writes, "She pressed into the forest up the incline through the brambles and thorns that snatched at her cloak and tore small holes that she would discover later. She slipped over the mud. As she moved her protesting body, her pain grew so large within her that she did not know how she would contain it." The LA Times says of Groff's writing, "She wields words with a surgeon's precision and a maestro's passion, never sacrificing craft for art or vice versa."

While the book goes into great detail about The Girl's body, its functions, its deterioration from infection and disease, there's a spiritual transformation that goes on, as she says to herself, "I run toward living. I run toward the living.

Publishers Weekly describes The Vaster Wilds as extraordinary and declares, "This is a triumph." The book will be released tomorrow, and Lauren Groff will be in conversation with Miranda July at a Books are Magic event at St. Ann's Church that's happening on September 12th. Lauren Groff joins me now. Hi, Lauren.

Lauren Groff: Hi, Alison. How are you?

Alison Stewart: I am doing great. Congratulations on the book. Really, I enjoyed it. I gulped it.

Lauren Groff: Oh, thank you. That means a lot to me. Thank you.

Alison Stewart: When did you first become aware of this history of Jamestown, a time that historians called the Starving Time?

Lauren Groff: I picked up a Smithsonian magazine in a doctor's office in 2012. It actually spoke in horrifying depth about the starving time, the winter of 1609 to 1610. I just retained for the next few years, this image of the bones of a 14-year-old girl they'd found that showed evidence of cannibalism. Eventually, I reread Robinson Crusoe and this book was born out of that.

Alison Stewart: When you began to research the time and the period, what kind of information were you looking for?

Lauren Groff: Oh, all sorts of information. This book is really a survival tale. I had to understand the physiology of the human body as it goes through such extreme conditions. I had to understand the geography of Virginia at that time, what the woods would've looked like, what would've been in the woods, how people were dispersed in The Girls' path, what the fort of Jamestown was like, and the language. This is the time of Shakespeare, so I got to go back and really steep myself in the most beautiful language that English people have ever written and just read all of Shakespeare all over again. It was pure joy.

Alison Stewart: As I was reading it, I was thinking back to your 3rd grade education about who came over, when and why. In your research in 2023, and knowing all we know, who came over, when and why? Who was there?

Lauren Groff: Who was there in Jamestown? It was English. It was the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Of course, by that time, the Spanish had already been settling for over 100 years. Of course, they also tried to settle in the Chesapeake Bay area as well, but that did not go so well.

This was a complicated thing. The people who came over were all different social classes. We had gentlemen, we had laborers, we had goldsmiths, we had military people. There were some women. There's even a survivor of the Starving Time, a woman named Temperance, I think her name is Flowerdew, which is just the most extraordinary name. The people who came over were yearning for a larger life. Some of them were yearning for money and some of them were yearning for freedom.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Lauren Groff. We're discussing her new novel, The Vaster Wilds. Your last novel, Matrix, was inspired by a 12th-century nun and poet, Marie de France, which you wrote while working on this novel. It sandwiched this novel, it sounds like. When you have two really strong ideas, are they in competition or do you have to say to one idea, "You'll rest now. I'll put you away. This other one is calling me?"

Lauren Groff: No. I like to write a lot of books all at the same time. Every book that I write takes many years, and so I enjoy having multiple projects because the projects speak to each other, especially in my subconscious, where most of the work gets done. I love having these books to bounce against each other. They really did inform one another. They're obsessed with some similar thematic ideas, even though the styles are so vastly different. They're 400 years between them. They really are talking to one another, these two books.

Alison Stewart: Could you see writing one that's 400 years in the future?

Lauren Groff: Oh, yes [crosstalk]-

Alison Stewart: Are you going to do every 400 years?

Lauren Groff: Believe it or not, yes. It's not a trilogy, of course, because they're all very different. They stand on their own. I've been writing the third and it's now. It's like a stone skipping across water. You come down in the Middle Ages, and then you come down again in Jamestown, and then you come down again here in the US in 2023.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because just looking at the calendar, Matrix came out the first week of September. Face and Fury was released in September. This is released in September. Is there something about your writing schedule, or is this just a coincidence?

Lauren Groff: I think you'd have to ask my publicity team. I have no idea why. I think September, it's a nice time of year. It's a time when people are coming back to school and reading a lot more, I think. Who knows?

Alison Stewart: When you said that a lot of the work gets done in your subconscious, how do you bring it forth? Are you a person who gets up in the morning and just starts writing before the world interferes? How do you get it out of the subconscious and onto the page?

Lauren Groff: Oh, I definitely get up in the darkness. I love the dream space. I grab a little cup of coffee, I go up to my room. I write longhands because if it's on the computer, it's too close to printed text, so every draft I have is a disaster. I can't read my own handwriting, which is good because I don't want to reread it. I go onto the next draft and then the next one, and finally, I try to transcribe my terrible handwriting onto the computer. It's a very, very long process.

Alison Stewart: When did the voice of The Girl come to you? In the past when we've spoken, you've described the voice of the character, almost like you didn't have a choice in some cases.

Lauren Groff: This one is a little different. The voice of the book, it's omniscient. It knows a lot more about the world than The Girl does. She's very ignorant because I think a lot of the English people who came over at that time did not know a great deal. They had no idea of the scale of the country. She too is illiterate, so even if she had the books to read about North America, which she did not have, she would not have been able to read them. She doesn't know about really survival. She's just going on guts and grits. It was a really complicated way to find my way to this very vulnerable, tender person in the middle of this harsh world.

Alison Stewart: What is it like for you to put up so many obstacles in front of a character that you have affection for, in some ways, want to root for?

Lauren Groff: There's no fiction without conflicts. I think that's one of the only things that we actually need for fiction. I guess there are books that have no conflict in them. I'm not remembering them at the moment, which may be speaking to how deeply I respond to them.

I don't see it as being cruel to them because in this book, in particular, even though she is suffering in the wilderness, there's also this anagogical turn toward spirituality, a higher spiritual life. She starts to see in a very real, almost ecstatic way, almost a mystically ecstatic way, how gorgeous the world that she's in is and what a true tremendous gift it is to turn her face to the sun and actually fully feel its warmth. I gave her as much as I took from her, I believe, but that's up to the reader to say whether I did that or not.

Alison Stewart: My guess is Lauren Groff. The name of the novel is The Vaster Wilds. Lauren, would you read the first page so people can see how we first meet The Girl?

Lauren Groff: Gladly. "The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat icy snow at angles. In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit to seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness. Over her face, she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slightly, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker to root and string and fiber and sinew.

Even so, starved and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrabbled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer, already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight. "Swifter, girl," she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs moved yet faster."

Alison Stewart: The story jumps back and forth in time, so where we meet her there, but then it's woven in as we learn the first time she feels what is love and lust. There is a description of a really traumatic, horrible boat crossing. We learn what she's witnessed in the colony. When did you come to the structure, rather than going chronologically, that you would go take us back and forth between what she's experiencing in her escape and her desire to live and what life was like before?

Lauren Groff: It was somewhere around one of the middle drafts when I realized that we needed a little bit more of a backstory. I needed to actually situate her not just as a body fleeing toward. I had to situate her as a body fleeing away from as well. A lot of the things she's fleeing from are not only memories, but they're also the received wisdom that she was raised within and she has taken into herself.

As she's fleeing, she's shedding these ideas and these tropes and these hierarchies and coming to a new understanding about the world, so yes. It took a while to get there. I tried to write a book that was purely, I think, prolapses. I think, is purely straightforward, pushing into the future, but that did not work out very well. A lot of my process is really just trial and error and a great deal of happy failure.

Alison Stewart: There are times when it feels like she may never be able to stop. She's just going and going and going, and she gets a moment of rest, you're so happy for her, but she's going to have to get up and keep going and going again. When you were in the editing process, how did you know when to pull back and give her a moment to rest or when to send her off on another leg of her journey? The pacing is really interesting.

Lauren Groff: Yes, it was mostly when I felt that I needed a rest as well. As the writer of this particular book, I was so deeply animally, physically invested in what my character was doing. I felt in my ghost. The moments when she does get a stop, she gets this beautiful stop where she finds oysters, she shoves her hands in and is able to actually roast the oysters, and so she's eating not only food for the first time in a long time, but delicious food for the first time. She finds these little freshwater pearls. It's wonderful. That was a moment when I needed that break, and so I give it to her.

Alison Stewart: In terms of how far to take it, some of the language is very vivid, it's descriptive, it's explicit about bodily functions, what infections look like, how she kills animals, certain animals she kills. How did you gauge how far to take the language?

Lauren Groff: The project of this book is to remember that we are both animals and spiritual beings at the same time, that suffering can coexist with ecstasy, and often does, and that death isn't the most terrifying thing. The most terrifying thing is being alone, I think, or feeling existentially alone. This book gives a book of innate contradictions in a very real way.

Alison Stewart: We're discussing The Vaster Wilds. It comes out tomorrow. My guest is author Lauren Groff. There's a line in the book that a lot of reviewers have picked up on. It becomes clear that aside from her lover on the boat, that the men in this book are not great. We have a very sinister minister, a crazed mountain man, and this is the paragraph, "For what woman has not, walking in the dark on the street or along a path deep in the countryside, sensed the brutal imaginings of a man watching her from a hidden place, and felt the same chills chasing over her skin and quickened her steps to get away."

When you think about gender and you think about this girl in her flight, what is the most active way that gender is playing into her flight from this colony?

Lauren Groff: Well, I do think that this book with actual men in it is a little bit deeper into reality than a matrix where I intentionally had zero men whatsoever. It was a female utopia, and so I'm going one step further into life. To be perfectly frank, gender didn't really come up in this book other than at a conceptual level. The frontier narrative is a masculine narrative. The western is the most patriarchal of all genres, and it's the one that upholds the status quo the most in very negative and very harmful ways, I think.

Centering a girl, especially a poor girl, a servant girl, an illiterate girl in this book as the locus of attention and love seemed to me to be all that I really needed to think about gender. Let's be perfectly honest, the people doing the vast majority of the violence at that time were men. That's not untrue. Yes, women did do bad things, but they were the men who were going out and slaughtering other men and women.

Alison Stewart: The indigenous people of the area are in the book. How did you know wanted to incorporate those people and their culture into the story?

Lauren Groff: One of my influences was early American captivity narratives, which are really fascinating documents of the minds of the people of the time. A lot of them were as told to by women who had been kidnapped by indigenous peoples and then ransomed off, I'm told, to men of the church mostly, I think. There's a Cotton Mather there was involved in this collection of captivity narratives, Increase Mather.

These stories served as propaganda for western expansion, for the genocide. What I wanted to do is actually turn that inside out. I wanted to write a captivity narrative that wasn't about being held captive by an indigenous culture but by possibly held captive by the original culture so, this is a sort of a gutted idea of the captivity narrative.

Alison Stewart: The book is dedicated to your sister, Sarah. For those who don't know, your sister is an Olympian athlete, Sarah Groff True, she's a triathlete. Her social media bio says, "Just a small-town girl running and swimming and biking around foreign cities in my bathing suit. Now, we're True but still very Groffy." First of all, what does it mean to be very Groffy?

Lauren Groff: Whenever our families gather, we do feats of strength, which is hilarious. It's sort of a joke, but it's not really. We were just really physical humans. I am the slowest of everyone. My brother and sister are extremely fast runners. I think to be very Groffy is to be very headstrong and to find a great deal of joy in the outdoors and animal. We're just animals.

Alison Stewart: Why did this seem like the book to dedicate to your sister?

Lauren Groff: She was the one who inspired a lot of it. She's now transferred from doing Olympic triathlon to Ironman, which is so, so weird to me. I like to imagine spending, how many hours, eight to nine hours running as fast as you can and swimming and biking through the countryside of many different countries. She's winning a lot of them too. She's, I think, going to Kona this year.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Lauren Groff: She is a person who's able to find profound beauty in profound suffering. She often talks about the pain cave, which is a trope, I think familiar to athletes where the deeper into a competition you go, the more pain you feel, and so you have to create an almost mental dark space, the pain cave, and go deeper into the pain cave in order to come out the other side or to be able to focus the pain. I was thinking about her this entire time of writing the book. Someone who is just exquisitely calibrated to the material of the physical world.

Alison Stewart: I think anyone who reads this book will have the one moment when they think, could I do this? Could I survive this? Could I make it just five days with a hatchet and a flint and my cloak? Could you? What do you think?

Lauren Groff: Oh, heck no. No way. I like to think of myself as just like an armchair survivalist. I have a whole library full of how to make fire 500 different ways. I do not like pain and I do not like cold. Those two things, I think, in order to make it through, you have to at least be able to bear. I think I'd probably just lie down and let the cold take me. How about you? How do you feel about this?

Alison Stewart: I would try my darnest. I know my inner, competing even with myself like, I am going to make it through this. I'm not going to let the darkness win. I'm not sure I would be successful, but I know I would try. I would try really hard.

Lauren Groff: I love it. I love it. Yes. I guess I hope neither of us have to find out whether we'd actually be good at this.

Alison Stewart: We need to call your sister. Sounds like she's the one that we need on our team. My guest has been Lauren Groff. The name of the novel is The Vaster Wilds. Lauren will be in conversation with Miranda July at a Books Are Magic Event at St. Anne's Church tomorrow, September 12th. Lauren, thank you for making time today.

Lauren Groff: That's such a delight. Thank you so much for having me.

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