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Lauren Groff on Jane Austen, ‘Infinite Jest,’ and the Book That She Would Build an Altar For
Welcome to Shelf Life, ELLE.com’s books column, in which authors share their most memorable reads. Whether you’re on the hunt for a book to console you, move you profoundly, or make you laugh, consider a recommendation from the writers in our series, who, like you (since you’re here), love books. Perhaps one of their favorite titles will become one of yours, too.
In Matrix (Riverhead) out this week, Lauren Groff transports us—and protagonist Marie de France—to a destitute abbey in 12th-century England where she becomes prioress. It’s the fourth novel for the NYT-bestselling author and two-time National Book Award finalist (for story collection Florida and novel Fates and Furies), a National Book Critics Circle winner and Barack Obama’s favorite book of 2015.
The Cooperstown, New York-raised, Gainesville, Florida-based author, who might have become a poet, was a Guggenheim fellow and Granta Best of Young American Novelists, studied under Lorrie Moore when pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has two sons and a dog named Olive, escapes to a converted barn at her parents’ farm in New Hampshire, tries to read 300 books in a year, lived in Nantes, France, was the 7 of Pentacles card in a tarot deck, buys questionable things on Etsy, considered Ernest Hemingway pin-up-worthy at 12, and earned 14 high school varsity letters. (She and her husband met on the crew team at Amherst; her sister is Olympic triathlete Sarah True.)
Likes: Foreign television/movies (Italian, Danish, French); Times New Roman font, Vegan Gator burgers, opera, the smell of ink and paper (hence writing drafts in longhand). Dislikes: sesame (allergy), everlasting roses. Below, some things meant to endure.
The book that…
…made me weep uncontrollably:
If I want to have a cathartic weep, I’ll take Jane Austen’s Persuasion into the bathtub and sob uncontrollably when I get to Captain Wentworth’s letter.
…I recommend over and over again:
I think Anne Carson is one of the great living geniuses; I’ve recommended Autobiography of Red at least a hundred times, and every single person I’ve talked into reading it has been blown away.
…shaped my worldview:
I love novels that make the reader deeply, uncomfortably complicit with the immorality or evils being described, or that reveal the hypocrisy of the reader’s own weak good intentions. I’m currently rereading Roberto Bolaño’s masterpiece 2666, and it’s breaking me in two, again.
…I swear I’ll finish one day:
I’ve been joyously reading Robert Burton’s majestic The Anatomy of Melancholy for two decades now, picking it up when I need it, and putting it down again for years. Someday, I will get to the end and have to start all over again.
…currently sits on my nightstand:
I’m wild to get through my long list of dutiful reading so that I can get to the surely deeply pleasurable brand-new story collection, Venita Blackburn’s How to Wrestle a Girl.
…I’d pass on to my kid:
To celebrate a huge event in my life, I bought a very fine early edition of Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts from the great London antiquarian bookstore The Second Shelf. It remains to be seen which of my boys will appreciate it most. The other one will get a signed copy of Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J.D. Salinger, which my father-in-law gave to me.
…I last bought:
Joshua Cohen’s new novel, The Netanyahus, from Still North Books & Bar in Hanover, New Hampshire, and both the book and bookstore are fabulous.
…has the best title:
Olga Takarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead has a spectacular title, and it comes from William Blake’s “Proverbs of Hell.”
…should be on every college syllabus:
No single book should be on every college syllabus, but I do think that Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel Cane is woefully undertaught, and is an utterly astonishing and structurally complex book about Black life in America.
…I brought on a momentous trip:
I was the big jerk who brought David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest on my senior year spring break to Key West in college, which was both insufferable, but also, weirdly, the perfect spring break book.
…makes me feel seen:
I don’t think I read books to be able to feel seen, or recognized, but maybe to try to see other people better. A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride showed, with extreme particularity, the stream-of-consciousness of a character who still, years later, lives as a voice in my head.
…features the most beautiful book jacket:
I’m obsessed with the clean and elegant covers of my old French Gallimard covers, and I think that, among modern publishers, Fitzcarraldo Editions hits that same super-minimalist note. Of their books, my favorite may be Kate Briggs’s This Little Art.
…I could only have discovered at…:
Harvard bookstore has a beautiful warehouse sale, where I often buy very strange books that end up delighting me. Recently, I bought T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death, which is an experiment in what happens when Clark goes to see the same painting by Poussin day after day. In the middle of the pandemic, stuck in the same place and same daily routines with the same three members of my family, I found it wildly moving.
…I’d want signed by the author:
Since George Eliot’s Middlemarch is my favorite book, a copy signed by her would be a holy relic to me. I’d set up a whole altar.
…I asked for as a kid:
I was accidentally given Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel as a kid and was so astonished by the sex in it that I asked for all of the other books in the series. These are deeply problematic books, overtly racist, and would never be published today, for good reason, but some of the sex scenes were extremely hot.
Bonus question: If I could live in any library or bookstore in the world, it would be:
About a month ago, I returned from a residency in a 15th-century castle in Umbria, Italy called Civitella Ranieri, where my bedroom was right off a library filled with the thousands of books that Mark Strand bequeathed when he died. I still have dreams that I’m in that tall white room, surrounded by all that poetry and am always a little disappointed to wake up into my own life again.
Read Lauren Groff’s Picks
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