Lauren Groff's Blog

I love this long, slow, lazy lull of time between the final edits of a book and its appearance in the world. The ARC is out flittering in limited edition toward the people who may or may not read it. Not that I like being pregnant, particularly, but I feel in the same state of mind as when I'm about six months gravid: anxious, thrilled, deeply ambivalent, mildly insane. You want so badly for your wee one to come out singing show tunes, sparklers in hand, with a genius so blinding the whole delivery room has the babe's image seared on their retinas for life. In the end, though, you would be hap

--I was delighted to be on the New Yorker's Fiction Podcast, reading a gorgeous Alice Munro story called "Axis" and discussing it with fiction editor Deborah Treisman. I love Alice Munro. If I could choose five living writers to have a dinner with, I'd choose Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Lydia Davis, Lorrie Moore, and Deborah Eisenberg. It doesn't escape me that they're all primarily short story writers, and all women. I'd just sit back, drink the champagne, and listen.

--"Eyewall," my story originally published in the great journal Subtropics, just won a PEN/O. Henry prize, and will be in t

I have a story in the New Yorker's Summer Fiction Issue called "Above and Below." I'm very happy.

And here's a FAQ about the story.

And here's what I'm reading now.

"Bubba the Love Sponge buys Ocala Speedway."


Hot, hot, hot! It's bloomin' hot!
Enjoy the gobble, skip the waddle.
We know we're fat.

It was an occasion to savor antique roses.
Helping to free the black woman's body.
Mister Mozert and the Mermaids.
Wellborn man accused of stealing scrap metal.
Suspect in hunting blind theft says he was seeing snakes.
3 young women found naked, arrested.
What you get for your money.
Parked in stranger to drink.

GPD: Her smile was a turnoff, she took his cash.
Woman claims friend tried to stab her in the back.

Sizzling highs this week.

Yes, yes it has been a long while, friends. Life up and whupped me one, in the fifteen-pound form of my baby, plus a two-year-old intent in poking my wee-est's eyes out, or smothering him with a pillow (according to Beck, the exact form of Heath's demise is inessential, as long as he goes). The endless renovation was finished two weeks ago and we have a house back. We lived through the family trip to the Puerto Rican jungle where it rained for the whole week so that it seemed that tiny mosquitoes were being bred out of regular mosquitos' spit: my feet were so bitten they looked like I was preg

Three weeks ago today, baby Heath was born an enormoid 9 pounds, 14 ounces.

We are all doing very, very well.

I was calm before Heath was born. I thought I was a pro: if I'd already had one, how different could a second be? Like everything else in the world, however--as in the world of writing, a whole galaxy I'm not even thinking of visiting right now--things are far easier to digest in abstract than they are in vivid, specific detail.

It is in specificity that you suffer--the tenor of the baby's rattle-breathing that gets you out of bed every ten minutes to make sure he's not

We have lived these past six weeks outside of our house. Our upstairs is down to beams, our floors have been evened, ten-inch studs have been embedded vertically through the kitchen and our first floor bedroom, their ends buried in five feet of cement in the ground below. The ceiling on the first floor has fallen. A water main broke and drowned our bed. A sturdy and jovial man named JC makes sly comments about the enormity of my midsection every time I tiptoe through, trying desperately to see my house in the apocalypse of plaster and sawdust.

All of this for the possibility of light, a do

Long radio silence, but my internet fast this year grew from the standard one month of mind-clearing to a vague and porous two. I stopped the Facebook and Twitter; I let emails languish in the inbox; I had brief fits of insomnia-driven responding, followed by weeks of gorgeous calm. The more technology presses in, the more this has come to seem necessary. A beloved and very smart member of my family is so ridiculously connected with his tchotchkes that he has trained his brain to be hyperactive as a puppy on chocolate, with the result that he is unable to actually read a book anymore. This sou

I woke up this morning, panicking, to a sunrise over the Puget Sound. It was a sort of misty, chilly, layered morning that seemed created for bad watercolorists. A train rumbled by and something hooted out there on the dark water and, for a long minute, I had no idea where I was. Then I remembered: Ah, Tacoma, to speak to a delightful group of students at Pacific Lutheran University and give a reading later. This is something I find I can't ever say no to, even if it's across the country and I'm uncomfortably enormous in the wombal-area (try fitting a standard airplane tray over this puppy!) b

Long radio silence, I'm afraid. I've had no time, almost, to sleep, what with edits on Arcadia, my sister's visit to Gainesville (amazing girl--20th in the world in triathlon, after about a billion setbacks this season), and our renovation of the entire upstairs of our house to make room for Infant Number Two, gender TBD, birthdate sometime in February, which will probably make him/her/it an Aquarius or a Pisces, in either case suitably aquatic. In fact, Beck insists on calling it "Goldfish,"...