The author of Fates and Furies on being endorsed by Barack Obama, the climate crisis and discovering medieval humour for a new novel about 12th-century poet Marie de France
Lauren Groff, 43, grew up in Cooperstown, New York, a place she fictionalised as a picture-perfect town in her bestselling debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton (2008). Her second novel, Arcadia (2012), explored the failure of utopian communities in the 1970s, and her third, Fates and Furies, about an unconventional marriage, was picked by Barack Obama as his favourite book of 2015. In 2018, she produced her first short story collection, Florida. Her latest novel, Matrix, is an inventive tale of 12th-century nunnery focusing on Marie de France, considered the first woman to write poetry (known as “lais”) in French. Groff now lives in Gainesville, Florida with her husband, Clay Kallman, and two children.
What made you want to write about Marie de France?
I’ve always loved her. I studied French and English in college and for a while I thought I wanted to be a medievalist. I love chivalric romances and I love that period. To be honest, I was trying to write a novel about the contemporary world but it was so overwhelming that I didn’t feel I had enough distance to do justice to this incredibly complicated and difficult time that we’re living through. I couldn’t do it in the midst of the Trump presidency with all these feelings of constant daily dread, so I had to look at things at a slant and see the roots of the contemporary world 1,000 years back.