Firstly, a big Juggalo “Woop Woop” for a short story collection, which we know are superior in craft and importance to long-form novels and other boring shit like that (citation needed). In these stories, economy is crucial, so each sentence is required to do more ‘heavy lifting’ than long-form works which are poised to accommodate empty paragraphs, pages about nothing. So thank you Lauren Groff for this collection which never has the time or privilege to bore me into skimming its pages.
Groff is an interesting storyteller. Her women protagonists are unnamed though other girls and women characters in her stories have names. There is something here about the every [wo]man of these characters. Any one of us might find ourselves in their (often terrifying) positions, enraged by everyday living in a world being destroyed one neighborhood at a time, out of work and money and then one's car and thrust into houselessness and hunger, left behind by the woman in charge of protecting you to fend for yourself to eat and stay safe, a little sister in tow.
Even without a first-person narrator, there is an immediate sense of relatability to the main character through each one’s curated ambiguity. In the story of your demise, you will probably say the names of others but likely not your own. And this was the exact effect these stories had on me; I read myself within them. Even when there is a logic to understanding the fictionality of fiction, its separateness from the reader is only as strong as their own fears about what they are reading. This is an odd way of saying Above and Below did not get me stoked to pursue a career in academia.
I read an NPR interview (take a drink) where Groff discusses the inquiries into the autobiographical nature of her characters—Which is a question so boring that when it is not asked of women writers I put one dollar into a celebration jar on top of my fridge. It currently holds $6. Anyway, she responded with this good good shit:
She's not not me ... she's not me, she's a fictional character, someone that I know, made grotesque, basically, that's what I think of. There's no such thing as fiction that is not somewhat autobiographical. Likewise, there is no such thing as memoir that is not fictional.And it's possible that some of the things that this narrator says and thinks are things that I myself have said and thought. But I think in general, I'm less grotesquely frightened of the world [emphasis mine].
Here, we get to be the characters and so does she—and also they are neither her nor us. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Read or listen to the rest of it here. She discusses snakes and the book and Florida’s odd history
Thanks for the NPR post, it's great. Also, i think you'll have more than 6$ in no time. :)
ReplyDeleteWomen do well abandoned. don't they?
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UGH, yes, that is best of the good good shit I have heard in a while about writing. Like, how hard is it to realize that the reason fiction is so relatable is because it reflects real life and often is based off of actual experiences? Like fantasy is great and deals with real shit too which is why it can be so great.
ReplyDeleteI will def be at all your future TED talks.
But yes, short stories are fun and awesome and I love how much work the story does for itself (which is so hard to do, like damn). Also, what do you think of the titles??? Like I've been thinking about them more and more especially with Flash Fiction this semester. Like, as I read I kept looking for the things in each story that told me WHY each was titled and by having that in the back of my mind it continually opened up new ways for me to read the story because I kept trying to find how the title came forth in each event.
OMG so I'd been looking forward to this book all semester and then on Sunday I didn't realize it was Sunday and I didn't write my blogpost because my temporality is all fucked up and so I'm going to just write all this commentary here:
ReplyDeleteOk so. I love this book and I was having such a hard time figuring out why. I have nothing in common with so many of these characters. They are often fancypants ladies who have kids and homes and sometimes even husbands. Those are not things I have but I found myself so attached to them like they were just living in my guts. HOW? And then there came this dawning thing. Groff's characters are relateable because they're having those crises that we all have (or begin to have). They're feeling alienated (from others and themselves) and unlikeable and lonely. And these crises may have different instigating events (kids, breakups, money stuff), but they're familiar crises. We see ourselves in them. Or I see myself in them. Even when I look at the character and say "I'm not like that at all!" I'm also saying "That's totally me!"
So she's done this amazing thing, she's created this bond among unlike people. And while Florida might be a sort of theme, I'd say that's a ruse. It's the alienation that's a theme, it's that familiarity that's a theme, it's the longing that's a theme, it's the way we recognize all of this that's a theme.
Like Groff said, these characters aren't her while they are, and they aren't us while they are.