Arcadia (36 page)
A Conversation with Lauren Groff
The tone and setting of
The Monsters of Templeton
and
Arcadia
are both so different, but family seems to be a pervasive theme in both books. Can you tell us a little bit about your inspiration for
Arcadia?
Family is definitely a pervasive theme in both books. I was in my twenties when I wrote
The Monsters of Templeton
and hadn’t yet started a family of my own, so my concern was with a larger idea of family as a historical construct and as a form of legitimacy. This time around, I began this book when I was pregnant with my first son, and I was uncomfortable, at the very core of my being, with the ethical implications of bringing a child into a world that is already overburdened and uncertain. I always turn to research as a solace, and I fell in love with the wild-eyed idealists, people who wrote utopian tracts and people who actively formed intentional communities, the ones who decided that they
must
do something to change their world.
The end of
Arcadia
almost seems dystopian, with a look into a future that is not entirely rosy. What led you to take the story in that direction, with a look into the past that you could easily imagine, and a look into the future that no one can be sure of?
The utopian and the dystopian are points on the same continuum: both are deeply concerned with how the present is tipping into the future. Both are invested with enormous amounts of anxiety, except that utopian anxiety focuses on active amelioration, and dystopian anxiety seems to sour into fear. In my research, I saw many 1960s counterculture idealists become, over time, obsessed with things like Peak Oil and gold and how to live off-grid, a kind of palpable belief that society is at the brink of failure. They’re not wrong. It’s hard to raise a child these days and not fear doom. This book was my argument with myself for hope.
How easy—or difficult—was it to inhabit the mind of Bit as a young boy, and later as a man?
All I had to do for Bit as a child was to think of my own son and imagine how he’d react to the world he was in. I was lucky in that the scope of my book was so broad: if you know a child’s foundational experiences, you know the man he’ll become.
Were any of the characters in the book drawn from anyone that you know?
Bit comes from my little boy, Beckett. My children hadn’t been born when I started the book, so Bit began as a projection of what Beckett could be and slowly aligned with my actual son as they both grew. My husband lent his personality to Abe, and when I was little, my father fell off the roof of our garage, narrowly missing paralysis, so Abe’s injury is the nightmare inverse of my father’s. Astrid’s fierceness and Hannah’s sadness are my own.
What is your next project?
My stories are soft green things that can’t be shared before they’ve had time to become tough and resilient. If I talk about them too early, they’ll die. My husband is the only person on earth who has any idea what I’m working on, but that’s because I talk in my sleep.
Lauren Groff
is the author of the
New York Times
bestselling novel
The Monsters of Templeton
and the critically acclaimed short story collection
Delicate Edible Birds
. She has won Pushcart and PEN/O. Henry prizes, and has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for New Writers. Her stories have appeared in publications including
The New Yorker
,
The Atlantic
,
One Story
, and
Ploughshares
, and have been anthologized in
Best American Short Stories
2007 and 2010, and
Best New American Voices
2008. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and two sons.
Copyright © 2012 Lauren Groff
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the original print edition of this book as follows:
Groff, Lauren.
Arcadia / Lauren Groff.—1st ed.
p.cm.
ISBN 978-1-4013-4087-2
1. Communal living—Fiction. 2. Hippies—Fiction.
3. Nineteen sixties—Fiction. 4. Coming of age—Fiction.
5. Homecoming—Fiction. 6. New York (State)—Fiction.
7. Domestic fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.R6344A73 2012
813’.6—dc22 2011009956
eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-4278-4
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Cover design by Will Staehle
Author photograph by Sarah McKune
First eBook Edition
Original hardcover edition printed in the United States of America.
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