Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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In your story “ The Honest Island ,” a man named Craint finds himself living in a hotel on an island where he doesn’t speak the language. He has no memory of how he got there, or of his life before this sojourn. How did the story come together for you? Did you begin with this premise and then seek out an explanation for it, or did you have a full sense of the story’s world and its rules before you sat down to write? I wrote this story just a few months ago, and now I’m struggling to remember how it came together. Maybe it’s more literally autobiographical than I realized. I believe I had the setting in mind before anything else, since the island was inspired by an actual place I visited. I imagined a foreigner on the island with no memory of when or why he had come. From there, I sorted out the rest while writing the story. (Its human world, as opposed to its geography, is—I hope it’s clear—entirely made up.) When I have a concept for a story, part of the pleasure of writing is figuring out just what about the conceit appealed to me, why the situation felt pregnant. This usually means identifying points where the idea connects to my emotional life or my experience of the world. At the end of Donald Barthelme’s story “ The Balloon ,” the narrator explains that the eponymous balloon—massive, mysterious, hovering over the city—“is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure.” I feel that there is something of this in “The Honest Island.” The story offers a quite specific geography for the island and the area that surrounds it. Why are the details of the place so explicit, when the larger question of what it is, where it is, even if it is, is left to the reader to decide? The protagonist, Craint, is somewhat opaque and unknown to himself. He’s a bit like a sketch that hasn’t been inked in. Much of how we come to know him, and how he comes to understand his situation, is […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
