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 May of 2021, I had a mental breakdown, which is the only term I’ve found applicable to what happened that night when my mind shattered into a million pieces, catalyzing a seven-month-plus hellish existence: never-ending panic attacks, debilitating anxiety, deepening episodes of depersonalization and derealization, and the darkest depression I’ve ever known. In August, I had an appointment with a new therapist. She quickly put me on SSRIs whose side effects formed a new branch of my delirium. Still, I was determined to attend my final semester of MFA coursework (I thought, if there is any place to be crazy it’s in an MFA program). That September, Laurie Sheck, my professor, arrived in my life as a fairy godmother wearing black, lace, fingerless gloves. Laurie’s first assignment led me to Norma. * In my debut novel, twenty-seven-year-old Norma is in the middle of a mental breakdown. She meets with a therapist, hoping therapy can provide relief from her insanity, enough so that she can finish her collection of short stories, which revolve around a character who is also named Norma…who is also a writer. That fall of 2021: there was Norma writing her story, Norma writing a character who was writing their own story, and then there was me: writing everyone writing. I took my fear over the future, my experiences with dissociation, and my diagnoses, and told Norma to deal with them in her fictional world. Because of the experimental style and stream-of-consciousness prose, people may assume the novel is autofiction. I remind them of the text on the cover: a novel. Still, there’s something to say about the space (and non-space) between me and Norma because something real, something human happened between the two of us. * I’ll say it outright for anyone wondering: Norma isn’t me and the novel is not autobiographical. There are obvious differences between Norma and I: where we grew up, our education, and our family lives. And though she isn’t me, Norma certainly held a part of me, as I imagine many characters do for other writers. I took visions from […]
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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,
