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Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, and to bird.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt.

This is Bookworm, and today my guest is Lauren Groff.

Her fifth book is a book of short stories called Florida.

It's been published by Riverhead Books.

And as I understand it, Florida was at a certain point imposed upon you.

You're a northerner, yes?

Yes.

And you move to Florida and you talk a good deal about the move.

At Halloween, you feel rather guilty putting your white little boy into a ghost costume

because of what it looks like in the heart of the deep south. And the book is full

of a certain resistance to Florida. How does it become your subject? That was a character.

I've never put my white little boy into a ghost costume. But I uh, yeah, I do feel great resistance to Florida,

while at the same time I love it very deeply. So it's, um, it's a feeling of tremendous ambivalence

that I'm sort of suspended between this overwhelming love and this overwhelming repulsion toward

the state in which I have found myself. My husband moved us there

...