Lauren Groff, MATRIX: A Novel

Totally Booked with Zibby

Zibby Owens

Connection, Inspiration, Moms, Entertainment, Arts, Reading, Books, Parenting, Literary

4.4 • 602 Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2021

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lauren Groff, the award-winning author of Florida, joins Zibby to talk about her latest novel, Matrix, which was inspired by the often overlooked medieval female poet, Marie de France. Lauren shares why she wanted to discuss contemporary issues through a historical lens, why her novels often go through four or five very different iterations, and the number one tactic she uses to get out of her own way when writing.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, this is Libby Owens, and you're listening to the award-winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.
0:07.0	I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology,
0:12.2	which you should run out and buy called Moms Don't Have Time to, a quarantine anthology.
0:16.8	All proceeds of that book go to COVID-19 vaccine research.
0:20.4	And I'm the editor-in-chief of
0:21.9	moms don't have time to write a new publication on Medium. And we're accepting submissions.
0:26.8	So please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on
0:31.2	Instagram at Zibby Owens and my website is Zibby Owens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast.
0:39.7	Lauren Groff is the author of Matrix. She is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times best-selling
0:43.8	author of three novels, The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, and Fates and Furies, plus the
0:48.7	celebrated short story collections, delicate edible birds, and Florida. She has won the Story Prize, the Penn O'Henry Award,
0:56.0	and has been a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle Award. Her work regularly appears in
1:00.7	The New Yorker, the Atlantic and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta's 2017 Best Young
1:05.7	American Novelist. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, with her husband and sons.
1:10.3	Welcome, Lauren. Thanks so much for coming on moms. Don't have time to read books to discuss your new books, Matrix. Very exciting. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. So for listeners who aren't familiar with your work and particularly this one, would you mind giving a little synopsis for this book? And then we can talk about your
1:28.0	whole career and everything else. Sure. So I've been obsessed with this medieval poet named Marie de France
1:34.5	since college, which was many years ago at this point. And I had wanted to write a book about her because
1:40.2	nobody knows much about who she was. Because women in the 12th century were not considered important
1:46.3	unless they gave birth to kings, or they were married to kings, or they were the daughters of wealthy men.
1:52.8	So nobody knows who Marie de France was, but she wrote these incredible poems called Le.
1:59.5	I fell in love with them, and I got very, very excited a couple of years ago about writing about this time period because I thought it would be a really interesting way to sort of see the contemporary world a bit slant. I felt overwhelmed by all of the problems of the contemporary world. I almost felt as if it was a moral
2:19.1	issue that I couldn't actually write about them as deeply as I wanted to, but I could if I were
	...

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