I'm Natalie Moore. I fell in love with soap operas when I was just five years old, and I still

watch them. Their television's longest scripted series and have zero reruns. Now let me tell you,

soap operas aren't just some silly art form. They are significant. In this season of making,

Stories Without End from WB EZ Chicago.

Join me as I share how the genre began, their social impact, and why these stories endure.

Listen wherever you get your podcast.

From WBEZ Chicago, I'm Greta Johnson, and this is The Nerd at Book Club.

It's just like a regular book club, except sometimes the author stops by.

It is the month of October, and our selection is Lauren Groff's newest novel, The Vaster Wilds. It is about a servant girl in early American colonial history who flees her corrupt and smallpox riddled

settlement and has to struggle to survive in the wilderness. This book is a meditation on

ugliness and misery and strife and mortality and deep, deep isolation, but it also balances

a remarkable eye for beauty and grace and peace.

Lauren, welcome to Nerdep.

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

So I would love to start with your research process because you are speaking very much of a

specific time period, but also kind of not at all, which is a really

fascinating balance. But I mean, like, how much did you actually research early American

colonial history with this one? Well, my research process is absolutely bonkers because I love

the archive. I think it's one of the most exciting places on the planet, right?

And it's full of just surprising and amazing things. All these details that actually bring a very

vague and sort of amorphous idea into the concrete real world. So it's so exciting to get in there

and dig. I did a lot of just primary

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