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 taken early retirement from her job. For the first time in her life, she finds herself with nothing to do. How destabilizing is this moment for her?

Eliza has a lot of me in her—so much so that I even gave her a piece of my middle name, Elizabeth—and perhaps it’s unresolved Calvinism or internalized and unexamined capitalism, maybe it’s even embedded in our DNA from Mennonite/Amish ancestors, but both the character and I get a great deal of our daily pleasure from working extremely hard. In all honesty, I’m pretty exhausted right now; there’s a little wish fulfillment in my giving Eliza a sudden forced rest. But neither of us find ourselves happy with enormous swaths of free time, and the more I have, the less I find myself engaged with the world around me. Eliza’s retirement changes everything about who she imagines herself to be.

Eliza and her husband, Willie, have spent most of their married life renovating an old stone house by a river. It’s now finished—and beautiful. Does it represent a vision of the future? Or a way of not thinking about the future?

A house is always more than a house. It’s a larger, far more durable body we can build and shore up against the elements to protect our small, animal bodies from the world. The urge to perfect a house is an urge to make a safer and more beautiful life. This is why home-renovation shows on television are so deeply satisfying: the trajectory is always toward greater beauty and safety. I think Eliza and Willie’s work on the house is an attempt to drive themselves toward a more stable future.

When did you come up with the title? Was it in place from the beginning or something that came to you later? Did you want to make a connection with Pablo Neruda’s poem?

Neruda’s poem—“One Hundred Love Sonnets: XVII”—has always been a secret talisman for me, evocative and rich and true, and I’ve thought of it nearly every day since I first read it decades ago. (The phrase “between the shadow and the soul” is from Mark Eisner’s translation; the original line goes: “te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras,/ secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma.” Translation is gloriously and necessarily inexact, and there’s a gravity to “sombra” that “shadow” doesn’t quite have, at least to my mind, where it’s both evocative of the English “sombre” and aligned with safety, like the phrase “ir por la sombra,” which means something like “take care.”) There’s a deep mystery to love, particularly to love that lasts for a long time. I’ve been with my husband since 1999; we’ve continued to grow into each other, and there’s a thrilling silence and density there that only Neruda’s poem, I’ve found, has ever come close to expressing. I had the final moment of the story before I had any of the rest of it, and in all of my thinking, as the story built itself inside my head, that last moment always circled around the feeling that arose from the last lines of the poem:

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.

You were the guest editor of this year’s “Best American Short Stories” and also served as the chair of the judges for the National Book Award for Fiction. How stimulating is it to think about other writers’ fiction?

This year was intense; I also opened a bookstore—The Lynx, in Gainesville, Florida. I haven’t slept in a very long time. There is a real difference between reading for joy and reading for duty, even when the dutiful reading holds some astonishing, life-changing books and stories, as it had this year for both “Best American Short Stories” and the National Book Awards. In all honesty, I’m ready to read simply for pleasure again. I began as a reader, and I’m still a reader first, before I’m a writer. I live most freely in the work of others. Literature is a long and vast conversation in which one can speak with dead geniuses like Virginia Woolf, George Eliot, Toni Morrison, as easily as one can speak with living ones like Anne Carson, Edwidge Danticat, Jhumpa Lahiri. I return to the work of others to feel drawn into a deeper, different conversation than the one my own mind has with itself. And I read to fill myself up with the necessary light that I need to create anything. ♦