We’ve been a little obsessed with Lauren Groff since we first read her short story “L. DeBard and Aliette,” a re-telling of the love story of Abelard and Heloise set against the Spanish flu outbreak in 1918. Her debut novel, The Monsters of Templeton, demonstrates her spectacular flair for using history to embroider her fiction. Templeton is a “slantwise version” of Cooperstown, borrowed from another novelist from the area, James Fenimore Cooper, and Templeton’s history is populated with characters from Fenimore Cooper’s novels. The result is a charming and sometimes heartbreaking pastiche of faux historical documents that dips just slightly into the stuff of fairy tales.
Fairy tales, and Templeton itself, appear again in her new short story collection, Delicate Edible Birds. In the opening story, a modern Templeton teenager watches her town fall apart after a scandal, and finds solace in the metaphorical morality of folk tales and myths. After that, though, we are unmoored from Templeton, and we’re following Groff through time and space: Argentina in the ’60s; Paris as the Nazis descend; an unspecified banana republic at what might be the turn of the century or might be yesterday. Groff is a skillful and inventive tour guide, and recently she gave us a behind-the-scenes tour of her work. Highlights from our conversation appear after the jump.
