Today we’re talking about Lauren Groff’s short story collection, Florida, published in 2018. Keep reading for my thoughts, an essay and review, a quick summary of each story, and some of my favorite passages.
The aura of Florida seems the perfect setting for Groff’s writing—it is distant, hazy, surprising, and at times suffocating. There is an atmosphere of hopelessness, or, rather, a futile hopefulness.
The imagery in each story is exacting, almost overwhelming in its specificity. Groff’s sentences do all the work for your imagination—they are simple, yet they manage to conjure up the most vivid scenes.
Every Florida creature is present here: snakes (lots of snakes), alligators, panthers, and mosquitoes. Swamps and humidity and sinkholes abound. This notorious state is just the right location for talks of existential dread and climate doom—after all, Florida is being affected by climate change much more severely and noticeably than some other parts of the U.S. at this very moment.
I had a feeling I’d like this book (why else would I pick it up?), but I was surprised by just how much I enjoyed it. Before I started reading, I wrote in my notes: “To me, Florida says weird, sweaty, and hazy.” While I could have done with a bit more weirdness, overall these stories delivered.
Lauren Groff said during one of her readings, “I believe that landscape really does change the brain…Florida can be somewhat of an infection that gets into you. But it also does draw, sometimes, insanity to it.” And I don’t think there’s any better way to set up this collection.
Quick Thoughts
Mood: quiet, hazy, and filled with dread (dread will be mentioned again and again—there’s no better way to describe the feeling here).
Themes: loneliness, abandonment, climate crisis, escape
Favorite Stories: Ghosts and Empties, At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners, Dogs Go Wolf, Above and Below, and Snake Stories.
swamps, writhing knots of reptiles, mold, humidity, hot stinking sun, thick with algae, sticky and hot, burning, wildness, hot yellow wool of daylight, a damp dense tangle, an Eden of dangerous things, a sense of something lurking, slow hot drowning, dread and heat
—a few choice words and phrases from the collection
A Constant State of Dread
The collection begins and ends with a character that is (I can only assume) the same woman: she is a mother of two boys, a writer, a wife, a transplant resident of Florida, and overwhelmed by constant dread.
She makes an appearance in a few stories, actually. She is our contemporary grounding for the collection—when she’s on the page, we know exactly when and where we are. In the other stories with other characters, we could be at any point in time. And while we’re almost always in Florida, we tend to delve into some seemingly-fantastical version of Florida with the other stories, rather than the dreadfully-realistic mirror this recurring character lives in.
~
“I have somehow become a woman who yells.”
In the first story, Ghosts and Empties, this unnamed woman walks the streets of her neighborhood alone night after night, the only way to escape her bottled up rage and fear. She ruminates. She worries about the impending doom of the climate crisis and what the future might look like for her children.
“I can’t stop reading about the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, the great Pacific trash gyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths and species, millennia snuffed out as they were not precious. I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.”
From here, we move through stories that feel almost like magical realism, a welcome break from the very real anxiety of the woman’s mind. (In a later story: “She would take a break from herself, too, but she doesn’t have that option.”)
I say *almost* like magical realism, because it’s really not. But these stories feel like fairy tales, thanks to Groff’s vivid and imaginative language. It is darkly fanciful. This other Florida appears to be another world, and Groff builds up this vision so perfectly.
“The older sister had dreamed of the courtyard of their Fort Lauderdale apartment, of the fountain’s turquoise water and the red-dyed cedar mulch and the tree heavy with sweet oranges that almost peeled themselves in your fingers, the golden sun pouring down over everything, all of it shimmering but untouchable, as if behind glass.”
It feels magical, I suppose, in the same way that Florida feels magical to so many people in real life. It’s easy to think of the swamplands and wild animals, the Disney-fied towns, the sandy beaches, and imagine that it’s a place people want to be. But the duality of this state is so clear in this collection: a fantasy to those who aren’t really there, a picture of doom for those who are.
~
We did escape Florida briefly—to France (a couple of times), to Brazil. While the characters in those stories had connections to Florida, the other settings were generally less interesting to me. The stories were good, no doubt—they had the same themes, the same ruminating, the same quality of characterization and language—but I missed the swamps and humidity and wild creatures when we ventured further afield.
And perhaps that was the intended effect. After being deeply immersed in one place for so long, it was hard to let go of Florida even when we weren’t there—something the featured characters don’t seem able to do either.
~
In the final story, Yport, we are back with the woman as she takes her two young sons to France, another attempt to escape—specifically, to escape the “dread and heat” of Florida, as she puts it. But even she, who seemingly despises the titular state, isn’t able to find the catharsis she was seeking when she left.
“She had always thought this [France] would be the place to be during the climate wars that she sees looming in the future…But maybe there is no place to be; maybe all places on a hotter planet will be equally bad, desert and hunger everywhere, even here.”
In France, she continues her catastrophic thinking. The loop continues in her mind, the fears for her children and the future.
“She can’t stop the thought that children born now will be the last generation of humans. Her sons have known only luck so far, though suffering will surely come for them. She feels it nearing, the midnight of humanity. Their world is so full of beauty, the last terrible flash of beauty before the long darkness.”
This was the longest story, and perhaps my least favorite—not because there was anything wrong with it, but because I loved the others so much. However, it was a good ending to the collection, quietly closing the circle we opened at the start.
“Of all the places in the world, she belongs in Florida. How dispiriting, to learn this of herself.”
It’d be easy to see this short story collection as another entry in the millennial fiction oeuvre—the one obsessed with climate crisis, certain doom, and and endless internal monologue. While this recurring character is a good representation of that, the addition of these other stories feels like a (brief) breath of fresh air. It makes you think that perhaps there is magic out there, even if it’s simply lurking in the darkness.
While we clearly cannot escape the most imminent crises, I don’t think hope and dread are mutually-exclusive. Although perhaps Groff’s recurring character would disagree.
“Goodbye to longing. She would be empty now, having chosen to lose.”
— from Above and Below
Story by Story
Ghosts and Empties: a woman walks the streets of her neighborhood at night to escape the uncontained anger and dread she feels at home. She peers into others’ lives, walking and walking, to soothe her fears of a doomed world.
At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners: Jude grows up loving numbers, the only thing he can count on. His distant, absent, abusive father loves snakes more than him—more than anyone—and Jude spends his life trying to escape the loneliness inflicted upon him.
Dogs Go Wolf: two young sisters are abandoned by their mother on an island, left to fend for themselves, relying only on each other.
The Midnight Zone: a woman & her two boys stay in an off grid cabin, becoming stranded while her husband leaves to take care of an emergency. A panther lurks outside. She falls & gets a concussion, then prowls, ghost-like, in the “midnight zone” as she waits for his return.
Eyewall: a woman is visited by ghosts of her past as a hurricane destroys the house around her.
Salvador: Helena has become the caretaker of her ailing mother, and gets 1 month a year to be free and “indulge” in her own needs. On her trip to Salvador, a storm hits, and she’s reminded of how trapped she feels.
Flower Hunter: a woman sits at home with her dog on Halloween, ruminating on the state of the world and why everyone feels like they need “a break” from her.
Above and Below: a young woman runs from her life to leave everything behind, then ends up homeless and searching.
Snake Stories: a woman ruminates on good & evil, Florida snakes, and the difficulties of trusting any man when the worst ones hide so well.
Yport: a mother takes her two sons to France to escape the heat and dread of Florida. But she quickly finds that dread follows her everywhere.
Reading over the brief synopses, you can pick up on the consistent elements within this collection. I read one story per day, and I always recommend doing that with short story collections, rather than trying to read one right after another. They need room to breathe, especially when they are all so closely tied.
“She found herself praying, not knowing if she was praying to her mother or to either of the gods, or a mixture of all three, but in truth it didn’t matter to whom the words were addressed because the act without direction was all she could do.”
— from Salvador
Further Interest
The Florida Project: I thought about this movie a lot while reading the collection. It shows that duality I mentioned earlier—how Florida could feel both big and magical, and yet so dreary and devastating.
To Sunland: Groff reads her story “To Sunland” on the New Yorker’s The Writer’s Voice podcast.
Sewanee Review Podcast: Lauren Groff talks about her recent novel, Matrix.
Thanks for reading today’s issue of Empty Head! If you’ve read Florida, or anything else from Lauren Groff, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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