There was a fascinating profile of writer Lauren Groff in last weekend’s New York Times, “How Lauren Groff, One of ‘Our Finest Living Writers,’ Does Her Work.” Groff is an excellent writer in the middle of an already distinguished career. Though I prefer her stories to her novels mostly for idiosyncratic personal reasons, she is on my mental list of people to always read. Even if it’s just a little bit of the latest novel, I will read some of it to see what she is up to now.

First, a tenet: profiles are a hoax. I realize that there are some profiles that are “good,” both good journalism and good writing, perceptive, useful, aesthetically pleasing, not completely dishonest and fraudulent. But most profiles are fraudulent. All celebrity profiles are fraudulent, and the New York Times profiles of writers are a specific breed of fraudulent. One could say there’s a long tradition of fraudulence with respect to this category at the New York Times. The fraudulence comes from the two-step conspiracy between profile writer (in this case journalist Elizabeth A. Harris) and profiled subject. You have a journalist desperate for a story, any kind of story, any kind of angle toward something interesting, combined with a writer who by necessity must spend the majority of his or her time inside, alone, listening to voices inside their head. Not the most fertile ground for interesting journalism. Combine this fraught set up with the need to do some myth maintenance. Who can forget David Foster Wallace asking Frank Bruni, “Do you have my saliva?” in that very same august publication? That profile also had Bruni going through Wallace’s medicine cabinet. On the one hand this seems like a creepy invasion of privacy. On the other, this seems like a desperate young journalist looking for anything they can find to hang a paragraph upon. (Upon reread, that old profile has a heroic amount of persona-building from both journalist and subject.)

That’s a long way of saying that profiles of writers are the softest of soft journalism and are usually filled with gargantuan mounds of self-aggrandizing BS, and the Groff profile does not disappoint. In fact, it might win a medal for the highest frequency of raised eyebrows from this humble reader. I realize that profiles like these are basically commercials for the writer and commercials for the sensitivity of the reporters. But even so, this one is an everlasting gobstopper of weirdness.¹

“The outing was unusual for an author interview — and, given the pace of the hike, not an insignificant amount of exercise. Typically, these conversations take place over coffee or lunch, at a publisher’s office or maybe in a writer’s living room. But Groff had chosen something different: a five-mile hike through the woods and a swim in a pond, followed by a lunch of chickpea salad and a beet slaw with pistachio butter, all of which she made herself.” 

Where to even begin? What a disappointing lunch. Why would you do that to those poor pistachios? And she “made it herself”? What is this, the Ladies Home Journal from 1983? 

Groff knows exactly what she is doing, taking your lazy ass on a five-mile hike and swim. She’s giving you the Hook, which simultaneously frames her as a flattering combination of writer/athlete. It’s like something out of Veep. She’s not like these other writers, etc. She is not just accomplished and talented but also athletic and cool with her “goofy sense of humor” and she knows her way around the kitchen when necessary and above all seems like someone you would want to hang with, or barring that someone you would at least look up to. 

“A former college athlete who still runs, swims and plays tennis regularly, Groff, 45, has a physicality about her that is central to how she lives and writes.” We also learn that Groff’s sister was an Olympic triathlete, so the jock is strong with this one. One can only imagine how intensely competitive the holiday sessions of Pictionary are up in New Hampshire. 

“Groff and her family remain close. Though she lives in Gainesville, where Kallman (her husband) owns and operates off-campus housing for University of Florida students, she spends every summer in New Hampshire, close to where her sister and her brother live, and where her parents have a house.”

First thought: that’s a good job. Second thought: that’s an excellent job for the spouse of a writer. Solidly remunerative and filled with interesting stories. I can only imagine the horrors that greet her spouse daily as he deals with the living consequences of the standard male UF undergraduate. Just think what has been done to all that carpet. 

“When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a banker’s box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most vital bits survive.” 

Really, Lauren. Really?

“It’s not even the words on the page that accumulate, because I never look at them again, really, but the ideas and the characters start to take on gravity and density,” she says.

Her “really” is doing a lot of work in that quotation. Seems like the hardest way to climb that mountain but what do I know? 

“When Groff agreed to move to Florida 17 years ago, she did so conditionally. She’d relocate, she said, only if she could travel as needed — for writers’ retreats, for book tours — and if Kallman agreed to reassess periodically. There’s a physical contract stating those terms, signed by her and Kallman, somewhere in her files. The document also delineates some of their child care plans — an arrangement that allows her to wake up at 5 a.m. and disappear into her writing for hours, without having to manage the routine of getting two children fed and out the door.

“Groff and Kallman wake up together, they said, but the morning is not a time to chat

“‘I get so mad at him if he tries to talk to me,’ Groff joked about her husband.”

Here’s where the profile goes from strange to fascinating. First, I bet the “getting mad at” is not actually a joke, no matter how jokingly described it was to the reporter. You don’t have to be Derrida to detect the undulating reservoirs of resentment at being drug down to north Florida to live out her adulthood, a compromise that in all likelihood also financially allows her to write full time. Now, I don’t know that for a fact. I don’t know how much money she makes from her writing. It is not my business and I don’t care. However, I am fascinated by “literary writers,” that is people who write novels and stories that attempt to be art, rather than say genre stuff or TV stuff, and how those people also make enough money to live. It’s the age-old double question: how do you pay the rent? And who takes care of the kids? 

To be clear, I don’t care who does what in any kind of gender-role sense. Please. Every family is its own island. A Dr. Moreau-like island, to be sure, but still an island. My hands are too full of grocery bags to throw stones. But one does want to know (per the headline) how the work gets done; one wants details. This profile has the depth of nail polish. Who packs the lunches? Etc.

Second, a good journalist would have asked to see that contract. This is the most provocative part of the profile.  She is a mother of two kids and doesn’t have to deal with getting them out to school every morning? I’m a middle-aged father of two kids and I can attest that getting people to school in the morning is a scene, a daily steeplechase of bad yogurt, missing laundry, and rolled-through stop signs. 

I wonder if she has hired help around the house. No judgment. Strictly a logistical financial curiosity. Is there a nanny figure? 

“‘I like the morning because it’s empty of people and ideas and you’re still sort of in a dream state until the caffeine kicks in. It’s the best time of day, for sure. It’s a very gentle time of day.’” 

It’s only a gentle time of day if you’ve got a contract saying that your husband will deal with all that crap so that you can write! It’s not a gentle time of day! It’s a nightmare time of the day! It’s like Wes Craven’s Busytown! If you think morning’s are calm, you’re either medicated or isolated or childless. Just think of the routine caffeine-doped gridlock on the interstate loop of a mid-sized US city. Those people are driving to work — fortunate enough to drive to work. It’s a lot of things but it ain’t gentle. 

“She estimates she reads about 300 books a year.” 

Don’t believe it. Sorry. And I’ve read press releases with a more developed sense of skepticism. 

“Her editor . . . said that Groff reread all of Shakespeare so she could write a version of The Vaster Wilds in iambic pentameter ‘just for fun,’ as a way for her to master Elizabethan rhythms.” 

Lauren, honey. Sweetie. You’ve got all morning. Every morning. Please don’t waste it on crap like this. Want to write 30 pages of iambic pentameter, 50 pages, okay fine. But the whole novel? Come now. 

Then, the reporter gets a quotation from Hernan Diaz, one of Groff’s friends who she provided a blurb for and who went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. His bit that praises Groff is hyperbolic and cliched, overwritten and underthought (“to make the syntactical edifice as sound and capacious and beautiful as possible”) and shares many of the same problems outlined in my ranting against blurbs. First, Groff should not be spending the valuable remaining hours of her life writing blurbs. (She writes them in the afternoons when “Groff deals with the business of being an author.”) No one should be writing blurbs, but we can be hierarchical about it. If Obama wrote you a letter saying how much he dug your novel, you don’t have to write blurbs any more. They are beneath you. And you shouldn’t have to give logrolling quotations to publications about your writer friends either. Jesus. What are we doing here, people? 

Groff’s not any good at this either. In a Lorrie Moore profile from earlier this year (I know I know, stop reading them if they make you so mad) by Dan Kois, a writer who should know better, Gross says of Moore’s famous kid cancer short story, “It’s so complicated and brutal. . . . You feel her great reserve is gone, and she’s bearing down with all her might.”²

“Bearing down with all her might”? What is she cracking walnuts? I realize we can’t grade all of a writer’s language output with the same eye we might take to her novels, but level up a smidge.³ & ⁴

But back to the praise of Groff by Diaz. What else is he going to say? He’s certainly not going to say anything critical, but the larger disappointment is that he’s not going to say anything interesting. I’ve seen more hard hitting reportage from the CBS Sunday Morning Show, in segments about, like, birds. This is embarrassing just in terms of journalism. (Harris, pay attention, I am talking to you.) 

Well you’re just jealous, one might say. You’re goddamned right I’m jealous! Granted, I don’t know who the intended audience for these profiles is if it’s not mildly embittered, middle-aged failed novelists. But yes, I am jealous. I’m also jealous of Heidi Julavits’s life, as cataloged in both The Folded Clock and Directions to Myself.⁵ She summers in Maine! People, I live in Mississippi, the very seam of Satan’s jockstrap. Do you know how much I would give to summer in New Hampshire or Maine? I’d even take up hiking if necessary. When summer arrives I just do what I do during the entire rest of the year except a) the structure provided by school vanishes completely, and b) it’s so hot even the lizards are frightened.⁶

So yes, I am jealous, but not just of the success and the talent. I am envious of the relentlessness and the discipline and the ruthless vision. To have those oceans of time to focus on your writing. And to actually get it done. The profile is correct in its Hook. Groff does approach writing like an athlete: regular, intense training, and religious routine. Let’s do some math. She’s 45. She made this contract 17 years ago when she was 28. 2006. Her first novel, The Monsters of Templeton, came out in 2008. She already knew, before that book came out. Or what’s more likely, she had the faith. She had the belief in herself to say this is what I’m going to do and you’re going to help me. You’re going to deal with the kids. And I’m not going to have another job. It’s this confidence in one’s own abilities, this self-validation that impresses me. And then the follow-through, actually getting the work done. Making the time for yourself and then using that hard-won time. Think of the arguments. Think of the familial judgment. Think of the clucking that happens at their kids’ school. Think of the strain of having to hack out that path over twenty years and then having to maintain it. People are always talking about how books are “brave” and “necessary,” literary criticism made of styrofoam. But Groff actually did what was brave and necessary. You want to see actual bravery by a writer? That’s bravery. Saying I am good at this and I deserve this time, this freedom. 

All of which is to say that I suppose this profile works, because I do admire Lauren Groff, novelist. Props are due. 

1. The most honest writer profile I have ever read was written by Boris Kachka, published in New York magazine, of novelist Claire Messud. It’s a collaboration in frankness.
2. Kois, a sophisticated journalist for Slate and a novelist in his own right, has all the guile of Bambi in that profile. But then again, it’s Lorrie Moore!
3. She does drop the valuable intel that Moore is “very, very good with [men],” which totally tracks. 
4. The story, “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” was devastating when I read it as a 20-year-old childless idiot, and the story was devastating when I read it as a 30-year-old father of a baby, and now that I am a mid-40s parent of two teen-ish kids, you could not pay me enough money to reread that story. I can’t handle it. It’s like an emotional Gatling Gun. Just give me another 20 years to recover. Jesus. Leave me alone. 
5. I know these footnotes are annoying, but I have a lot to say. In both Groff’s story collection Florida and in Julavits’s memoir Directions to Myself, there is much metaphoric soup made from tide pools and the young boys who play in them. There is a nature/nurture, maternal presence metaphor in both, and both lean into the idea that “my boy won’t be like that.” The that in this case is the predatory adult male, the bully, the chauvinist, the rapist, the assaulter, the vicious threatening male presence that we all know and love. There is much forced wishing and hoping going on in these passages. A mildly unnerving parallel thread of parental paranoia. 
6. To have the financial and logistical wherewithal to summer in New Hampshire? To have the imagination to even begin to think of summering in New Hampshire? I didn’t even conceive that was something you could do until I was 40. Talk about a failure of imagination.