Severe Weather in the Sunshine State

LAUREN Groff never wanted to live in Florida. “I mean, Florida is the biggest joke of all the states,” she says. “It is the punch line to every other state’s joke.” Nevertheless here she is: the acclaimed novelist, short story writer, and twelve-year resident of Gainesville whose husband works in his family’s construction and real estate business and whose two sons have only ever called the Sunshine State home.

“It’s a struggle every day,” Groff says, biting into toast with preserves at Oxford Exchange in Tampa, where we’re having breakfast on the third morning of the 2018 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference. “We moved here because, well, family businesses—they’re impossible to get out of. We’re never leaving.” She smiles ruefully as she chews. “I haven’t come to terms with being a Floridian yet. This is not my vision of myself. I feel if I were given my druthers, I would live in Paris full time, but that’s not where life brought me.”

It is in Florida, however, where Groff has honed her writing voice—all of her books have been published in the years she has lived here—and it is in Florida, perhaps, where she has discovered her most powerful subject matter. Groff’s new story collection, appropriately titled , published in June by Riverhead Books, is ambitious, personal, and dangerous. Made up of eleven stories, it begins and ends with narratives told from the perspective of a character at odds with her circumstances. “Ghosts and Empties” follows a woman, a mother, as she runs in the predawn darkness trying to both escape from and return to her spouse and children. The final story, “Yport,” shows the same mother on vacation in France with her sons and, in the last scene, crouching in fierce