“If we don’t change the narrative of human supremacy, we’re in profound trouble.”
Acclaimed American novelist Lauren Groff reflects on the deeper themes that drive her literary work, exploring how fiction can restore forgotten lives to the historical narrative, challenge patriarchal storytelling traditions, and reconnect readers with the natural and metaphysical world.
The American writer reveals that her novel Matrix (2021) was born from a moment of political frustration and creative provocation:
“When Trump was elected in 2016, my friends and I had this joke about how we wanted to just live on an island of women without any men at all.”
This playful concept evolved into a serious exploration of power, female ambition, and institutional misogyny through the reimagined life of the medieval poet Marie de France. In Matrix, Groff eradicates male presence almost entirely: “There are no male anything—not even the animals are male what so ever – and there are no individual men.”
Groff’s body of work, which she describes as a thematic triptych in progress, challenges the individualist hero narrative, often replacing it with communal, overlooked, or erased perspectives: “Every movie is a superhero movie, where there’s a single person who is exceptional and better than everyone else. I think that is so fundamentally tragic for humanity, to have faith in a single person, and it’s very fundamentally misogynistic as well. History is made by a texture of humans… the people who are forgotten to history.”
Her writing is also deeply attuned to the relationship between the female body, religion, and the environment. Groff critiques the historical misreading of “dominion” as “domination,” urging a narrative shift away from human supremacy: “If we don’t change this idea of ourselves being at the very top, we’re in so much trouble. We will never recover the planet.”
Perhaps most powerfully, Groff speaks to the fundamental, even spiritual, impulse behind storytelling: “That’s where the impulse to make art comes from… to connect to something deeper and more beautiful, and that is always there under the surface.”
Throughout the conversation, Groff reflects on form, creative iteration, the metaphysical dimensions of literature, and the moral responsibility of writers in the Anthropocene. Her reflections urge readers—and fellow writers—to pay attention to the textures of life, the silenced voices of the past, and the invisible forces that shape our world.
Lauren Groff (born in 1978 in Cooperstown, New York) is an award-winning American writer known for her novels and short stories exploring themes of history, feminism, and power. She is the author of ‘Fates and Furies’ (2015), Matrix (2021), ‘Florida’ (2018), and ‘The Vaster Wilds’ (2023), among others. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, and she has been honored with fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.Her work has been a finalist for the National Book Award and has received widespread critical acclaim.
Elisabeth Skou Pedersen interviewed Lauren Groff in connection with the Louisiana Literature festival in August 2024 at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Camera: Simon Weyhe
Edit: Signe Boe Pedersen
Produced by Christian Lund
Copyright: Louisiana Channel, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, 2025.
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