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Thursday, October 11, 2018

Lauren Groff's breakout story?

Lauren Groff's story Above and Below, in her new collection, Florida, was probably her breakout story - it was published in the New Yorker, but some time ago and I don't remember reading it there - and it gives a harrowing account of the life of a homeless woman, in this case a somewhat atypical homeless person, one with whom many of Groff's readers could painfully identify. The protagonist is a grad-student/instructor in English at seemingly the U of Florida, whose boyfriend walks out on her and who seems to have no other friends or family to turn to for support, emotional and financial (over the course of the story, about 6 months, she makes to phone calls to her parents, each achingly unhelpful). She abandons her apartment and her debts and lives for a time in her station wagon, scrounging every day for food and a degree of cleanliness. Eventually, her car is trashed and she heads deeper into the life of the dispossessed, eating a soup kitchens and churches, eventually drifting into a scary campground for the homeless and undergoing a frightening yet entirely credible degree of sorrow and suffering. OK, perhaps it's unfair to present the life of the homeless through an unstable grad student - there but for fortune, many readers may think - rather than someone w/ fewer resources or options; the protagonist does emerge, at the end of the story, whether convincingly or not is another matter, but I think few writers have taken on this subject so directly and observed the life led by the homeless community with more acuity. Since this story, Groff has written many others regarding the conjunction of the intersection, or collision, of the intellectual community around the UofF community and the displaced populations, including the homeless and the uprooted - but this story set the tone and staked our her territory, which she claims directly in the title.

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