“I didn’t want any more men yelling at me ever again.” And I just wanted to live among women,” she adds, laughing. “I could see that this was my next book because it was dealing with a lot of the ideas that I really wanted to wrestle with, about power and God, about climate change. “As I was sitting in the audience, it wasn’t like a mystical vision, obviously, but I could see the book in front of me,” she says. Then, “late in the Trump presidency,” Groff recalls, she attended a lecture about medieval nuns, where her love for Marie de France suddenly took on a new and exciting direction. The fascination lingered for decades, and she even attempted to translate de France’s poetry. As a student at Amherst College, Groff was mesmerized by de France. It follows the astonishing life of a poet who, under the pen name Marie de France, wrote the first verses ever attributed to a woman in French literary history. Matrix delves deep into the mist and mysticism of medieval England and France. She has abandoned not only familiar settings, like New York City and the upstate idyll portrayed in her first two novels, The Monsters of Templeton and Arcadia, but North America-and the 20th century-altogether. Readers introduced to Groff through Fates may find her fourth novel, Matrix (Riverhead, Sept. That is the pleasure of the book: discovering the shocking distance between Lotto’s portrayal of Mathilde and the reality of her interior life.

Mathilde’s voice crackles with a calculating and ferocious anger that felt bracing and new, especially in 2015. Told in two parts, the novel’s second half is narrated by Mathilde, who unravels everything that we’ve learned in the first. A runaway critical and commercial success beloved by former President Barack Obama-and a finalist for multiple awards, including the Kirkus Prize- Fates is a scintillating portrait of the marriage between a golden playwright named Lotto and a reserved woman named Mathilde. It’s been six years since the publication of Groff’s novel Fates and Furies.

Crying is also part of my work,” she adds with a wry laugh. “There are weeks, months, maybe even a full year where I would just sit there and write shitty sentences, or no sentences at all, and just stare at the page and cry.

“I have swung through periods of profound depression, and I find it almost impossible to write when I’m depressed,” she says. The emotional realities of the pandemic have hit Groff hard, she tells me. In Florida, where she lives, the average number of daily Covid cases has catapulted over the 17,000 mark during the first week of August, when we chat over Zoom. The critically acclaimed author of four novels and two story collections, Groff spent her afternoon cancelling plans.

Groff matrix