The sky was overcast and gray when I met Lauren Groff for lunch in her adopted hometown of Gainesville, Florida with the rollout of her new book, Florida, just weeks away. The weather was a grim but honest backdrop for our conversation about Florida, both the book and the state. For all of Florida’s insistence that it’s the Sunshine State, it’s just as much one of heavy gray clouds and thick walls of humidity. The clouds had been hanging low in the sky all day, threatening one of the almost daily downpours that begin in May and last through the summer. Groff was eager for the threat to end; eager for the rain to fall.
Our conversation began as most conversations between two Floridians begin: with talk of weather, particularly the obstinate need to differentiate hot from humid. This conversation is learned; a skill one acquires after at least a few years in Florida. Like many Floridians, Groff is an accidental resident, brought to the small college town in the northern end of the peninsula by family and stability. She moved here with her husband, who, over a decade ago, took over a family business. Both of her sons were born in Florida—Groff tells me that she spent the summer of her first pregnancy trying to find relief from the heat and humidity by swimming “like a big manatee, slow in the water”—but her transition to Floridian has been marked by a particular kind of restlessness that seems unique to the state. It’s less of a clear transition than a slow succumbing to Florida’s unique malaise, a realization that comes when, one day, you find you can easily converse about humidity, tourist traps, and invasive species.
she spent the summer of her first pregnancy trying to find relief from the heat and humidity by swimming “like a big manatee, slow in the water.”
Groff and I then turn to the next mandatory conversation for Floridians, exchanging stories about the non-Disney tourist traps that define Florida, those locales that imbue the state with its distinctive identity. If Floridians trade these stories like currency, then Groff is particularly rich.
Groff tells me about a visit to Weeki Wachee, an icon of both old Florida and tourist traps where, for nearly seven decades, women have been dressing as mermaids performing balletic underwater shows (Groff wrote about the mermaids in a ruminative essay for Oxford American). It has been at least a decade since I trekked the 300 miles to Weeki Wachee, and Groff encourages me to visit. She notes that the mermaids’ show now includes a tribute to fallen soldiers. In turn, I tell Groff about the Coral Castle, a group of large structures outside of Miami with a mystical reputation. Built by hand over the course of 20 years by a Latvian immigrant named Edward Leedskalnin, the Coral Castle is often described as a labor of love, a romantic gesture built in memory of a girl who jilted Leedskalnin, leaving him sad and lonely the day before a promised wedding. The girl, it turns out, was only 16 years old, a fact that makes the story far less romantic and the endurance of the site as a tourist trap all the more baffling. (Billy Idol reportedly penned his 1987 hit “Sweet Sixteen” in Leedskalnin’s honor.)
She tells me about Bob’s River Place, a swimming hole on the Suwannee River in Dixie County, which she visited recently with family and friends. “It’s just this guy who has this place on the river and opened it up to people,” Groff says as she describes it with a laugh. Bob’s River Place is made up of rope swings dangling from tall trees that drop into the Suwannee, as well as a slide and a few floating pads; there’s even, Groff notes, a karaoke station. “There’s so much sex in the air, it’s very sensual,” Groff says with her characteristic warm expressiveness. “It’s the weirdest place I’ve ever been in my entire life…It’s so insane…all these boys who haven’t fully developed their brains swing on these ropes, hanging 100 feet up,” she adds as she gestures emphatically. She did one pass at a rope swing and adds, “I’m really surprised that no one died while we were there.”
Later, when I Google Bob’s River Place to confirm its location, the search engine suggests “Bob’s River Place death.” I click out of morbid curiosity and read about all of the people who forever disappeared into the blackwater of the Suwannee after jumping from one of Bob’s ropes.
Bob’s River Place, with its danger and odd eroticism, could easily have been a setting for one of the stories in Florida, Groff’s second book of short stories. Throughout the 11 stories that compose Florida, the “erotic” “dense, damp tangle” of the state haunts. In Groff’s hands, Florida is an “Eden of dangerous things” populated by snakes and alligators, its landscape defined by widening sinkholes and waterways that are threatening barriers. If Groff’s menacing terrain of “frenzied flora and fauna” evokes a state of danger, then the women and children who navigate the landscape are aware and are, in turn, filled with anxious trepidation.
In story after story, Groff’s protagonists find themselves either abandoned, abandoning, or alone. Mothers and caretakers are particularly keen to run away. In “At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners,” the mother disappears, leaving her vulnerable young son with his professor father, who collects snakes and stores “fodder mice” in the boy’s closet. The boy is haunted by his loneliness, a “living creature that shadowed him,” yowling cats, and puppies that have been gobbled up by the ever-lurking alligators.
In another story, a young woman abandons her life only to find herself the accidental caretaker of yet another missing mother’s children. She too leaves the children, unable to provide for them. In one of the collection’s most haunting stories, “Dogs Go Wolf,” two young sisters are left alone in a fishing camp on an island in the middle of the ocean. The girls, starving and scared, dress in their mother’s clothes, cover themselves with her perfume and makeup and stagger into a stranger’s arms. “Ghost girls in clown makeup and floral sacks, creeping out of the dark forest,” Groff writes, describing the girls as characters in a grim fairytale.
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