Matrix by Lauren Groff7/6/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() When we meet a work of art, there’s something about that encounter that isn’t fixed in time, but rather, it unfixes time: the shaft opens. ![]() Matrix hits that perfect blurb-y mix of “timeless and timely,” so it was interesting to me that Groff was working out her feelings about historical fiction and time in fiction while writing it. They began a friendship which lead directly to the book. Groff said she saw George Cukor’s The Women on a plane, started thinking about The Bechdel Test, and the very next day, saw a lecture by Katie Bugyis, author of The Care of Nuns. The novel was inspired, mainly, by three historical women: Marie de France, Eleanor of Aquitaine, and Hildegard of Bingen. “You just keep synthesizing and eventually you come up with something.” ![]() “My art is an art of synthesis,” she says, noting that should be of inspiration to other writers. A centrifugal lecture that both explains how the work came to be and spins you out to its inspirations like footnotes. It’s one of the best talks I’ve heard from a fiction writer. I liked Lauren Groff’s novel Matrix so much I wanted to know more about it, and luckily, right after I finished it, a lecture she gave at Notre Dame was posted online. ![]()
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