Lauren Groff on American Masculinity

This week’s story, “Mother of Men,” begins, “There are men in my house. Lots of men. The men who are always in my house drive me crazy.” The narrator goes on to list her husband, four construction workers, and her two sons, who are no longer boy-sized but man-sized. How surprising is it to her – and to any mother of children – that her little boys have grown up into men?

I was so shocked to discover that my boys, who were squishy newborns just yesterday, had become enormous men in their teens. I was at Bread Loaf for a few days last summer, sitting at dinner with writers Carter Sickles and Emmett North—both of whom have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about constructions of gender and masculinity—and one of them asked me what it was like to be a feminist and raise men in America. I said I didn’t think it was possible to be conflicted about this, if you were paying any kind of attention. The first little seed of a story was planted then. Masculinity is a hell of a drug, with a heavy side of privilege and forgetfulness, and I sometimes despair that maybe my sons don’t really listen to me when I tell them they need to realize that their bodies are immediately seen as a threat by smaller, more vulnerable people; that they need to understand the insidious ways in which misogyny lives on (and to be fair, it lives in all of us, unless we work hard against it); They need to check themselves when they have the urge to immediately refute something a woman says because knee-jerk neglect of women is part and parcel of American masculinity, even when what women say is true. They’re both good people who care about others, but I’m up against tens of thousands of years of male supremacy and normal violence and control. I have to keep going and hope for the best.

The narrator is out walking the family dog ​​when a man suddenly appears in her path. She realized with horror that this was the person who was stalking her. After initially becoming fixated on her, he drifts away, but seems to return without warning every couple of years. Did you know from the beginning that the story would take this turn?

I knew the story was going to be about a stalker, yes. When I got the full story, I was sick of men, including all the corrupt, soulless men in the public sphere. I had a real experience with a stalker, although of course the stalker in the story is completely fictional. Sometime this fall, it just broke off. I’m done falling for the false narratives of hateful men. This means I can tell any story I want. It also means that the fascists in power, who feed like vampires on the fear they sow, and who only have power because they depend on our compliance in advance, will never get either compliance or silence from me.

You’ve written many poignant stories in recent years about male violence, and your upcoming collection “Brawler,” due to be published next spring, collects a number of them. What was it like looking at the stories together? Did anything surprise you? Did “Mother of Men” come in response to the group?

I don’t know if we still have time to put the story into the collection; I’ll leave that to my editor to decide. But, yes, seven of the stories in “Brawler” appeared for the first time The New YorkerEditing, fact-checking, sound engineers, art – sir, what an incredible gift to have the close attention of… The New Yorker Staff (thank you). I find the way the collections of stories come together is absolutely miraculous. I don’t intentionally write stories about a topic, or know intellectually that I’m constructing different ways of interrogating something big, but the human subconscious is amazing. The stories in my three collections are often woven in the darkness of my subconscious even before I sit down to put them to paper, and after I’ve written anywhere from twelve to twenty, I step back, read them slowly, and always see a clear, bright thread between them all. The easiest part is determining which stories – and in what order – can make the collection the strongest possible argument.