Tags
books, feminism, Lauren Groff, literature, marriage, reading, review, short fiction, wine, women
In this new collection of short stories, Lauren Groff perfectly captures a sense of always present dread. An insidiously vague feeling that something isn’t right, like the first prickle of sweat when the Florida heat hits you after leaving an air-conditioned room, sits tightly coiled amidst its pages. Set against a backdrop of impending ecological disaster and contrasted by Florida’s irrepressible wildlife, this book is held together by quiet rage and biological anxiety.
Though there is a host of fascinating characters, including a pair of abandoned sisters, a professor turned homeless drifter, and the lonely son of a herpetologist, they are only the chorus that surrounds an unnamed wife and mother. She stands tall in this collection, a steel-edged woman who is filled with restless anger. I identify with her more than is probably healthy. She coldly relates unspeakable truths about motherhood, like our unshakable fear that our children will die but also our unacceptable resentment for their disruption of our lives. It’s a balancing act of burdens that I think most mothers experience.
She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but not longer than they do.
She walks in the morning to clear her head, and walks at night when she can see glimpses of life through the lit windows of her neighbor’s houses. She walks when she’s angry, when her skin itches, when everything seems small and inevitable in the face of our planet’s grim circumstances. Whether she’s alone or in a room full of people, she can’t reconcile who she is on the inside with what people expect her to be on the outside.
I see the mothers I know in glimpses, bent like shepherdess crooks, scanning the floor for tiny legos or half-chewed grapes or the people they once were, slumped in the corners.
Each story in Florida reveals another facet of marriage, of loneliness, of survival, of womanhood. It’s filled with snakes and stalked by a slouching panther, sinkholes open under your feet without warning. I was particularly moved by the story “The Midnight Zone” which features most prominently the panther that graces the book’s cover. In it, the mother character is camping with her two sons when she sustains a head injury. She fights to stay conscious while they wait for help to come, certain that if she falls asleep the worst thing is not that she could die. The worst thing is that the panther they’ve heard is in the camp could come in and kill her boys.
The anxiety and fear that seep out of this story so accurately represent our physical tie to our children, our bone deep knowledge that we’re the only thing standing in the way of harm. But it is also the insidious truth that even we, even mothers, cannot always protect them. While she struggles to stay awake, her youngest son rubs a lock of her hair against his lips (she tells us he did this when he nursed as a baby), and it rekindles in her a primal tenderness that is too raw to speak of. Imagine then, that in this same book a woman leaves her daughters behind and never looks back. That, too, is a raw, forbidden truth.
She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.
Whether I was reading about a woman with more ghosts than living lovers, or a childless couple that haven’t realized their marriage is over, I was sucked into the dense humidity of their lives. This collection is deeply human and deeply female, and I know will spend a long time absorbing its many, fluid layers.
Pair Florida with a wine that will match its intensity and complexity and will coax you to discover its hidden secrets. My sister Alicia, fabulous artist and wine connoisseur, has chosen the Alma Negra M Blend for it’s earthy richness and dark aesthetic.
Winemaker’s Notes:
“Alma Negra means “Black Soul”, because the color of the wines made from the bonarda grape is deep and intense. The first wines made, which were all reds, had a real “black soul” when you saw them in the glass. Ernesto Catena, the owner of Ernesto Catena Vineyards in Argentina, also wanted to create a wine about which little was known, the composition or technical details, so that the wine was judged solely on how the taster perceived it. When the line was launched in 2006, the wines were named Misterio, and the mask on the label was a symbol for a hidden identity or mystery.”
Tasting Notes from Alicia:
“Shows elegant notes of spice aromas, violets and mature blueberries. The palate has a great body, powerful but balanced. The secrets of this blend incite enjoyment without revealing itself. Dense, dark and tasty, intriguing aromas of black fruit, coffee and a wonderful earthy smell. On the palate, it flows smoothly with rounded tannins, complete and lasting for a long time with echoes of ripe cooked fruit.”