by Lauren Groff
11. “This is a story of creation,” says Marmaduke Temple in one of the epigraphs before the book begins, ostensibly an excerpt from his own story about how he founded Templeton. In what other ways is The Monsters of Templeton a story of creation? How can Willie’s story be seen as a story of creation?
12. The Monsters of Templeton ends with a death and a birth. What does this mean in the larger context of the novel? Who—or what—else is born in the book?
13. What does the book’s title mean? Who or what are the “monsters” it refers to? What, exactly, does the word “monster” mean in the context of this book?
An Interview with Lauren Groff
Q: What was your experience growing up in Cooperstown, New York? Did you always have a fascination with its history, or was that something that you came to later in life?
A: My family is not originally from Cooperstown, but I was born there, so I have always had a fierce, possessive pride in my town. I tried to mirror in my novel exactly the way I felt about Cooperstown: It’s such a beautiful, rich place, though not without its irritations and drawbacks. I grew up in the heart of the town, about a block and a half from the Hall of Fame, right on the lake—in a house named Averell Cottage, exactly the way I described it in the book, all haunted and wonky—at least to my overactive imagination as a child. I was a really shy, really bookish, easily frightened little girl with horrible eyesight, so when I awoke at night in my creaky, drafty old house and the light from the window slanted a certain way, I really did see ghosts. Living in a house so old, one just feels as if one is living in layers upon layers of history. Also, in the basement of the house they actually did at one time find slave fetters, and that made a huge impression on me—I wrote Hetty, in part, to try to rewrite what I knew about the house where I grew up.
Q: Willie and Vivienne are such great characters, both very layered, interesting, and complicated. Were there any people in your own life who inspired them?
A: Not per se—but every character in fiction comes from a place within that writer herself, so Vivienne and Willie both have some element of me in them, I guess. My mother would like for me to note that she is nothing like Vivienne—she is a hummingbird of a woman, very tiny and very happy, and was a majorette in college when Vivienne was a burgeoning hippie—but there are both a hidden depth and a fierce, overwhelming love in Vi that I think do come from my mother. Willie and I are mostly different—I grew up with a father, have brilliant, incredibly competitive siblings, and have always, for the most part, been much more secure than Willie is—but Willie and I obviously share a hometown and a house and a love of all things historical, and Willie’s the kind of wild, reckless, beautiful girl I’ve admired from afar my whole life.
Q: What was the writing process like for you? Did you write the story first and fill in the history later, or vice versa, or neither?
A: I always knew that I was going to write about my hometown, and that I was going to use a great deal of its history, but I did about a year’s worth of research before I wrote even one word of the story. I ended up with four complete drafts, each vastly different, and Willie as she is wasn’t even born until the last draft. At one point, the novel was a collection of six novellas, with little overlap; in another, the ghost of Marmaduke narrated; in another, Willie was actually a boy. I write full drafts, then throw them out completely, and start anew. It’s difficult, and very discouraging, but I do feel that I start the next draft in a much stronger way because at least I understand how I had failed the time before.
Q: Who is your favorite character in the novel?
A: I wish I could be a good parent and say I love all my characters equally, but unfortunately I’d be lying. A few are especially dear to me, though for different reasons: Vivienne is so wacky and strange, deeply kind and warm; Willie has the most in common with me, though, as I said, we’re very different people; and I’m fascinated by Noname. I adore the Running Buds, because they’re modeled on my father’s group of running friends, all of whom have been proxy fathers to me throughout most of my life, and who have such an incredible depth of love for Cooperstown and one another that it’s really all I could do to try to harness some of that. Maybe most of all, I love Glimmey—he’s the beating heart of the book, to me. I don’t think I’d feel the same about my hometown if—in the summers, when I’m deep in the middle of the lake, treading water—I didn’t suspect that there’s a benign, preternatural, ancient presence there below me, mysterious and beautiful.
About the Author
Lauren Groff was born in Cooperstown, New York, from which she draws inspiration for this novel. She has a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her short stories have appeared in several literary publications, including The Atlantic Monthly and Ploughshares, and she has won fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Yaddo. She is currently the Axton Fellow in Fiction at the University of Louisville.
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Also by Lauren Groff
Copyright
“Baseball and Writing,” from THE POEMS OF MARIANNE MOORE by Marianne Moore, edited by Grace Schulman, copyright 2003 by Marianne Craig Moore, Executor of the Estate of Marianne Moore. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © 2008 Lauren Groff
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the original print edition of this book as follows:
Groff, Lauren.
The monsters of Templeton : a novel / Lauren Groff.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4013-2225-0
1. Single women—Fiction. 2. Women genealogists—Fiction. 3. Sea monsters—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3607.R6344M66 2008
813'.6—dc22 2007041360
eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-9559-9
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Cover design by Michelle Ishay
Cover illustrations by Beth White
Original hardcover edition printed in the United States of America.
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Endnotes
1 Could scientific titles be more reductive? It’s like calling Anna Karenina something like: In Which a Woman Leaves Her Family for Another Man, Feels Great Guilt and Jealousy and Throws Herself under a Train; Including the Plight of Levin, a Man Who Searches for and in the End Finds God. Science needs an infusion of art.
2 This is so delightfully screwy: imagine that, a bazillion years after the first fish crawled, panting, out onto land, one silly ungulate looked into the water and thought it was a good idea to dive back in. Apparently, this is what happened. Instead of imagining whales as mythical, brilliant alienlike beasts, as poeticized in millions of crystal-and-hemp new-agey stores worldwide, we should simply imagine them as great blubbery goats. Sometimes, the ancients were wiser than we: Proteus, in Greek myth, was, apparently, the herder of Neptune’s dolphins. Aka, an underwater shepherd for the underwater sheep.
3 Hermaphrodite: an organism that has both male and female sexual characteristics; a synchronous hermaphrodite is one that has both sexual organs at the same time. There are also sequential hermaphrodites, when the gonads change throughout life (Tiresias in Greek myth was a sequential hermaphrodite because the Gods changed him to a woman and back again over the span of his life). Humans can be gonadal hermaphrodites, intersexual, but it is rare for either sex organ to b
e functional. The word came from the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who was said to have been fused to a nymph, resulting in a god with both sexual traits.
