Authors' Insights: Lauren Groff's 'Arcadia' - Why Western New York?

  Books tell more than the story of their characters; they tell the stories of the place in which they're set.

 
We asked Lauren Groff about Western New York as the setting for Arcadia and she offered the following insights about her choice of setting.  Many thanks to Lauren for sharing her thoughts with us.
 

- Why (western) New York?

I return again and again to upstate New York when I sit down to write. I grew up in Cooperstown, not far from where Arcadia is set, and I think there's something in me that longs to go home again; I get the chance to do so every single day for hours when I write stories about the place. Also, Arcadia had to be set in western New York, specifically, because I'd studied and stayed at Mansion House, the former site of the Oneida Community, when I was researching the book. Before I knew it, my characters became intertwined with the place itself and I couldn't imagine putting them anywhere else. 

- Did you have a connection to western New York before you wrote Arcadia?

I don't have a connection to western New York, per se, other than some visits and some weddings. But boundaries are porous, and it's difficult to say where central New York ends and western New York begins, especially because it feels as if the weather and culture and economic issues are mostly shared across the state. The longer I live in Florida, the more the entire region begins to feel as if it belongs to me, and I feel a powerful nostalgia for, say, Vermont, where I've never lived, simply because it rubs up against my home state. 

- What is the importance of western New York to this story?

There's something deeply moving to me about a place with lakes and hills and thick forests, possibly because much of my narrative DNA comes from a extremely early readings of the Grimm's fairy tales, which are full of forests and fields and babbling brooks. Arcadia, the community, had to be settled in a fairly depopulated, agrarian place with lake-effect weather and a fair-sized population of Amish, and western New York fit the bill. Also, I was so fixed on a version of Mansion House as the pattern for Arcadia House that my focus never left that particular part of the country.

 

- What's a book you love for its ability to tell a story of a place?

There are so many books that tell the story of a place beautifully. I think of how steamy Indochine lends a lot of erotic heat to Marguerite Duras's The Lover, or how the village of Middlemarch with its small-town pressures act with and against the characters in George Eliot's novel of the same name. I love Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy books because the dusty western landscape works with the laconic characters and McCarthy's tight language to create additional resonance and power. Most of the novels I love have strongly delineated settings that act as characters equal to the people in the narrative. 
 

If you would like to browse other books set in or about New York our recommendations are here.