I'm Ann Bocock, and welcome to "Between The Covers."

Lauren Groff is a "New York Times" bestselling author and two-time National Book Award finalist, and that includes her latest book, "Matrix."

She's also one of America's most acclaimed writers, and here is just a sample of what's being said about Lauren Groff, and I'm quoting now: "One of the best writers in the United States."

"You're helpless to the power of her evocative prose."

And, "She writes like her hands are on fire."

Her latest novel is a shift from her contemporary settings.

It's the story of a remarkable nun in the 12th century.

It's a story of power, sisterhood, love, war.

The book is "Matrix."

Please welcome Lauren Groff.

Hi, Lauren.

Hi, how are you?

I am good.

I am so glad you're here.

I can't wait to get right into "Matrix."

The main character was a real person.

So first, how do you go about finding information on her?

And then I guess, the broader question is, why a book about nuns?

It's two very good questions.

We could spend the entire rest of the half an hour talking about it.

But so yes, the main character is very, very, very loosely based on Marie de France, who was the first published female poet in the French language.

Of course, this was vernacular French at the time, and it was this sort of an anglicized French.

And because of her name, we know that she was a French woman who was in England.

Now, we don't know almost anything else about her.

And so it was quite easy doing the research on her because there's very, very little that we actually know for sure about this person.

She may have had some sort of connection to the court of Henry II.

She may have been an abbess of Shaftesbury, which is this wonderful, huge abbey at the time.

But of course these are all suppositions.

And so in order to do the research, to gather enough information about her, the only thing I could do is go back to the work that we believe that she had written.

There are four books in contention, two of which I believe very, very firmly that she had written.

One is the "Lais," which are these series of Breton stories in poetic form.

They're amazing.

And then the other one is a collection of fables.

And so I went back into them and I pulled out these little images and these ideas that I thought were really incredible, and then I built a character out of those.

And then, why nuns?

Well, the last, I don't know, five years have been incredibly difficult, and I've made many, many jokes with my friends that I really just want to form my own separatist lesbian utopia out on some island somewhere.

And so it was one way of just being with these incredible women that I just wanted to spend all day with.

I love the answer.

You know, in the beginning I said what extraordinary praise there is for your writing.

So I would be honored, and I know our audience would love it, if you'd give us a taste of the book and read a little bit from the beginning.

And it's the part where Marie is 17 years old.

She's too big, she's too wild for Royal life, and she has this meeting with the queen about her fate.

Yes.

All right.

So this is on the actual second page.

"She is tall, a giantess of a maiden, and her elbows and knees stick out ungainly.

The fine rain gathers until it runs in rivulets down her sealskin cloak and darkens her green headcloths to black.

Her stark Angevin face holds no beauty, only canniness and passion yet unchecked.

It is wet with rain, not tears.

She has yet to cry for having been thrown to the dogs.

Two days earlier, Queen Eleanor had appeared in the doorway of Marie's chamber, all bosom and golden hair and sable fur lining the blue robe and jewels dripping from ears and wrists and shining chapelet and perfume strong enough to knock a soul to the ground.

Her intention was always to disarm by stunning.

Her ladies stood behind her, hiding their smiles.

Among these traitors was Marie's own half sister, a bastardess sibling of the crown just like Marie, the sum of errant paternal lusts, but this simpering creature, having understood the uses of popularity in the court, had blanched and run from Marie's attempts to befriend her.

She would one day be princess of the Welsh.

Marie curtsied clumsily, and Eleanor glided into the room, her nostrils twitching.

The queen said that she had news, oh, what delightful news, what relief, she had just now received the papal dispensation.

The poor horse had exploded its heart, it had galloped so fast to bring it here this morning.

That, due to her, the queen's, own efforts in these months, this poor, illegitimate Marie from nowhere in Le Maine had at last been made prioress of a royal abbey.

Wasn't that wonderful.

Now at last they knew what to do with this odd half sister to the crown.

Now they had a use for Marie at last."

A use for Marie.

She goes to this nunnery, and the condition of this place when she arrives, there is disease and starvation and poverty.

And at some point it thrives under her direction.

And I want you to talk a little bit about this because there is a particular rhythm in this medieval nunnery, and if you could explain that.

Sure, there are lots of rhythms.

And that was actually one of the big challenges in writing this book, was trying to understand the different kinds of rhythms that these women would have had to live by.

So of course, there were no computers, no printing presses.

There are no clocks.

So there's the rhythm of the day.

These nuns, they prayed eight times a day, including in the middle of the night, and each time that they prayed, they had a very specific thing they had to sing, during a specific time of year.

It was all very regulated.

So there's that, one, just daily understanding of the cycle of life there.

But then there's also seasonal cycles, right?

I had to understand what England of the 12th century, what they would be doing in May, for instance.

Would there be harvesting at the time?

Would they be planting?

And then I had to understand the larger liturgical churchly cycles, the way that the year was set up with all of the feasts, and all of the Christmas pomp and circumstance, and things that were happening at Easter.

And so there are these interconnected gears that I found really interesting to try to understand the way that these women moved through their lives.

I know that as part of your research, you did spend some time observing an abbey, I believe, in Connecticut.

What was the most interesting thing?

What really struck you?

Well, it was only a very little bit of time.

You know, I didn't become a holy sister by any means.

But I really only spent a couple of nights.

This is one of those interesting things.

I had done the vast majority of my academic research before I got there.

I read many, many, many books, many articles, all sorts of things, like even novels sort of re-imagining that time, to try to understand the sort of book I wanted to be writing.

But I just felt that something was missing.

I wanted to see, as closely as I possibly could, what cloistered nuns might experience, what their lives might be like.

And of course, I couldn't do it from up close because they are in enclosure.

This is the Abbey of Regina Laudis in Connecticut, in Bethlehem, Connecticut.

But the abbess is this extraordinary person.

Very, very literary.

I think she has a PhD in literature.

And she allowed me to come, and it's such an extraordinary place.

It's Benedictines.

They feed you, and once a day you're allowed to go sit at mass, and they're singing very similar songs, Psalms, to what they would have sung in the 12th century.

And then you get to work with the nuns.

And a part of the Benedictine rule is that work is prayer.

And so you go out into the gardens, and what I was doing was ripping up these tomato plants, and the next day I got to chop wood.

And I think it was, what was most interesting to me was sort of trying to see as a novelist, trying to see the way that the nuns interacted and they loved one another, how to see how they dealt with the hard work.

There was this very, relatively old nun, probably 80 years old, who chopped so much wood nobody could keep up with her.

She was like the most amazing wood chopping person I've ever seen in my entire life.

So I mean, her work was prayer, and she was really, really good at it.

I think it was just an extraordinary experience that gave me something that is intangible, something that went into the book, and I felt so much pure love and admiration for these brilliant, wonderful, accomplished women who are there.

In "Matrix," I mean, this book is about women.

The book, and I'm gonna say, the book is at times violent.

At its heart, it is feminist.

I'm curious how unusual Marie was for a woman of the time.

Was it, the fact that she came from nobility unusual for going into the nunnery, and what was her power as the abbess?

So all of the abbesses, I think, that we know of from that time were of the nobility, and actually, it was not unusual for a noble woman to go into an abbey at the time.

It was basically the only career path other than marriage that was available to women.

And of course, marriage is not something that every woman wants, right?

Even back then, it was maybe not something that every woman was party to, longing for.

So I think a lot of families, for instance, very pious families tithed one of their daughters to the church, to convents.

Also, women, after their husbands died, or they were left alone in the world, would often go to monasteries.

So it was something that was not unusual at all.

And literate women tended to be women of the noble classes.

In the book, you do, you write about visions.

You write, one of the visions is God dropping the eggs.

And there's mysticism.

Marie is a mystic.

And this leads to such an important part of the book.

It leads to her building this elaborate labyrinth, and yes, the labyrinth is a line of defense, but as I'm reading it, there is so much more to this labyrinth as part of the story.

If you've got your voice back, can you talk about the labyrinth for a moment?

Sure.

I have my voice semi-back, so forgive me about this.

Yes, so the labyrinth came out of research.

There were a number of labyrinths built into cathedrals at that time.

For instance, in Chartres Cathedral, my favorite cathedral in the entire world, probably the most beautiful one, in my mind, which is built at about the same time, there is a unicursal labyrinth set into the paving stones in the nave, I believe.

And it is just something that I saw over and over again in my research.

It just kept coming up in my life.

It was the universe sort of speaking to me.

And the way that I work is, I write many, many drafts, and then I throw them out in between and I start over again.

And it wasn't until relatively late-draft that I realized I didn't have a fundamental architecture to the book.

So I looked at this labyrinth and I looked at some of the stories that I was reading, and I realized that this is actually the deep architecture, the deep structure of my book, was in the form of a unicursal labyrinth where you have to go through a life and you sort of return and patterns recur.

So I finally knew how to write the book that I wanted to write by looking at this physical object of a labyrinth.

It was a stunning part of the book, I have to say.

Something else that was so interesting, and there are things that people use to define women, and I think two of them are age and beauty.

And I wanna look at age first because Marie said something, and not only did I love reading it but I wrote it down and I actually typed it out and put it on my desk.

And it said, "Aging is a constant loss.

All things considered essential in youth prove with time that they are not."

So this is a powerful statement.

The other part of this is beauty.

In Marie's case, she has always been looked at as ugly.

So these two things, how do they color her journey and, really, the story in this book?

One of the things that I wanted to think through over the course of a novel, this novel, is the idea of female power.

And this is not, you know, girlboss, rah-rah, excited power.

I'm actually really criticizing the way that women within a hierarchical, patriarchal society often, sometimes inadvertently, take into themselves, into ourselves, some of these power structures and then impose them upon the people around them, even if they think that they're subverting these powers structures.

And there is, as you said, a great deal of power in the way that we think about performance of femininity, and performance of femininity often relies upon youth and beauty.

There's power in youth for a woman and there's power in beauty for a woman.

And I wanted to think about age, and how age has a different kind of power to it.

The model for, one of the models for Marie is this contemporaneous mystic from what is now Germany, named Hildegard Von Bingen.

I think she's one of the great geniuses of any age.

She was a polymath.

She is a musician and we still play a lot of her compositions.

She was a medical person.

She wrote a tome that was used for four centuries afterward.

Really very brilliant person.

And she got these mystical visions from God after menopause set in.

So her actual visionary power happens after fertility left her, which I found to be somewhat of an inversion of a lot of the tropes of female power and female beauty and female aging that we subconsciously subscribe to, even if we're feminist, right?

Even if we believe that we don't.

So that was the aging part.

And I thought that coming into my own Marie's mystical powers after menopause sets in, that's when she becomes abbess, that is when her true power begins.

I thought that that was really fascinating to start it then.

And then with the beauty, Marie, my Marie is, as you heard, not a beautiful person.

But of course, this is the age before actual mirrors, mirrors as we know them now.

I mean, if you wanted to take a glimpse of yourself and you were not extremely rich at the time, you would look in a pool of water, which is, as anyone who has ever looked down into a pool of water, it's distorting, it's grotesque, right?

Like, you just look strange, even if you're a five-year-old.

And so for Marie, she had taken into herself, all of her life, this narrative that she was ugly, she was illegitimate, she was unfit, she's too tall, she's unfeminine.

So yes, it's true that as she moved through her life, this is the way that other people treated her.

But this is also something that she fought against within herself and sort of, and it gave her a kind of twisted feeling of longing to take power and longing to come into her own power that way.

In the book, each nun has her own personality and they all had different reasons that got them to the nunnery.

So other than Marie, who did you have the most pleasure in creating?

There's a nun who's the mad nun.

Her name is Gytha and she's not literate but she's a very fine artist.

And she licks these paint brushes with lapis lazuli on them in order to paint, and so she has blue teeth .

And this actually comes out of something that one of the people who gave me this book, Dr. Katie Bugyis, who is now at Notre Dame, she gave a lecture and that lecture gave rise to this book.

But she showed that only a few years ago, I think it was maybe two and a half years ago, there was this archeological find in Germany where they found the skeleton of a nun, and they found blue lapis lazuli in her dental calculus.

And that proved something that feminist scholars have been insisting on for a very long time, but there had never been actual physical bodily proof of it, that nuns were allowed to and capable of illustrating and writing liturgical texts, the holy texts.

Up until then, male scholars have primarily insisted that only men were allowed to do that, only monks were allowed to make these holy books.

And then we have an actual body that says, "Oh, no, guess what?

This nun probably was involved in making holy work and therefore women were allowed to do this work as well."

And I found that that was this really incredible avenue into the book and into the mind of a, who would be interested to make these kind of wild, funny drawings?

I don't know.

Have you ever seen the drawings in the medieval manuscripts, Ann?

I'm not sure.

But that would be what she was doing.

It's fascinating.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they are these incredible things.

So these little cartoons that once in a while, you'll find them.

If you look up drolleries, they're somewhat scatalogical sometimes, somewhat kind of ribald, very strange cartoons that are very invested in subverting power structures.

So there are things like rabbits.

So the rabbit was a symbol of something weak, something feminine, something that had a lot of babies, a woman, but taking up arms against priests, right, and sort of fighting priests to the ground with hatchets in their hands, too.

And so they're these, I just love a lot of these medieval illustrations and illuminations and drolleries for their wild sense of humor and their color and the way that they take a very flat contemporary idea of what a medieval person would be like and they put air into it, they put life into it, they put humor into this idea.

I will definitely be looking up drolleries after this.

On her deathbed, Marie says that greatness is not the same as goodness.

And to her, there was a distinction.

What did Marie think she was?

Oh, Marie knew she was great.

She knew from the beginning that she was full of a kind of genius.

And I think that she probably would have said that the visions from God were a physical manifestation of the fact that she was chosen for great things.

So she believed all through her life, even as a young nun, as a prioress, as she got to the abbey when she was 17 years old, I think she believed she was destined for great things, because she didn't ascribe to the idea that women were not supposed to have worldly ambition.

She was surrounded in her early life by a bunch of weapon-wielding viragoes who went on the Second Crusade with the Queen Eleanor, right?

So she just never thought of herself as the shrinking violet, as a very quiet and pious woman.

She wanted to make her mark on the world.

But she knew of herself that even if she could see the larger picture, even though she was an incredible manager and actually business person...

So this is the funny thing about this book.

It's both a critique of capitalism but also in some ways it's a glorified protocapitalism.

So it's both at the same time.

But she was so good at all of this, but she wasn't necessarily good in herself, right?

She was not a person who radiated love all the time.

She was not patient.

She was not kind.

She was tough.

She was a shrinking violet, as you said.

And I have a question that's probably coming out of left field, and I wanna know if you're psychic.

And I'm asking because like a decade or so ago, you wrote this book, "Arcadia."

It takes place in a hippie commune, and it was about a virus that killed a million people and shut down the planet.

So how did you do that?

Yeah, so yeah, you're right.

So the first part of "Arcadia," the second, we're in the '60s, '70s and '80s, but the fourth part is set in 2019, and there is a virus that's almost exactly like COVID.

I think in the book I call it SARI, S-A-R-I.

So I'm not psychic, of course.

I mean, maybe I am kind of reading your mind at the moment.

But I pay a lot of attention to history and cycles of history.

And I think that's one of the novelist's great jobs and this is something that I find possibly contemporary novelists need to do much more of, which is to look back at cycles and look back at the way that the moment that we're living in corresponds to moments in the past.

And I was transfixed by the 1918 flu epidemic probably 20 years ago.

It was something that I thought of all the time.

I did.

My first published short story, actually, in "The Atlantic Monthly," was about the 1918 flu epidemic.

And so I just saw that this was going to be coming back to us, coming back to us during our lives and probably within the next 10 years.

And when, believe it or not, Ann, when that book came out into the world, every stop I went to on my book tour, someone would stand up and be like, "This is totally ludicrous.

We're not going to have a worldwide pandemic in 2019."

And I was like, "Maybe, but who knows?

Right?

Like, it's possible."

And guess what happened?

And guess what happened.

Matrix is the Latin word for mother and "Matrix" is the title of Lauren Groff's latest book.

Lauren, I have so enjoyed this.

Don't make me wait so long for the next one, please.

And I wanna thank you so much for sharing your time with us today.

I'm so grateful to you.

Thank you so much.

And thank you, watchers.

This is my final event.

I am so grateful to everyone.

Thank you.

I'm Ann Bocock.

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