Featured Book: Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff

Sara Trucksess

Stepping away, for a moment, from the idea of the artist as simply a visual creature, Lauren Groff’s award-winning Fates and Furies delves into the complicated and artful marriage of two young writers. This extraordinarily emotional fiction is a family saga reimagined; a redefinition of marriage as two lovers who are held together by their art, just as their art is held together (or equally torn apart) by their relationship.

The symbiotic ebb and flow of husband and wife in this novel renders each spouse completely necessary to every part of their artistic process. The archetypally moody, mad-artist husband falls into spirals of depression filled with manic periods of writing, revealing the intimacies of their collaboration. The couple’s shared triumphs and disappointments as he reaches for fame and glory are ultimately less shared than he assumes, leaving his truly interesting spouse lurking in the shadows and holding the marriage together by a tenuous thread. As the intermingling o…