Until Fates and Furies, my books had been sparked by an urgent need to force something wild and inchoate in me into focus. The spark of Fates and Furies came from a more complicated place: while I still wanted to say something shadowy and seemingly unsayable, I also wanted to write against the book I was working on at the time, Arcadia.

This second novel was about the aftershocks of the failure of a utopian community. The need to write it had come directly out of my nightmares; it was hellishly hard to write, a distillation of moral ambivalence I felt about bringing my first son into the anthropocene era and my fear for the world he’d inherit. I knew that, in order to finish it, I had to look at all of my own darknesses every day I sat down to write. I gave the book every bit of myself that I could spare, and was rapidly wrung dry.

And so, in the moments I couldn’t handle any more anxiety or sadness, I’d stand up from my desk and stretch and dream a little about a project that would be the opposite of Arcadia, something full of blazing sunlight and sex and drama. I’d read and loved the Old Filth books of the great Jane Gardam, and was obsessed at that time with the modern masterworks Mr Bridge and Mrs Bridge by Evan S Connell. Perhaps, I thought, my new project could be two books, one told from the perspective of the husband in a marriage, one from the perspective of the wife.

I’d always been critical of the misogynistic latencies in the institution of marriage, though I am very happily married myself: what if I described a conventional vision of marriage in one book, and then punctured that vision in the second book? I laughed at the idea, but it hung around for long enough that at some point, the project came alive in me. Though I was only half finished with Arcadia, I put up two huge pieces of butcher paper on opposite walls in my studio in Florida, and in the breaks from my dark and solemn book, I would turn to the other project, writing a gold-toned scene from the wife’s perspective, then running across the room and writing from the husband’s greener point of view.

The more I wrote on the walls, the wilder my vision of the project became. The husband became a playwright; his narrative, not only being romantic in terms of the love story, would be made up from the kinds of narratives that men have always dominated: bildungsroman, campus novel, myth, medieval courtly romance, even opera, in which women’s sexuality always seems to be punished by death. In contrast, the wife’s point of view would be spiky, elliptical, its own thing.

Arcadia came out; shortly afterwards I had my second son. Perhaps it was my feeling of being trapped by small children, but I began to see that the women around me appeared to be barely containing their rage. I lent their elegance and self-control and internal flames to Mathilde, the wife. I lent elements of my maddening home state, Florida, to Lotto, the husband; its heat and sexiness and deep-down weirdness.

A few years later, when I finished my project, I still thought I had written two novels, but when my agent read it, he laughed at me. We met to discuss the book in a vegan restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. I flew up in person because I was sure he was going to hold my hand and tell me gently that nobody was going to publish such a crazy project as mine, to start something new instead. Instead, he pushed the two halves together. Here, he said. Two flawed humans in one codependent project. I’d written a novel, he told me, in the shape of a marriage.

Extract

A thick drizzle from the sky, like a curtain’s sudden sweeping. The seabirds stopped their tuning, the ocean went mute. Houselights over the water dimmed to gray.

Two people were coming up the beach. She was fair and sharp in a green bikini, though it was May in Maine and cold. He was tall, vivid; a light flickered in him that caught the eye and held it. Their names were Lotto and Mathilde.

For a minute they watched a tide pool full of spiny creatures that sent up curls of sand in vanishing. Then he took her face in his hands, kissed her pale lips. He could die right now of happiness. In a vision, he saw the sea rising up to suck them in, tonguing off their flesh and rolling their bones over its coral molars in the deep. If she was beside him, he thought, he would float out singing.

Well, he was young, 22, and they had been married that morning in secret. Extravagance, under the circumstances, could be forgiven.

More about Fates and Furies

“This insightful portrayal of a marriage is even more complex than it first appears. Groff has a subtle ear for the way personalities interact in love, especially when the distribution of talent and effort is uneven, as it always must be.” - Washington Post
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“Groff is a manipulator of information, who controls what the reader understands in a novel that is all about narration.” - the Guardian
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• Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff is published by Windmill Books in paperback priced £7.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £6.55.