Brawler: Stories
Brawler: Stories
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summaries & Analyses
Author Insights
NEWQuizzes
NEWReading Tools
Lauren Groff on Brawler: Stories
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Urgency recognized in retrospectSeven of the nine stories in the collection had already appeared in print before Groff recognized them as a collection at all. The binding happened not through design but through accumulated weight, when enough had been said in a shared emotional register that she could finally step back and see it.
I don’t build a collection story by story. I just write the stories that seem urgent, and then at some point I take a step back because it feels as though there’s been enough said in a similar vein.
The book took shape during a specific political moment, and Groff has been direct about what that moment demanded of her. She opened The Lynx, an independent bookstore in Gainesville, in 2024 as a direct response to Governor Ron DeSantis’s book-banning agenda, and the same refusal to look away runs through the fiction.
We’re in a dark moment in human history. We’re caught between fight, flight, or freeze. I know that I can only live with myself if there’s an element of fight.
The title story is not the collection’s longest or most central piece, but it supplied the one word that could hold everything else together. The logic was purely formal.
It was the story that had the best title. The title could unify all the others.
That decision, made at the assembly stage rather than the drafting stage, reflects how Groff thinks about collections: the governing idea is found, not imposed.
How she wrote it
The long swim before the leapGroff drafts short fiction far more quickly than novels, not because she works faster but because the work begins long before she sits down. By the time she writes, the story has already been living inside her for years.
I keep a story in the back of my mind for years until one day it becomes so urgent I have to sit down and write it. It’s a long swim versus a terrifying leap.
That extended incubation period compresses everything that follows. Where a novel demands revision across eleven or more drafts, a short story for Groff comes out in four or five, because so much of the construction has already happened at the level of the subconscious.
I don’t even write a short story until I can see the whole thing in my mind’s eye. I let them sit in the subconscious for a really long time. Usually, because I’ve been thinking about [a given story] for so long, I’ve done a lot of the work in my subconscious. I spend so much of my day just staring at a wall. So it’s just a few drafts, four or five, as opposed to, like, eleven.
Editing, for Groff, is not a single pass through a manuscript but a series of targeted sweeps, each one isolated to a single concern and tracked with a different colored pen. The goal of all that separation is calibration: prose that stays at the same emotional distance throughout becomes suffocating.
You go through and you just do language. Or you’ll do character development. Or you do the quality of the sensory information.
The collection’s central novella, ‘What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?’, did not start as one. It kept expanding through drafts until its length made the form inescapable, at which point Groff had to contend with a form she regards as the hardest she knows.
I think novellas are possibly the most difficult form, because you don’t have the relief of constant constraint of the short story, and you don’t have the leg room of the novel.
When reviewers identified registers in the collection drawn from Flannery O’Connor and Tennessee Williams, Groff acknowledged those debts without apology. Her relationship to influence is appetite, not anxiety, and she has articulated what she is actually after when she reads.
I want voice creep! The whole purpose for me of literature is to have voices speaking to you out of time. I want brilliant writers speaking to me all the time because it makes me feel less existentially lonely. I welcome voice creep because I want to steal from the book... It’s having a conversation. It’s speaking back to these people whom I love so profoundly and just want to be in conversation with.
On craft choices
The window that was always thereGroff sees the short story form as structurally different from the novel, not just in length but in emotional register. She has described her novels as being in a major key and her stories in a minor key, a distinction that shapes everything she withholds.
I want to break your heart. I think it comes from the form itself. My novels are in a major key, but my short stories tend to be in a minor key. They have such a small canvas on which to work, and so much information needs to be withheld, so you linger in the really intense moments.
The ending of a story, for Groff, is not a destination the writer steers toward but a discovery of something that was already embedded in the text. This means endings are not imposed from outside but released from within.
My philosophy is that there should always be a window, all the way through the text, that the reader doesn’t know exists, in the room. And the ending is opening the window and letting the air in, letting a different kind of light in. So it lives there all along, but the ending is really just discovering the slight differential that’s going to change things.
What she wants us to sit with
A candle, not a floodlightThe darkness in the collection is not nihilism. Groff has described her emotional position with precision: she holds a genuine belief in human goodness, and the stories register what it costs to hold that belief against the available evidence.
I’m the opposite of a fatalist. I am a utopianist; I actually believe in the goodness of people, so every time they prove that they’re not good, it breaks my heart.
At the back of the book, Groff included a paragraph of her own notes on each story, a feature that is unusual enough to warrant explanation. She has been careful to describe what those notes are not: they are not keys that unlock a correct reading, and they do not resolve the stories’ ambiguities.
They’re a bit of a cheeky gift for the reader. I’ve always had so much fun with the closeness and distance in the author-reader relationship. It’s a deeply intimate relationship, and it can be a parasocial relationship when the reader projects thoughts about the writer back into the work. I wanted to embrace that and say, ‘You’re not wrong.’ We’re conversing, and if you wanted a bit more insight into this story, here’s a tiny little candle in the dark. It’s not going to illuminate the whole thing, but it’ll show you a couple of signs.
For a book club reader, those notes at the back are worth saving for after the discussion, when the conversation has already found its own shape. They will confirm some instincts and quietly complicate others.