Florida

Florida, Lauren Groff

Florida is a strange place. Most people are aware of that, although primarily through vague stereotypes. Florida Man has his own twitter profile, Carl Hiassen has made a career out of the absurdity that is Florida, and a bunch of the country threatens to write us off after every election. And yes, the political and human strangeness is part of it, but Florida is much more than that, and I love it so.

For one thing, for all its development, Florida is still wild. In the city where I grew up, alligators were in all the drainage ditches along the road and would occasionally end up in someone’s pool. Any golf course has a few resident gators in their water traps. Snakes can be found in the most manicured resort. I have come home to my college apartment to find a half-foot across huntsman spider on the door. And then there is the weather. Summer in Florida becomes a joke, but to those who haven’t been there it is difficult to describe just how different Florida feels than anywhere else in the country. The heat, humidity, the sound of cicadas, fill everything in your consciousness. There is a downpour every afternoon harder than the ones that result in severe storm warnings in my current mid-Atlantic home. The sky is different, and bigger, than anywhere I’ve ever seen. And sitting through a tropical storm or hurricane is an experience in itself.

It is this Florida, the one I feel in my bones and that makes me sigh and know I’m home, that is a character throughout Laura Goff’s collection of short stories. It is also a tale of searching and anxiety, of torn apart relationships and where there is anything to hold on to. Much of it is about solitude, following on character on their lonely journey, or dwelling with someone who is alone even in the midst of many others. The stories include a doctoral student consciously becoming a homeless drifter, a woman on her nightly walks and meditations, visits from ghosts during a hurricane, and taking family on the road to search for more.

Solitude is its own character in the story, and introspection. As is anxiety. Touched on more than once is mothers thinking of the fact of climate change, the ugliness of a world that it will leave for their children. Florida is one of the few places where the realities of global warming can’t be ignored, where even the reddest of Republicans know they need to act or they’ll be under water, and this anxiety resonated with me. I’ve spent many days and nights thinking about the world my kids will see, and wondering if they’ll even remember the coral reefs the way I do, or miss all the birds that will have gone extinct by the time they are grown. And this anxiety is just one piece of the constant, low level fear that all moms walk around with and that seeps through the pages in this book.

This collection of short stories felt amazingly real, even where the stories seem unreal. The sense of place is so incredibly strong, pulling me through cypress trees and live oaks as Goff spends far more time in the central swampland and forests of the panhandle than the white sand beaches. And the exploration of characters was strong, bringing the reader into their minds and feeling there with them. It was a powerful and moving collection showcasing a different part of Florida, one foreign to those of us who only know Hiassen and Disney and Miami, but one that is very real.