Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. The relatively young author gathered major attention for her novel Fates and Furies – from literary awards to a nod from President Barack Obama. Her newest novel, Matrix, imagines the life of Marie du France, a medieval writer who became France’s first woman poet. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists. On April 12, 2022, Lauren Groff came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk about Matrix with Isabel Duffy. The two also discussed the utterly unique way in which Groff writes her novels. After copious research, she writes a complete first draft, tosses that away without reviewing it, writes a new draft, and repeats the process again. With Matrix, she went through eight full drafts before arriving at the final version.