SIMON: That makes her a target for the schemes of men, doesn't it? SIMON: Marie of France turns out to be what we'd call an entrepreneur these days. This is just "Matrix." And "Matrix" comes out of the Latin for mother, right? So I'm returning it to its original idea, I think. SIMON: And to be clear, "Matrix" has nothing to do with the Keanu Reeves. So I bet this has nothing to do with the actual life of the actual Marie de France, but it's the closest I could get to her. And I built a life, a biography out of those images. But what I was able to do was to go back to her own works, the lais and the fables that she wrote, and to pull out images. There are suppositions that she was a bastard daughter of nobility. There are suppositions that she was an abbess. She was the first female poet in the French language that we know of. GROFF: Well, we don't know much about Marie de France. How much of an attempt did you make to tell her real story, and how much was that wonderful fodder for imagination? SIMON: Marie de France, like Joan of Arc, is a real person. And they worked very hard, and they prayed very hard, and they loved very hard, and their lives were taken care of. The nuns at the time, especially the Benedictine ones, had a very frequence (ph) process of praying halfway through the day, and the night, also. GROFF: It's a tough life, but it's a beautiful life. SIMON: Lauren Groff, a two-time National Book Award finalist and author of "Arcadia," "Fates And Furies" and other books, joins us now from Gainesville, Fla. Lucy (ph), of whom, in desperation, she molded a wax votive with her good hand and let it melt on a hot stone while praying. In June, a miracle, and Felisa (ph), whose half body had frozen after she stepped over copulating snakes, awakens, having regained the use of her frozen face and hand and only limps with a single unwilling leg now. In the abbeys, sleepy without its souls, a mother vixen with heavy teats trots out of the cellar, dragging a whole dried sturgeon. Rains come in the night, and the wet earth bursts to green. The nuns take pauses in the greater work to sow the wheat to plant the gardens. LAUREN GROFF: (Reading) At night, the heavens spin into their summer constellations. Lauren Groff, could you please set the scene of a summer there?
Lauren Groff, one of America's most acclaimed contemporary novelists, has set her new book "Matrix" in medieval times in a nun's abbey, presided over by Marie of France, who's banished there when she's 17.
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