“People are Banning Books Because They are Powerful”: Lauren Groff on Fighting Censorship in Florida

(GAINESVILLE, Fla.) – Lauren Groff is a New York Times bestselling author and one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People of 2024. She co-owns with her husband Clay Kallman The Lynx bookstore in Gainesville, where they advocate for banned and challenged books.

Groff spoke with The Click about book bans in Florida and why she believes literature is for everyone.

This interview has been edited  for length and clarity. 

 The Click: What inspired you to open The Lynx?

Lauren Groff: We were in Germany when [Florida Gov.] Ron DeSantis cracked open the state of Florida to allow an avalanche of book bans to happen. Being in Germany, you see things from a distance, and I was making light of what was going on, because I’ve lived in Florida for a really long time, and I got used to authoritarianism. And my German publisher pulled me to the side. He’s like, “No, this is really serious, you have to stop this.” He quoted [German playwright] Heinrich Heine, “In the places where people burn books, they will one day burn people.”

I got scared and didn’t want to come back to Florida at all. But my husband, who is from Gainesville, and whose family owned a bookstore throughout his childhood, was like, “Let’s open a bookstore,” and I’ve always wanted to. So, we came back, we found the space, and we opened The Lynx.

One of our missions is to uplift, celebrate, and make sure people are reading the books that are currently being banned, which in the state of Florida is over 4500 individual titles. So, just one month later, we opened our nonprofit wing [The Lynx Watch]. Our nonprofit has given away over $65,000 worth of banned and challenged books to Floridians for free. So, we’re a two-pronged effort.

The Click:  How have your experiences as an author shaped your perspective on censorship and the importance of independent bookstores?

Groff: I was first a reader before I was a writer, and I read books that I wasn’t supposed to, and those were the books that had the most profound influence on my life. People are banning books because they are powerful, because they’re some of the most extraordinary modes of communion with other human beings that exist. I see a great book of poetry or a great novel as though the writer is taking a piece of their soul and implanting it into the reader so that the reader is never alone. This is just the most extraordinary technology that exists.

So as a writer, I don’t want my books to be banned, and Fates and Furies has been banned in the state of Florida and in certain counties. But I also don’t want other people’s voices to be banned, especially since most of the voices that are being banned are the voices of people who are already being hounded and made to feel unworthy and unlovable and lesser than, especially here in the state of Florida. So my life has been enriched as a reader and as a writer by listening to people who are not like me. That’s one of the more beautiful things that literature can do. It can show the common humanity and the common need for dignity and respect for other people. 

My special impetus is the freedom of expression. This has been guaranteed in the Constitution, and it’s currently being undermined savagely on many different fronts by the powers that be. And often I think, “Is upholding banned and challenged books enough?” I don’t know, but I do think, like George Eliot wrote at the end of Middlemarch, small, passionate acts do pave the way for other people to live a more comfortable and beautiful life. I really do believe that. This is the route that we’ve chosen, and we’re going full force to try to protect these banned and challenged books. 

The Click: How do you feel recent book bans have affected readers, schools, and libraries here in Gainesville?

Groff: It’s brutal. It’s not just the overt bans; it’s the environments of fear and paranoia that these book bans create that is even more dangerous and ugly than the book bans themselves. These book bans take place in so many different counties and so many different school districts; this is why they’re hard to fight, because it’s a many-headed Hydra. It creates this sense of paranoia. 

Authoritarians count on good people preemptively agreeing to their own oppression. It’s out of fear and complying with things that they actually do not have to comply with. We see this with these executive orders that have no legal basis whatsoever, and yet people start to comply with them as though they are legally sound.

They’re not. We don’t have to agree to do it, but I think authoritarianism is dependent on fear, and so we are trying very hard to be a lighthouse, to say you don’t have to listen to the authoritarians. You should read these books to see what is so offensive that people want to pull them off the shelves.

My heart goes out to librarians and booksellers; it’s a hard time to get a job. I understand that they don’t want to put their livelihood on the line. We have heard many, many times that people are doing things preemptively where their job is not at risk in order to cooperate. And I just have to say, you don’t have to. We don’t have to. Do not concede in advance.

The Click: Have you faced any resistance or pushback for carrying certain books or advocating for free expression?

 Groff: I’m a woman of a certain age who’s really loud, and I’m really excited about protecting vulnerable people, which other people don’t like.  And so, I have been subjected to many death threats. And in part, this is what the Lynx is. We are a lightning rod to take some of the ire off of the people who are bearing their undue burden of it. I do not want my beautiful trans friends to feel the constant animosity and hatred that’s coming to them from the right. If that can be directed toward me, that’s awesome. I can withstand it. I’ve been withstanding it for a while; that’s part of the job. 

The store has also received the gamut. We’ve received angry posts online, one-star reviews. The first day we opened, April 20 of last year, was an amazing day. But the next day, we went to the Banned Books area, and in all of the LGBTQ+ books that were remaining on the shelves, there was a Christian tract tucked into them. But of course, that’s the risk we’re taking by being a strongly mission-based store.

The Click: Beyond selling books, what other strategies, initiatives, or events is The Lynx using to educate the public and bring attention to censorship?

 Groff: So, Gainesville Reads was set up as a one-city, one-book event. We were able to put together these amazing 23 events in a month. We chose Edwidge Danticat’s “We’re Alone.” And I’m still moved by this, this young Black woman came up to me and she said, “You know, there’s never a free event that happens in Gainesville where there’s a strong Black voice at the center where the identity is not the reason why we’re there.” The reason that we’re there is that we’re celebrating a piece of literature and this extraordinary person who put it out. I was so moved to see Gainesville, where I’ve been for almost 20 years, finally start talking about the things that are really, really urgent.

[Another] thing that I’m so proud of, is we worked with GRACE Marketplace, which is our local one-stop, one-house center. And we built a 1,300-book library, and of course, it’s a free library, and it’s free, meaning, if someone goes in and they want a book, they take it home with them, because we believe that our unhoused neighbors deserve vast, gorgeous interior landscapes as well. It’s not just for people who can have a library card, which is often dependent on residency. Literature is for everyone, and books are for everyone, and everyone can see themselves reflected in something.

We also do legislative work. So last year, Jackie Davidson, who’s the treasurer for the nonprofit, who’s also our operations manager, and I went up to Tallahassee to testify against a very harmful House bill that ended up not being passed. We’re working with a lot of other groups in the state of Florida to work against this authoritarian push.

The Click: What do you hope The Lynx can achieve long-term in terms of fighting censorship and supporting readers’ rights?

Groff: I hope for a lot of things. One of the narratives is that people from other places in the US and abroad think of Florida as a really backward place. I want to change that narrative and say, “No, there are so many incredible people doing a huge amount of work here in order to offset the deprecations of this political climate.” Everyone here is worthy of respect and dignity. Another thing that I would like to do is just be an example for people to not be afraid of the book banners and the authoritarians. To say, “No, we don’t have to comply with this inhumane way of living in the world.”

 I also would love one day to be able to relax our ferocious guardianship of freedom of expression. I have a feeling you cannot relax. When you have a right, you have to defend it, which we’re discovering now. When we had the right to bodily autonomy as people in female bodies, that was only taken away because we relaxed, because we allowed it to be taken away. So, there’s no point at which people who want to profit off of the pain of the masses will stop. They will never stop. So, we cannot stop pushing for a world that we would be proud to live in.

The Click: If you could put one book in the hands of every Floridian to spark conversation about censorship and free expression. What would you pick?

Groff: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. It’s about climate change in a lot of ways, and about poverty, misogyny, and racism. It’s a book in which there are so many ideas that we all should be engaging with, and it’s so beautifully written.