The themes of Brawler by Lauren Groff are difficult at first to connect; the overall mood of the stories is what brings them all together, a wiggly feeling difficult to pin down in words. What unites these stories is a sense of searching, a plaintive, painful yearning, and also feelings of guilt, deep and raw and hidden. A woman tries to get her children out of the house of an abuser; an older woman struggles with the lack of future possibility; a once-close friend group comes back together on one woman’s deathbed. In “Under the Wave,” a mother wakes up on vacation engulfed in water, and must find a reason to keep herself and her mind afloat. In the title story “Brawler,” a sharp, abrasive teen finds her place knifing through the water, as far as she can get from a sterile home where she is totally, utterly not in control.
“The women were drinking peach schnapps,” begins “Birdie,” “telling stories about the worst things they’d ever done.” Both Birdie and Nic share theirs, on the surface. But it’s not until later, when the two of them are alone, the other friends gone, that they tell the real stories, with the real reasons. Each renders themselves bare to the other, and there is a mix of fury, forgiveness, and understanding in each of them when they part.
That’s where the crux of these stories by Groff (of Fates and Furies, 2015, and The Vaster Wilds, 2023) form a braided, trembling core. From a young, jealous, needy child to a rich wreck of a young man to a retiring woman sinking her hands into the soil, Groff’s characters break because they need. They break hearts and confidences, wish for what they know they shouldn’t, stay silent when they know they should speak. They are at times decades apart in age, but the guilt lurks smoky and hurt and even selfish in the pits of their stomachs, all of them, and the reader knows why they’ve done it, is there beside them understanding the need and desire, the desperate loneliness or heartbreak, that drove them to this perilous cliff of hurt.
The reader is pulled into empathizing with all of them, even the ones they’d prefer to hate, who if they just read a headline instead of Groff’s stories, they would happily turn against. As in life, nothing is easy for these characters. In “To Sunland,” a young woman fights sexual harassment, theft, and her own inner turmoil to commit her brother into an institution so that she can go to college.
The characters don’t have the grace that the author does, to see in all corners, to know what they look like from outside. The protagonist of “What’s the Time, Mr Wolf?” believes he has everything under control; believes that his money or his charm or the way he’s set to physical work will bring the woman who catches his eye around. Nic in “Birdie” is shaken when her three friends admit to ghosting her in high school, to icing her out; she thought they’d simply left each other to their own devices that summer all that time ago. In Groff’s stories, the reader’s gaze provides both stark judgment and deep empathy. That’s the art of Groff’s narrative work: she gives the reader just enough of a window to think we know it all, to place our judgments and pass on pity, but there are always darker corners or unexpected skylights that Groff has access to—small details that she saves and reveals with devastating impact.
Lauren Groff’s prose draws readers in with such slowness that they’re caught before they’re fully cognizant, trapped in a net of powerful feeling that she’s already laid down. Her stories wrap intricate emotional nets around the reader, distracting them with plot points, visions, and humor just long enough to pull the trap tight and immerse us in a rush of often painful human feeling. Brawler is both addictive and painful, the perfect size for a short story collection, each tale its own saturated, heavy narrative, weighted down with hope and hurt.
FICTION
Brawler
By Lauren Groff
Riverhead Books
Published February 24, 2026
