Doom-eager: A Novel

Groff’s Academy project, the novel “Doom-eager,” takes place over the course of one exhilarating night. She first encountered the word “doom-eager” in a quote from the dancer Martha Graham: “You are doom eager for destiny no matter what it costs you. The ordeal of isolation, the ordeal of loneliness, the ordeal of doubt, the ordeal of vulnerability which it takes to compose in any medium, is hard to face…[the] artist is doom eager, but never chooses his fate. He is chosen, and anointed, and caught.” Groff’s new novel plays with these ideas, but also with the morality of bringing children into the Anthropocene era, with insomnia, complicity with systems of power, and the way language can conform to or resist those systems. She describes “Doom-eager” as a novel of dislocation, asking, too, what happens when insomnia is so severe it changes one’s perception of the world: “The flickering phantoms at the edges of vision assert themselves, figures from books just read spark alive in the mind, the proportions of the day slide and turn grotesque in the dark.” In Berlin, Groff looks forward to breaking out of “the deep grooves I have worn into my life in Florida—the systems and routines of the everyday—and be constantly challenged by multiple new forms: a new language, new people, new physical surroundings, new challenges. … [the] assertion of the real Berlin over my internal imagined abstractions will create an immensely fruitful fiction, one this book needs.”