This week we had a special book club treat. Lauren Groff, author of “Fates and Furies” was in D.C. on her book tour and came by WAMU to talk with Kojo.

Whenever we talk to the author of a novel on the show, we’re careful not to reveal too much of the plot to prospective readers. In this case we were SUPER cautious about spoilers because so much of this plot is layered and revealed by degrees. You could easily, inadvertently start divulging too much. Even describing the central characters Lotto and Mathilde in too much detail feels like potentially shaky ground.

To my mind, spoilers feel a lot like secrets. Blurt one out and all of a sudden you’re the person in the room everyone is staring at, agape, as you start to figure out how to backpedal and enter damage control mode. They require context and need to be revealed at the right moment, if ever.

Lauren Groff On “Fates And Furies,” Writing Life And The Nature Of Secrets – The Kojo Nnamdi Show

One big theme that “Fates and Furies” takes on is secrecy and the very nature of information withheld or left untold. So we used this conversation to talk, in part, about whether secrets are necessarily bad.

“I’m not sure that secrets are a good thing,” Lauren Groff told Kojo. “But I do think everybody has a very rich and varied and strange internal life. That doesn’t necessarily [extend] to one’s intimate partner.

There are times at night when I wake up in the middle of the night and I look over at my husband and I have this existential dread because I don’t know what’s happening in his dream at that moment. So I do think that we all contain this well of secrecy and it’s a mystery and that’s good because that’s what makes us human and that’s what makes each person unique…

So I don’t think that everybody has a secret…but I do think that we all keep things to ourselves. And that’s a great thing in a relationship. You do not want to tell your partner everything that’s passing through your head.”

I contend that everyone – and I mean EVERYONE – has some kind of secret or fact about themselves they guard ferociously from most people they know. It could be big – that they’ve had an affair – or small – that they really don’t get what all the fuss about van Gogh is. But, whatever it is, it’s something they think would change how others think about them.

Not everyone – ahem, Kojo – agrees with me. But that’s what makes this interesting, and I can’t wait to hear what YOU think about the secrecy in this book. Lauren Groff left us with one last secret….a message for us to read once we’re past all the spoilers and have read the book. Join us – in a spoiler heavy book club setting – on the evening of Thursday, Nov. 5 at WAMU to hear what she had to say!