GAINESVILLE — Lauren Groff was having a busy week, even for a woman who is currently writing three books.

On Thursday, she and her husband, Clay Kallman, were in New York City to attend the Time 100 Gala, where she was honored as one of Time Magazine’s most influential people of the year.

“It was surreal,” she says. “At one point, Dua Lipa brushed up against Clay, and he nearly fainted.”

On Saturday, she was in Tallahassee, talking about her books on stage at the sprawling Word of South music and literature festival.

And on Sunday, she was back home in Gainesville to open the new bookstore she and Kallman co-own, The Lynx.

Why does a woman who has a hugely successful career as a writer, who has published books like “Florida,” “Fates and Furies,” “Matrix” and “The Vaster Wilds” and won or been nominated for the Story Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle prize, and who has a husband and two sons, need another career as a bookstore owner?

“We did this because of book bans,” Groff says. “We want to fight back against the chill of authoritarianism that is creeping across Florida.”

She’s not alone, apparently. On a sunny Sunday, thousands of people showed up for the store’s grand opening, so many that the building rapidly reached capacity and the overflow had to wait to get inside in a long line that stretched across the back patio and into a parking lot for most of the day.

Groff says, “We rang up 1,900 separate sales, and I know a lot of people came, looked at the (checkout) line and left. So we had over 2,000 people here.”

They came for a full day of author readings and signings, music performances and hanging out in what Groff says is “meant to be a safe space.”

And they came to buy books, 998 of them to be exact.

“So many books sold out,” Groff says. “All of mine did, and I had stocked up massively on them. But they were all gone by 11 a.m. But that’s what you want!”

On opening day, Groff, 45, was in constant motion, stacking books, chatting with customers, pausing only to introduce the authors reading from their work.

The inside of the store was so packed it took effort to quiet people down during the readings. At one point, after poet Ange Mlenko had begun to read, someone came through the back door talking in his outside voice. Groff spun around and shushed him like a superhero librarian.

Traffic control was a group effort that included Groff’s mom, Jeannine Groff, monitoring one door and Kallman at the other. Groff’s husband has bookstore experience — his grandfather started Gainesville’s Florida Bookstore during the Depression, and then his father ran it until the family sold it, but not before Kallman worked his first job there.

In recent years most of Gainesville’s independent bookstores have closed, and Groff and Kallman had considered opening one for several years.

Two of the authors who read on opening day were early cheerleaders for the plan. University of Florida professors Cynthia Barnett and Jack E. Davis both talked about a meeting they and Groff attended with Gainesville Mayor Harvey Ward Jr.

“He wanted to know how we could make Gainesville a more literary city,” said Barnett, a professor of environmental journalism and the author of several books, including “The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans.”

“We said, we need a bookstore that can do big events.”

Davis, who is the Rothman Family Chair in the Humanities, specializes in environmental history and sustainability studies. He is the author or editor of 10 books and won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea.”

Growing numbers of people are coming to Gainesville to visit its natural spaces, Davis says, like Paynes Prairie and Sweetwater Wetlands Park. “This can be part of that,” he says of the bookstore as a draw for tourists as well as locals.

The handsome decor of the shop reflects connection to the environment, Groff says, with dark green walls representing Gainesville’s lush tree canopy and gold accents, like the monkey chandelier in the kids’ books section, drawn from the colors of Paynes Prairie.

And The Lynx is easy to spot in its location in South Main Station thanks to a mural of its namesake animal that stretches the length of the building.

Its celebrity owner just adds to the attraction. Groff is part of a trend of bookstores owned by authors, and she says she’s had “tremendous” support from several of them, including Judy Blume, Ann Patchett and Emma Straub. She’s also happy about the support she’s had from other Florida independent bookstores, such as Tombolo Books in St. Petersburg, Midtown Reader in Tallahassee and Books & Books in Miami.

“Oh, my gosh,” she says, “everyone just wants to help.”

The Lynx has garnered support from across the country, Groff says. Crowdfunding through IndieGoGo raised $116,000. Donors “were sending me pictures from Seattle, Wisconsin, Texas, all over.”

On Sunday, supporters showed up in person — a friend of Groff’s who runs 68 book clubs in the Los Angeles area, as well as her agent, editor and publicist, who came from New York.

But many in the crowd were from Gainesville, where Groff has lived since 2006. When it came time for her reading, she stepped up on the stage on The Lynx’s inviting roofed patio and read a short story from her 2018 collection, “Florida,” recently called out by Florence Welch as the inspiration for her part in Taylor Swift’s “Florida!!!”

“Ghosts and Empties” is a stunning story about a woman dealing with anger issues by walking around her neighborhood at night, peering through uncurtained windows. Its setting is clearly identifiable as her Gainesville neighborhood, called Duckpond.

Wasn’t she worried some of those neighbors might take offense? “Well, if they’ve never read me, they were in for a surprise,” she says with a laugh. “It’s not a not-edgy story.”

When the book was published, she says, “Maybe some of them yelled at me. But we’re about freedom of expression here.”

No one yelled on Sunday; the crowd laughed knowingly at moments and gave her an enthusiastic round of applause.

That’s another thing she’s aiming for: community. The store is designed not just to sell books but to hold events where people can come together. Its feline name is a pun: The Links.

Groff wants to link everyone; the store’s bookshelves proudly display banned books and books by and about LGBTQ+ people and people of color as well as books by Florida writers, popular bestsellers and classics.

Actions by Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis and its Legislature were what pushed her long-simmering bookstore plan to the boil, she says.

A recent report by PEN America found an “unprecedented surge” of book bans in 2023-24, especially in Florida. The state had the highest number of bans, at 3,135 books across 11 school districts.

“I think a very, very tiny minority of Floridians are for the book bans,” Groff says, “but the vast majority are being affected.”

Contact Colette Bancroft at cbancroft@tampabay.com.