INTERVIEW: Elizabeth Strout

the pulitzer prizewinning novelist on character names, monosyllabic Mainers + her 11th novel, The Things We Never Say

The week before last, I had the pleasure of interviewing Elizabeth Strout in London about her eleventh novel, The Things We Never Say. It was a gig that came with a degree of anxiety: Strout, a Pultizer prizewinning novelist beloved by writers such as Hilary Mantel, David Nicholls, Ann Patchett and Zadie Smith, has been at the top of my bucket list since I read Olive Kitteridge - and, well, they say to never meet your heroes. (I know this from experience: I once came across a famous author outside a coffee shop, and while I was telling them how much I loved their work, they cycled away… my words dying in the air behind them.) Luckily, Strout was as singular as I’d hoped: curious, compassionate, witty, with a wonderfully wonky, girlish laugh.

Her latest book is about a 57-year-old history teacher named Artie Dam, living by the sea in Massachusetts. He is happily-ish married to the strident, capable Evie, he has an adult son, Rob, who he worries about terribly (after a tragic accident changed all of their lives, when Rob was 17), and a boat that he loves. He is also very depressed.

This is a novel about men, and the many ways in which they might struggle; about the secrets that may last an entire marriage; about teaching and the vitality of young people. It is a book about fathers and sons, and - as typical in all of Strout’s work - class and trauma, and unexpected alliances of commune and care. Strout also does something new in this book: via a series of brief flash forwards, scattered throughout the text, the author tells us the fate of every single character, even the most peripheral. The interludes are abrupt, shocking you out of the present moment, and so compelling. I think it is this narrative device, that makes it my favourite of her books so far.

I hope you enjoy the interview.

Elizabeth Strout, welcome to London!

Thank you, I love it.

Can you tell us a little about how Artie Dam came to you, and why you wanted to tell his story?

A friend of mine sent me an obituary from Upstate New York - because that’s the kind of man he is - and there was one of a man named Damm. And this man’s face was very, very, very ordinary. And so pleasant. He had big gold-rimmed glasses on. And his face was the germ, I think Henry James calls it ‘the germ’ [of Artie]. And then, I’m not sure what happened. But Artie, my Artie, had arrived.

Artie Dam is such a singular name. Like Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. Do you think quite carefully what to call your characters?

Once I have the right name, I can write the character. And the right name is essential. I learned that with Amy & Isabelle. I knew that Isabelle’s name was Isabelle, but I could not figure out the daughter’s name for so long and it just didn’t work until I did.

Was Olive Kitteridge ever anything other than Olive Kitteridge?

No, she just showed up. Boom.

Of course she did. The Things We Never Say is a book about the many ways in which a man can feel lonely and how he might struggle to express that loneliness. Near the start of the book, Artie thinks to himself:

“People do die of loneliness and I am - I will be - one of them.”

Loneliness is a big theme across your books. You have this line in Tell Me Everything - a devastatingly simple line that I think of often - where Lucy Barton says to Olive Kitteridge:

“Who is not lonely, Olive? Show me one person?”

Have you always been interested in loneliness?

I have always been interested in what I think of as the interior life of a person. Every time I walk down the sidewalk, I think, there goes a person. We see a person, there goes a person. But inside that person, what is going on? I think it’s because I grew up without many people at all. When I was young, we would go into town, and my father would run errands and I would sit in the car with my mother, and my mother would go, “Look at that woman. She’s not too excited to get home to her husband”. I would scramble onto the front seat and go, “How can you tell? How can you tell?” And she would say, “Look at the hem on her coat. It hasn’t been fixed for ever and ever.” And I was so fascinated! I wanted to follow that woman home.

I was probably around 10 or 11 when I realised that I would never see this world through any other lens than my own two eyes. And that’s true of anybody. I couldn’t believe it. I still can’t believe it. About that time, I read a book - not a children’s book, because we didn’t have children’s books [at home] - and I realised that in fiction, you can get inside somebody else’s head for a few moments. And that was such a relief to me. So that’s why I write. The interior life coming up against the exterior world that we all live in.

Rob cannot see into Artie’s interior life and Artie cannot see into Rob’s. They are both so atomised. There are also peripheral characters going through their own crises, like Artie’s boss, the headmaster. It’s a timely topic - we are in a masculinity crisis in the Western world. Was this intentional?

It was not intentional. I don’t do anything intentionally. All I can do is start with a character and once I have that character and I’m inside that character, I just go through whatever they are going through. And later somebody will say, “You wrote about male loneliness”, and I will go, “Oh! Yes, I did.: But I wasn’t intending to do that.

Is there any sense of osmosis -

Sure. Because I live in the world. And I think of myself as porous. I think I absorb a lot of stuff. But it wasn’t a conscious decision. When I write, it’s almost always intuitive.

Like another of your most famous characters, Lucy Barton, Artie is from a very humble background. He cannot stand people who think that they are better than anyone else - like Reginald, who plays an unexpected role later in the book. What fascinates you about class, and who holds the power, and who thinks they hold the power?

I didn’t even know I was writing about class, when I was writing Amy & Isabelle. And then a woman said to me, “This is a really good book about class”. And I thought, Oh my word. And it was, of course it was. When I wrote the Lucy Barton stories, it was because I was interested in that type of family, who were so poor and ostracised.

There was this boy in my third grade who came from a family like that and he never spoke a word, never ever said anything, and one day the teacher said to him - she was a horrible old thing - “You have dirt behind your ears. Nobody is too poor to buy a bar of soap.” And I watched the whole back of his head go red, he had a crew cut and it crept up his neck and over his ears. Part of why I wrote Lucy Barton is to give that person a voice, because they don’t have a voice in society.

You actually wrote about that teacher for me - in your contribution to What Writers Read.

Awful, awful woman.

You’re clearly really interested in the impact of teachers - in the case of that little boy, how traumatising that was, but also how magical that relationship can be, when you have a good teacher. Artie changes the lives of some of his students, like Danny and Rhonda. As a former teacher yourself, could you feel the power that you had, for better or worse, over a young person and their trajectory?

I’ve never had any sense of myself having any power. I’m from such a puritanical background in Maine, I never had any sense of my self, let alone having power. But when I taught at Manhattan Community College for 13 years - I just adored it. I was young and the students were so young and unpretentious. I didn’t have any sense of having power, but about five years later, this woman on the subway goes, “Professor Liz, Professor Liz! Look at what I just bought!” And she showed me a copy of Raymond Carver’s short stories. And I just about died.

I bet some of them wave your books at you, now.

No, never.

There’s that puritanism… This book has more concessions to modernity than your previous books. Artie and Rob text each other a lot, for instance. What made you want to technology in?

Every story is about a place and a time in history. And this book is about Artie’s time in history, with the digital world exploding all around us, and his place, which is the eastern coast of Massachusetts.

I’d like to see how Olive Kitteridge would text. What she’d think of emojis.

Ha ha ha…. I don’t think she’d like emojis.

She’d write texts with proper spacing between paragraphs. At the beginning of the book, Rob and Artie are lost to each other because of a traumatic experience which happened when Rob was a teenager. As a family, they have grown around the pain of that accident. As father and son unpick the shame and the guilt, and build a reciprocal relationship, they become more estranged from their mother/wife Evie. I wondered, do you think that is that always the case? That intimacy blooms when tiny estrangements grow elsewhere?

That’s a really interesting question. I think it can happen, yes. Families are so complicated. My word, my word, my word. Any family, anywhere, is such fertile stuff for a novelist. I think different intimacies preclude other people being allowed into other parts of the family. Yes! Absolutely. That’s my answer, absolutely.

Evie thinks of Artie as ‘soft’. She shares some qualities with Olive Kitteridge - a certain stridency and bossiness. It feels quite radical, to me, that you very often have these female characters who have little time for vulnerability, and these male characters who are a bit more doubting and shape-shifting.

Writing against the grain is what I’m interested in. Because if you go with the grain, you’re just going to have something that people expect.

Do you care if your characters are likeable?

No, I don’t care. I’m just writing about people - and people aren’t always likeable. I want people to be able to understand who I am writing about, but they don’t have to like them. They can be very badly behaved. Especially Olive.

Olive is deliciously badly behaved.

In the first book of Olive Kitteridge, there is a scene where she steals her daughter-in-law’s brassiere and one shoe, just to make her feel crazy. I was in Olive’s head, walking through her son’s bedroom, opening the drawers, and I thought Oh, look, there’s a brassiere. I made it up. It was a good day at work.

But when I went on the road with that book, so many women would lean in to me and go, “How did you know?” It was fascinating! They would say, “You must have a daughter-in-law.” I don’t! I now have a son-in-law, but no. And what I found out, is that so many women out there must want to be stealing their daughter-in-law’s brassiere and one shoe, but they don’t have to, because Olive already did it. So I think that’s part of Olive’s appeal.

It’s so wonderfully petty. It’s like hiding a fish under somebody’s mattress. You mentioned stealing, then. That’s something Artie is also experimenting with. I don’t know what your motivation was writing it, but reading it, it felt like Artie was so desperate to feel. And when he steals, he has this experience of extraordinary kindness, where the man who owns the shop treats Artie so tenderly; he understands that he is stealing because he is going through something.

When I was young, there was a woman in town and her son got sick and he was fine, he got better, but she shoplifted. And I asked my mother, “What did her husband think?” And she said, “I don’t know, he was probably very embarrassed.” And he probably was. And then later, I knew this woman who shoplifted when her brother had died, and she was the last woman you would think to shoplift. And I was interested in how this could happen, shoplifting, when you are feeling a loss.

When teenagers steal, it’s part of the boundary-pushing of adolescence. Despite his age, there is a sense of Artie testing his boundaries; because everything has lost its shape and he doesn’t know what’s real any more. He has this theory that he has precognition. Do you believe in precognition?

I kind of do. I’m going to tell you why. This is the stupidest story you will ever hear. I have a friend called Kathy Chamberlain, who is my one reader for these books. And I went to her house in Long Island, and I left behind a very cheap watch. I didn’t give it another thought. Months went by and as I was getting on the subway to go to school one day, I had an image of my watch being inside my mailbox. And when I got to school, my watch was in that mailbox. It really spooked me. I think it probably happened because it was irrelevant. If it was anything important it wouldn’t have happened. But that’s why I believe in that. I think we probably all have a drop of it.

One of the most compelling things you do in this book is to do a quick jump forward to the future, to describe what becomes of the characters, or how they die. I loved it - I found it so jarring but effective. Why did you decide to do that?

It was narratively very different for me to do that, to address the reader directly. And then it pulls back and you go back into the story. It seemed kind of risky, but I kept it in. It seems like it made the book it’s particular book. That the book needed to be told that way.

You’ve touched on politics in previous books - Olive talks about not liking a president’s face - but this one is much more overtly political. A lot of Artie’s despair comes from where America is going and about Trump and what he stands for. What made you want to make it a more political book?

The truth is, I didn’t want to make it a political book. I was frightened to make it a political book. But because I was writing about Artie’s time in history, I had to. All of this was happening and it affected him, so it had to be there.

There are wonderful moments where you fold levity into “the sads”, as Artie’s student Rhonda calls them, and how you often do that is with your peripheral characters. They’re a hoot. For instance, Spud. “Here’s the thing” you write. “Spud had a hole in his head.” Do you have fun with these kinds of introductions?

Here’s what happened with Spud. My husband knew a guy called Spud and he was talking about Spud and he said to me - he actually said this to me, sitting in his blue chair - “Here’s the thing about Spud. Spud had a hole in his head”. And I thought, wow. That’s a sentence. Two sentences. Poor Spud, he is no longer with us. He didn’t own a restaurant, either.

As shown with Spud, one of the most appealing things about your writing is its simplicity. As The Atlantic puts it: “Elizabeth Strout does more with less - than any other writer I can think of”. I wondered, is the understatedness deliberate, or is it an extension of your personhood?

For many years I was writing and writing and writing, trying to write like a writer. And it wasn’t until I got completely fatigued with that, around the age of 40, that I thought, just say it. And then I began to write Amy & Isabelle and I realised - there’s my voice. That’s my voice. So that’s part of it. But my writing has become cleaner [over the years]. More and more succinct.

Real Mainers do not talk. If my brother was here, he would say, "‘Hello’. And that would be it. [Much audience laughter, due to her delivery of this.] I’m absolutely serious. So when you are brought up with that kind of succinctness, only what matters gets said. With all sorts of meaning reverberating down, from whatever is said. That could very well be part of my DNA. And why I had to return to Maine, to write Amy & Isabelle. Obviously, I am very chatty, because some genetic mutation took place, but with my writing, I think it could be that my DNA. Just say it. Just say it!

Were you chatty as a child?

I was. It was very awkward for my parents.

Was it really?

Oh, it was terrible! They were so embarrassed. I would never stop talking. I remember at Thanksgiving, my father would say to me, “Lizzy, listen to me. When you see me touching my tie, it means you are talking too much.” And I would stop. And then I would start again.

Your writing brings such clarity, comfort and wisdom to so many people. Who do you go to, for that?

William Trevor. I go back and back and back to William Trevor, who I’ve been reading for years. It’s so gentle and kind and truthful and poignant and there’s so much of it.

I haven’t read him.

Oh! You have such a treat. I am jealous.

When you look back at your eleven books, do you feel like you have changed as a writer?

I feel like I was preparing for a marathon. And then all of a sudden, I just took off. And I wrote so many books in quick succession. They were just spilling out of me. That was interesting. It was like they were in there and just dying to get out and I finally had the language to do that.

Do you have someone dying to get out right now?

I do but I can’t talk about it. I’m trying to be disciplined.

What’s your writing routine like? Do you have a routine?

Not anymore. I used to when I was teaching and raising my daughter. But I’m not a disciplined writer now, I mostly meander, thinking about it, and then when a scene comes to me I will write it down straight away. I probably prefer to write in the morning. My husband is really chatty by the way. Very chatty. So by the time we finally are done having breakfast, I will go away, and that’s the best of my writing day, up until we have lunch. There’s something about lunch that breaks it, so I will put lunch off until I’m ready to faint.

Do you write fully formed, as it were, or do you noodle around, editing, re-writing?

I will do both. I will write down a scene and then as another scene is coming to me, I will be rewriting that scene. I am, let me just say, very unorganised in how I work. Very messy.

How funny that you are so messy, because the result is so clean and so dignified. Thank you, Elizabeth. So very much.