Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Stroutis an American novelist, academic, and short story writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Olive Kitteridge, a collection of connected short stories about a woman and her immediate family and friends on the coast of Maine. The book has been adapted into an HBO miniseries that won six awards at the 2015 Primetime Emmy Awards...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth6 January 1956
CityPortland, ME
CountryUnited States of America
The purpose of fiction is not to make people seem nice. What makes anyone think people are nice? Look around you!
'Pnin' by Vladimir Nabokov, which is a literally small book, fit right in my common law book. I would sit in class and read it.
I was a pretty terrible lawyer. A really, really terrible lawyer.
I sometimes miss the sense of excitement that I remember having when I was younger. I miss that sense of, 'Oh wow.' I think it's part of aging.
I don't think there's anybody I write about who I don't care for deeply in some way, no matter what their behavior is.
I don't ever really know where I get my characters from.
Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.
I love arranging the words and having them fall on the ear the right way, and you know you're not quite there, and you're redoing it and redoing it, and there's a wonderful thrill to it. But it is hard. It's a job of tremendous anxiety for me.
I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I went to law school because I didn't know how to earn a living otherwise. I tried to ignore the pull, but it wouldn't let me.
I think, really, that the only way a person can open their heart to someone who is so much another is really by knowing them... whether that's in a classroom, or a soccer team, or a food pantry, or any of those things. I mean, we're kind of more alike than we are different.
I grew up on a dirt road in Maine, and pretty much everybody on that dirt road was related to me, and they were old. And so grumpy.
I love the comfort of daily life's routines: things like being able to read a paper on the subway. It's no accident that my favourite word is 'quotidian.'