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
brother hate kids
You have family", Bob said. "You have a wife who hates you. Kids who are furious with you. A brother and sister who make you insane. And a nephew who used to be kind of a drip but apparently is not so much of a drip now. That's called family".
jobs elderly house
My first job was when I was about 12, cleaning houses in the afternoons for different elderly women in town. I hated it.
character order use
I actually see myself in all my characters. In order to imagine what it feels like to be another person I have to use my own experiences and responses to the world.
life waiting feelings
You couldn't make yourself stop feeling a certain way, no matter what the other person did. You had to just wait. Eventually the feeling went away because others came along. Or sometimes it didn't go away but got squeezed into something tiny, and hung like a piece of tinsel in the back of your mind.
drawn england miss type
I'm drawn to New England because that's where my roots are, and I miss it. I come from many generations of New Englanders, and so, in my writing, I've been drawn back there to the landscape and the light and the type of personality that's revealed.
anxiety literary people problems publishing share success tension work york
I like people a lot, but I am not comfortable in literary New York situations. There is deep anxiety and tension around success here. I don't share problems I'm having about my work, and I think conversations around publishing are boring.
along grew interested kids million people
I got a gerontology certificate a million years ago along with my law degree, so I've been interested in older people for many years. Some people grow up with a lot of kids around, but I just grew up with a lot of old people.
dishes fast might
I don't think of myself as a fast reader. I just read a lot. When someone else might think, 'I might do the dishes,' I don't. But then the dishes multiply.
complexity contained prefer shows though watch
As a novelist, I like the contained drama and complexity of the courtroom, though I don't watch those shows on TV. I prefer the hospital shows because I wanted to be a doctor.
fall hard-work writing
It's tremendously hard work. Yes, 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.
giving-up trying permission
I suspect the most we can hope for, and it's no small hope, is that we never give up, that we never stop giving ourselves permission to try to love and receive love.
mean judging understanding
I would also hope that readers receive a larger understanding, or a different understanding, of what it means to be human, than they might have had before. We suffer from being quick to judge, quick to make excuses for ourselves and others, and I would like the reader to feel that we are all, more or less, in a similar state as we love and disappoint one another, and that we try, most of us, as best we can, and that to fail and succeed is what we do.
writing thinking maine
In a way, I'm very interested in writing about Maine, because I think Maine represents its own kind of history. It's the oldest state, and it's the whitest state.
sea safety world
Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. (211)