Just outside the town of Brunswick, Maine, the Harpswell Road runs along a finger of land poking into the ocean. It passes clapboard houses and mobile homes, stands of red-tipped sumac and pine, a few farms, a white Congregational church, and the Harpswell Historical Society, which used to be Bailey’s country store, when the writer Elizabeth Strout worked there as a teen-ager. “I remember sitting on the front porch eating a lollipop,” Strout, who is sixty-one, said one damp day in March, as she drove past. “And this woman came by, and she goes, ‘Oh, you’re so cute! Can I take a picture?’ My mother was furious. I think my mother felt like the person was . . . a summer person.”
Strout longed to be one of them—these people who were free to experience the world beyond New England. “They’d come in with their tennis racquets, and I would want so much to be friends with them,” she said. “I just don’t think I existed for them on any level.” In her mind, they came from places where a person wouldn’t feel so stuck—as Strout did, in the house that her parents had built next to her grandmother’s cottage, down a dirt road from her two great-aunts. “My parents came from many generations of New Englanders, and they were skeptical of pleasure,” Strout has written. They didn’t drink or smoke or watch television; they didn’t get the newspaper. “By the time I went to college, I had seen two movies: ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians’ and ‘The Miracle Worker.’ ” Strout’s family still owns the house, and as she walked in the front yard—which isn’t really a yard so much as a perch among the pine trees, on a rocky outcropping high above Casco Bay—she said, “It’s a long way from nowhere.”
And so she left. After college, at Bates, she went to England and worked in a pub. She went to law school, in Syracuse, because she was afraid that otherwise she’d end up a “fifty-eight-year-old cocktail waitress,” instead of a fiction writer. She met her first husband, Martin Feinman, there, and moved with him to New York City, where she taught at a community college and he worked as a public defender. They had a daughter, Zarina. “I just was so happy that she had the world right around her,” Strout said, looking out at the gray sea. “That she didn’t have to live like this.”
For Strout’s most vivid characters, leaving their small towns seems either unthinkable or inevitable. The protagonist of “Olive Kitteridge,” which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, is the embodiment of the deep-rooted world where Strout grew up: Olive could no more abandon Maine than she could her own husband. (“Oh God, yes, she was glad she’d never left Henry,” Olive thinks, when she’s older, and her husband has been incapacitated by a stroke. “She’d never had a friend as loyal, as kind.” But she also remembers “a loneliness so deep that once, not so many years ago, having a cavity filled, the dentist’s gentle turning of her chin with his soft fingers had felt to her like a tender kindness of almost excruciating depth.”) The narrator of “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” a writer, cannot remain in the remote community where she was raised: there is an engine in her that propels her into the unknown.
Strout dislikes it when people refer to her as a “Maine writer.” And yet, when asked, “What’s your relationship with Maine?” she replies, “That’s like asking me what’s my relationship with my own body. It’s just my DNA.” It took her decades to understand this. After law school, Strout quickly decided that she didn’t want to be a lawyer after all, and that she didn’t care if she ended up an aging, unpublished cocktail waitress: at least she would have spent her time writing. (“I took myself—secretly, secretly—very seriously!” Lucy Barton says in Strout’s novel. “I knew I was a writer.”) Strout barely published before she turned forty, except for a few stories in “obscure literary journals” and in magazines like Seventeen and Redbook. “It was a long haul,” she said. “I kept going, long past the point where it made sense.” Zarina told me, “I remember being really small and registering that she was miserable about it, and I was, like, ‘Why don’t you just stop?’ And, of course, she was, like, ‘Because I can’t.’ ”
Strout had an intuition that the problem was, as Lucy Barton says of another writer, that “she was not telling exactly the truth, she was always staying away from something.” Strout remembers thinking, “I’m not being honest. But what am I not being honest about?” She had always been interested in standup comedy, and it occurred to her that what’s funny is true. “That’s why people respond, because the unspeakable is getting said,” Strout told me. “So I thought to myself, What would happen if I put myself in that kind of pressure cooker where I was responsible immediately for having people laugh?” She enrolled in a standup class at the New School, which required students to perform at the Comic Strip. She was terrified before going onstage. “My whole routine, I made so much fun of myself for being an uptight white woman from New England,” Strout said. “And the incredible part is it worked.”
A few years later, Strout published her first novel, “Amy and Isabelle,” about an uptight white woman who lives with her daughter in an old Maine mill town. It was a national best-seller. Maine—Strout’s DNA, the isolation and emotional restraint she had abandoned for bustling, gregarious New York City—was the thing that she’d been staying away from.
Maine has served as the setting for four of Strout’s books, and now she lives there part-time, with her second husband, in the middle of Brunswick. It’s just twenty minutes away from the house where she grew up, at the other end of the Harpswell Road. As we drove back past what was once Bailey’s store, Strout noticed a lanky girl on the front steps. “Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!” she shrieked with delight. “Little skinny girl sitting there with her big feet!” It could have been Strout, half a century ago, except that the girl had a cell phone, and the store is now defunct. “All the sadder for her,” Strout said, shaking her head. “Jesus. I want to say, ‘Come on, kid—get in the car, and we’ll give you a ride out.’ ”
“Olive Kitteridge” has sold more than a million copies, and to many readers, particularly in Maine, the woman at its center—who explodes with rage but is often unable to access her other emotions—feels like an intimate. “I can think of at least a half-dozen real-life Olives in Maine who helped raise me,” one woman said when Strout gave a reading in Portland recently. Another said, “I just love Olive, and I’m always wondering about her backstory. What formed her? What made her Olive Kitteridge? Do you have any insight on that?”
“I do,” Strout replied from the stage. She was wearing black, as she tends to, and her blond hair was up in a clip.
“Oh, good,” the woman continued. “Will you tell us?”
Strout smiled and said, “No.” The audience laughed, but she wasn’t kidding. “She does have a backstory. We all do. And I would love to tell you.” Strout sighed. “But I just don’t think I will.”
Withholding is important to Strout. She never speaks about books before they’re finished, because, she said, “there’s a pressure that has to build, and if I talk about it then I can’t write it. It’s like putting a pin in a balloon and just popping the air out.” Her characters are no less circumspect: there are always things that they can’t remember or can’t discuss, periods of time that the reader can only guess at. Critics frequently note the starkness of Strout’s writing—what Claire Messud, reviewing “Lucy Barton” in the Times, called her “vibrating silences.” This encompassing quiet is always there, like the sea on the edge of the horizon.
Strout has an aesthetic as spare as the white Congregational church, where her father’s funeral was held. The dramatic turns are understated—tone on tone—but the characters are nearly bursting with feeling. One of the central agonies of their lives tends to be an inability to communicate their internal state. It’s as if they needed Strout as an interlocutor.
On the day that Olive Kitteridge’s son, Christopher, is getting married, to a doctor from California named Suzanne, Olive hides in the couple’s bedroom, suffering:
Growing up, Strout told me, she had a sense of “just swimming in all this ridiculous extra emotion.” She was a “chatterbox,” people said. “Liz has always been a talker,” her brother, Jon, told me. “I’m much more reserved, much more of a Maine Yankee. My sister’s not much of a Yankee.”
Her passion and volubility were frowned upon in the taciturn world she inhabited. “I can remember my father saying to me at Thanksgiving, when my aunts would be around, ‘When I put my hand on my tie, it means you’re talking too much,’ ” Strout said. “I often felt that I had been born in the wrong place.”
Eleven generations ago, a sixteen-year-old named John MacBean came from Scotland to New England. “He made leather shoes,” Strout’s mother, Beverly, said one morning. “And the funny thing is that L. L. Bean—who is also descended from that line—made leather shoes. He was cousin to my grandfather.” We were sitting in a diner at the Topsham Fair Mall, not far from where Jon used to have a dental practice. (He had stopped by the diner earlier for a blueberry muffin. His mother ordered one, too, though she worried that it would be too large.) Mrs. Strout, who will turn ninety in July, was carrying a bag of cloth she’d bought next door, at Jo-Ann Fabrics, and was wearing a gray-blue wool cloak that she’d made: she still sews all her own clothes, and used to make clothes for Elizabeth, whom she called Wizzle. “Anyway,” she said. “That’s the Beans.”
Her late husband, Dick—who was “kindness itself,” she said—was from a similarly old New England family; one of his forebears, a cousin of his great-great-grandfather’s, was appointed the lighthouse keeper of the Portland Head Light during the Ulysses S. Grant Administration. (The job stayed in the family for six decades.) Dick was a professor of parasitology at the University of New Hampshire in Durham, and Beverly taught expository writing at the local high school, which her children attended; the family shuttled between Durham and Harpswell.
In an interview on NPR, Strout told the host, Terry Gross, “I understood that my father in many ways was the more decent person, but my mother was much more interesting.” Her mother taught her to observe others, and to write what she saw in a notebook. “She kind of whetted my appetite for characters,” Strout told me. “We would be sitting in a parking lot, waiting for my father to come out of a store, and she’d point to a woman and say, ‘Well, she’s not looking forward to getting home.’ Or, ‘Second wife.’ ” It was Strout’s first experience of contemplating the interlocking lives that make up a small town, the way their disappointments and small joys—“little bursts,” Olive calls them—can merge into a single story.
In the diner, a man wearing a maroon work shirt approached the table. “Well, hello, it’s been a long time!” Mrs. Strout said to him.
He explained their history: “I did a lot of work for these people—septic system, road.”
“I need some more septic system,” she told him. “They broke through the pipe. Are you doing it still?”
“I might take a look at it, yah. Jon still gets me out of some jams with my teeth. He said you were going to be celebrating a big birthday this summer. Mine’s this Saturday. I’m going to be seventy.”
“Well,” Mrs. Strout said. “I guess you’re growing up.”
The connections and constraints of small-town life—and the almost erotic ache for something more—remain Strout’s primary subject. Her new collection, “Anything Is Possible,” takes place mostly in Lucy Barton’s childhood home, a depressed farming town in Illinois that is strikingly similar to the towns that Strout has written about in Maine. (Many Mainers who survived the Civil War moved to the Midwest, where there were open spaces to farm and timber to log.) The inhabitants are white, reserved, generally decent, and suspicious of new arrivals. “It’s a similar kind of person who has gone from the East to the Midwest,” Strout said. “They’re Congregationalists”—like her family—“and they’re plain, plain, plain.”
In the communities that Strout creates, the mores are set by tradition, and people aren’t confused about their roles. But this continuity provides no protection. In “Olive Kitteridge,” a young man, returning home to Maine to commit suicide in the same place that his mother did, worries about who will find his corpse: “Kevin could not abide the thought of any child discovering what he had discovered; that his mother’s need to devour her life had been so huge and urgent as to spray remnants of corporeality across the kitchen cupboards.” (As he contemplates this, Olive barges in and interrogates him. “ ‘Jesus,’ Kevin said quietly. ‘Does everybody know everything?’ ‘Oh, sure,’ she said comfortably. ‘What else is there to do?’ ”) Lucy Barton’s parents hit her “impulsively and vigorously” throughout her childhood, and lock her in the cold cab of a truck as a punishment. Her father is tormented by his experiences in the Second World War, and, in an indelible embarrassment, is caught by a farmer “pulling on himself, behind the barns.” In “Anything Is Possible,” the barns have burned down, and the farmer has become a janitor, haunted by the “terrible screaming sounds of the cows as they died.” The tone of Strout’s fiction is both cozy and eerie, as comforting and unsettling as a fairy tale.
Strout feels misunderstood when people ask her if characters are based on her mother, her father, herself. “It’s not even remotely how it is,” she said. “Because these are all different people that have visited me. I use myself—I’m the only thing I can use—but I’m not an autobiographical writer.” (When her first book came out, Strout asked her editor if she could do without an author photograph on the jacket. He said no.) “Some people have an idea,” she continued. “I just see a person, and I start describing who this person is.”
Strout recalls having almost mystical experiences of temporarily inhabiting other people. The first time it happened, she was twelve years old, working at Bailey’s. “This woman came in—she seemed old to me, but she was probably like fifty-five—and she started to talk to me about how her husband had had a stroke, and it had left him depressed,” she recalled. “And I remember so clearly almost feeling her molecules move into me—or my molecules move into her. I understood there was some sort of merging.” This is also how Strout feels when characters “show up, just like that.” They seem like real visitors, bringing dispatches from their lives. “I have a very specific memory. I was loading the dishwasher, and Olive just arrived,” Strout told me. “She was standing by the picnic table at her son’s wedding, and I could peer into her head.” She heard Olive thinking, It’s high time everyone went home. “So I wrote that down immediately. And that was it—there was Olive.”
Once, when Strout was young, she asked her father, “Are we poor?” because they lived so austerely. “He said, ‘Yes!’ ” Strout told me. “And he said it with great pride.” In her telling, this was a Yankee fiction, an attempt to embody the understated flintiness that they valued. (Jon remembers it differently. “We were poor,” he told me. When I asked in what sense, he said, “Financially.”) It was almost incomprehensible to her family when Strout married into a wealthy, demonstrative Jewish family and moved to New York. “My former husband and his father would kiss when they met,” Strout told me. “I just thought that was so lovely.” Her mother-in-law liked to hear her pronounce Yiddish words in her clipped New England accent. “I could never say anything right except oy vey,” Strout said. “I was made for oy vey.”
Strout and her family lived in a brownstone in Park Slope, which, she said, “felt almost like a village,” except that it was full of people she didn’t know. She joined a writing group, and took classes from the editor Gordon Lish. “She really found what she was looking for in New York,” Zarina said. “I remember clearly stacks of manuscripts throughout my childhood on the dining-room table. They weren’t sacred—we’d kind of eat on them and live around them.”
Strout’s parents didn’t often visit. “They were well educated, but in some ways very provincial,” Feinman said. “New York was alien—it was like Sodom and Gomorrah to them.” (Olive Kitteridge laments having “a little relative” living in the “foreign land of New York City.” She tells a friend, “I guess it’s the way of the world. Hurts, though. Have that DNA flung all over like so much dandelion fuzz.”) Strout feels that her parents disapproved of the way she raised her daughter. “My generation was the one that turned around and became friends with our kids,” she said. “I think they thought that I paid her far too much attention. I mean, I don’t know that, but I think that.”
After Zarina left for college, Strout, who was then working on her second novel, “Abide with Me,” moved out of the brownstone. Feinman told me, “I know that one piece was a desire to really just focus on her writing. A desire to not have to be responsible for anybody else.” It was almost a decade, though, before she and Feinman got divorced. “They like each other so much—that made it confusing,” Zarina, who is thirty-four, said. “My takeaway is that love itself is not enough.”
Unlike Strout’s other books, “My Name Is Lucy Barton” is in the first person. It is about a writer who flees a place where she feels stifled and ends up in New York, delighted by the buzzing humanity around her. She dearly loves her mother, a tough woman who sews and who calls her Wizzle. She is a passionate mother herself, who leaves her first husband.
Barton is told by a friend that to be a writer she would have to be ruthless. Decades later, when she is successful enough to sit with wealthy people “in the waiting room for the doctor who will make them look not old or worried or like their mother,” she reflects on her friend’s advice. “The ruthlessness, I think, comes in grabbing onto myself, in saying: This is me, and I will not go where I can’t bear to go—to Amgash, Illinois—and I will not stay in a marriage when I don’t want to, and I will grab myself and hurl onward through life, blind as a bat, but on I go! This is the ruthlessness, I think.”
Eight years ago, Strout was onstage at Symphony Space, in New York City, when a man in the audience stood to ask a question. “I’m from Maine, too,” he said. She was skeptical: she had become accustomed to people in Manhattan telling her they were from Maine, when in fact they’d gone to camp there one summer. She asked where he was from. “He said, ‘Lisbon Falls,’ ” Strout recalled. “I thought, Oh, my God, he really is from Maine. I mean, everything’s shut down, the paper factories are gone.” Lisbon Falls is not a place where people go on family vacations.
When Strout signed books afterward, the man was first in line, and he introduced himself as Jim Tierney. “We chatted for a while, and then, when he left, I remember turning and looking at him and thinking, That should have been my life,” Strout said. “I had no idea that I would ever see him again.” But she realized later that he had slipped her his e-mail address. “We wrote back and forth a few times,” she said. “And then we met twice. And then he moved in.” On their second date, Strout told him that she had been rejected from his alma mater. “He thought about it for a second, and then he said, ‘I’ve never had dinner with someone so stupid they couldn’t get into the University of Maine law school before.’ And I thought, Oh, my God—I love this man.”
Tierney, who became Strout’s second husband, was Maine’s attorney general for ten years, and, before that, a member of the legislature. “My mom married Maine incarnate,” Zarina said, “except that he talks even more than she does.” Once, when they were visiting her in Brooklyn, Tierney noticed a car parked in front of her apartment with Maine plates; he left his business card on the windshield. “They share an intense relationship with Maine,” Zarina added. “It’s a need and an adoration and a loathing.”
Since 2010, Strout and Tierney have split their time between Manhattan and Brunswick, where they live in an old brick house that has been converted into apartments. Down the block, she rents a modest office, decorated with a vomit-colored carpet and a floral thrift-store couch. “It’s just my weird little place!” she said. On the wall is an old photograph of the Libbey Mill, in Lewiston, where her grandfather worked, and a framed copy of the Times best-seller list with “Olive Kitteridge” at the top.
In “Anything Is Possible,” Lucy Barton returns home after seventeen years; she tells her sister, Vicky, that she’s been busy. “ ‘Busy? Who isn’t busy?’ Vicky pushed her glasses up her nose. In a moment she added, ‘Hey, Lucy, is that what’s called a truthful sentence? Didn’t I just see you on the computer giving a talk about truthful sentences? “A writer should write only what is true.” . . . Well. I don’t believe you. You didn’t come here because you didn’t want to.’ ”
It’s a recurring theme in Strout’s novels, the angry, aching sense of abandonment small-town dwellers feel when their loved ones depart. Olive Kitteridge never quite recovers from the “ghastly blow” of having her son “uprooted by his pushy new wife, after they had planned on him living nearby and raising a family.” When I asked Strout if people she grew up with resented her for leaving, she said, “I don’t know. I haven’t stayed in touch.”
Tierney, however, seems to know one out of every ten people in Maine, and he frequently stops to chat with them for as long as they’ll listen. One afternoon, the couple walked into Gulf of Maine, a bookstore down the block from their house in Brunswick, to say hello to the proprietor Gary Lawless, a poet with a long white beard and hair, whose father was once the police chief in a town up the coast. “I never get tongue-tied except when you’re here,” Lawless told Strout. “When Jim’s here, I get ear-tied.”
Tierney, who was wearing corduroys, a navy sweater with holes in it, and his grandson’s red Spider-Man cap, teaches at Harvard Law School and has been working with progressive groups mounting legal challenges to the Trump Administration, but he spends as much time as possible with Strout, accompanying her to readings and events; they cling to each other with the urgency of mates who’ve found each other late in life. “When I read Liz’s work, I forget she wrote it,” Tierney declared. “The strength of the voice takes me away—I go right down the tube with everybody else.” He continued, “She’s the hardest-working person I know. I work hard, she works harder.”
“Whatever,” Strout said.
Looking at a stack of copies of “Olive Kitteridge,” adorned with Pulitzer insignia, Strout recalled once visiting the shop and seeing a woman—“short, blond, bustling, chubby”—inspect the display. “She goes, ‘ “Olive Kitteridge”—well, I guess that wasn’t the best book I’ve ever read!’ ” Strout said. “That really blew a few hours for me.”
“Olive Kitteridge” is dedicated to Strout’s mother—“the best storyteller I know.” When I met Beverly Strout, I asked what she thought when the book was awarded a Pulitzer. “I thought that was fine,” she replied. “At the university, there was a professor who won a prize—it wasn’t a Pulitzer—and the truth was he won the prize because he had friends on the committee. And I don’t think that was fair. I knew it wasn’t true of Elizabeth, so I was very proud of her not cheating.”
Though Strout has always been ambitious, when she accomplishes something she “can’t take it in fully,” she said. It upsets her when friends call her modest, because it means that they don’t really know her. The truth, she insists, is that her successes are “inaccessible” to her, which she attributes to her upbringing in the Congregational Church, where her father was a deacon. “We were not supposed to think about who we were in the world,” she said. In a draft of “Abide with Me,” Strout wrote of what it felt like for the protagonist—a Congregational minister in Maine—when parishioners praised his sermons: “Compliments would come to him like a shaft of light and then bounce off his shoulder.” It is, Strout suggests, literally against her religion to feel pride.
When Strout told me about meeting Tierney, I asked her why her immediate reaction was regret rather than excitement—why she thought, That should have been my life, instead of, It’s about to be. “I’m a Strout,” she said. “We never think we’re going to . . . whatever.”
The day after the Trump Administration made its second attempt to ban travel from a half-dozen Muslim-majority countries, Strout went to visit the Telling Room, a youth writing organization in Portland, Maine, where she met refugee and immigrant high-school students, mostly from Africa and the Middle East. The students stood in a circle and told Strout what they were working on. “My name is Abass, and I’m trying to define what home is,” a teen-ager from Ethiopia said. Steff, from Burundi, told her, “I’m writing about how I find my voice in America.” Another boy said, “I’m writing about second chances.”
Strout’s fourth novel, “The Burgess Boys,” which Robert Redford is adapting for HBO, was based on an incident she read about in the newspaper after her mother alerted her to the story: in Lewiston, which has a large Somali community, a young white man threw a frozen pig’s head through the door of a mosque during prayers. Strout spent months lingering in Somali neighborhoods before she started writing. “I would drive by the school to watch—I wanted to see, with the little kids, if they were playing with white kids, and so I would just watch and watch and watch. I was afraid I was going to get arrested,” she said. “Then, eventually, I went into their store—at that point they only had one, now they have like a million—and they had different things: sheets next to rice next to nutmeg next to a broom.”
Eventually, Somalis began inviting Strout into their homes. “It took a long time, but it was so interesting,” she whispered. “The men all hang out on the sidewalk because they like to see the sky, they miss the way the sky is in Somalia. And these beautiful teen-age girls would flutter downstairs—these young, butterfly-type girls. And I really saw the difference between the young ones, who had come out of the camps early, and these women who had obviously spent years there, and had such difficult lives, and their faces were just ravaged.”
Strout told me she thinks of herself as “somebody who perches—I don’t sink in. So I feel like New York has been this marvellous telephone wire for me to perch on, and I can come back here and perch. But Maine people sink in. This is their home.” One of the costs of living in a place where everyone seems interconnected is that outsiders stand out. These days, Maine isn’t a place that many people move to, as Strout’s ancestors did. It is the whitest and among the oldest states in America, and is increasingly far from political power. Maine, which once had eight congressmen, now has two, and may lose another one as its population stagnates.
Before Strout left the Telling Room, her hosts introduced her to Amran, a seventeen-year-old, wearing jeans and a yellow head scarf, whose family emigrated to Maine from Kenya four years ago. She had just won a competition for poetry recitation, and, in the hallway, she gave an impromptu performance of W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Song of the Smoke.” “I am swinging in the sky, / I am wringing worlds awry,” she said, with vibrant feeling, nearly singing the words. “I am the thought of the throbbing mills, / I am the soul of the soul-toil kills.” Strout listened, so rapt she could have been exchanging molecules.
In the parking lot, Strout looked back in through the windows. “The people I write about are almost disappearing,” she said. “And that’s fine. It’s time. It’s like, Please, hello—let’s have others in here now.” ♦
