Elizabeth Strout published her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, at 43 years old. Before that, she spent years writing stories that were routinely rejected by literary magazines. She knew they weren’t quite good enough yet. “I understood that it wasn’t quite good enough, but I also understood that it was getting better,” she told Booth. When her work finally did get published, it didn’t take long for readers and critics to catch on. In 2009, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Olive Kitteridge, a novel told through linked stories about a blunt, complicated woman living in small-town Maine.
Strout has built a career writing about the kind of people who rarely appear in fiction: aging, lonely, often invisible to others, quietly suffering. Her most well-known characters are Lucy Barton and Olive Kitteridge, two very different women with two very different voices. Olive is sharp, unsentimental, and often harsh. Lucy is quiet, emotionally raw, and observant. What they share is emotional depth and interiority, a sense that their lives are shaped as much by silence and memory as by action.
Strout is especially skilled at capturing the internal weather of her characters. In My Name Is Lucy Barton, she writes about a woman reflecting on her troubled childhood and strained relationship with her mother. The story is told in fragments, moving back and forth in time, and it’s driven less by plot than by voice. Strout told the Women’s Prize that the novel began with scenes of a mother and daughter in a hospital room. “It just kept coming to me and unfolding to me as I heard her voice,” she said.
That voice-driven approach defines all of her work. Her books don’t follow traditional narrative structures. They unfold in episodes. Some of her novels, like Anything Is Possible and Olive, Again, are structured as interconnected stories. Others, like Oh William! and Lucy by the Sea, feel like a series of personal reflections strung together. “I seldom write anything from beginning to end,” she told the Booker Prizes. “I will write in little scenes and then eventually they pull together. (Or they don’t.)”
Strout’s later books have returned again and again to Lucy Barton, a character she says is not autobiographical but deeply familiar. “As long as I can hang on to her voice I can go with her,” she said to the Booker Prizes. “She allows me to look at the really quiet parts of living.”
Her writing is shaped by deep observation and a commitment to honesty. Strout said she’s listened all her life. Hilary Mantel once praised her for being in “perfect attunement to the human condition.” Strout agreed. “I have listened all my life, listened and listened and listened,” she said. “Perhaps from that very commitment I have learned over the years to be in ‘perfect attunement.’”
Elizabeth Strout’s daily writing routine
Strout doesn’t write every day, but when she’s working on a book, she keeps a consistent morning routine. She wakes up, eats cereal with her husband, and starts writing as soon as he leaves the apartment. “I write first thing in the morning after having breakfast with my husband,” she told The Guardian. “Then I clear the table and sit down to work.”
She writes by hand, often beginning with a scene or part of a scene. She transcribes everything to a computer later, once she’s marked up the pages to the point where they’re hard to read. Scenes are written out of order, spread across a big table. Over time, she starts to see connections between them. The good ones stay. The others get thrown away. “The ones that aren’t any good to me get slipped on to the floor and eventually into the wastebasket,” she said.
Strout often writes from home, sometimes moving from the table to the couch that overlooks New York’s East River. When she’s in Maine, she writes in her studio above a bookstore. “It is a large room with windows that look out at the fire station and I have a couch and a table and a big lumpy chair,” she told the Booker Prizes. “It’s lovely, because no one ever goes in there except for me.”
She doesn’t outline or plot in advance. Instead, she builds a novel slowly, by instinct, through scenes that feel emotionally true. “I have to tell the story—here we go,” she told Goodreads. She revises constantly. During her writing day, she sometimes walks around her apartment talking to herself about the work. After lunch, she may return to the day’s writing, but it’s risky. “If I feel it is good work, I am happy for the rest of the day,” she told The Guardian. “But if I feel it is not good work, I become fretful.”
She doesn’t listen to music while writing. She doesn’t need silence, either—just the ability to be alone in her own head. Strout doesn’t worry about genre or audience. She just tries to write something true. “I always imagine an ideal reader: someone who is patient, but not too patient; someone who needs the book and wants to read it, but may not read it if I do not write it honestly,” she said.
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