Elizabeth Strout: ‘It’s a tough thing to be creative and have children’

Elizabeth Strout, author of ‘The Things We Never Say’, has sold 2 million books - (Leonard Cendamo)

Elizabeth Strout found the hero of her latest novel, The Things We Never Say, in an unlikely place. Well, actually, her friend did. “We’ve known each other forever, and he sent me a page of old obituaries that he found from, like, the Sixties and Seventies. It sounds weird, but whatever,” she tells me. “So I was looking at them and there was this man’s face that was so ordinary and kind and pleasant, and just as ordinary as a face could be.”

The man’s face stayed with her, until one day she realised this was Artie Dam, an unassuming history teacher in late middle age whose life was full of secrets. After crochety Olive Kitteridge, who won Strout the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and quiet, courageous Lucy Barton, who Laura Linney played at London’s Bridge Theatre in 2018, Artie is Strout’s first major new protagonist for many years, in her first novel set outside of her native Maine. “He was just so quotidian-looking, you know?” says Strout, 70.