“The two characters that I have written who are older are Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton. It’s interesting because as I wrote them it was their character that was most important to me, and their age was simply a piece of that character. So even though I knew I was writing about older people I didn’t think about that in a way, except to make sure they were always who they were.”
How To Own The Room Podcast
“How can you overcome stage fright? Viv Groskop talks to award-winning writer and nominee for this year’s Booker Prize, Elizabeth Strout, ahead of the ceremony.… Elizabeth tells Viv how the spaces that allow her to write are the ones in which she’s not needed by anyone. Riding the subway is good, but even better is her studio in Maine. ”
Viv Groskop, “Elizabeth Strout, Writer,” How to Own the Room (podcast), October 14, 2022.
FT Magazine: Elizabeth Strout on Judith Joy Ross’s ‘breathtaking’ photography
“What a thing! To see with our own eyes into the honest self of another!”
Elizabeth Strout, “Elizabeth Strout on Judith Joy Ross’s ‘breathtaking’ photography,” FT Magazine, March 11, 2022.
A Conversation with Elena Ferrante
The author of the Neapolitan quartet and the Pulitzer prize-winning novelist discuss identity, ambition, truth – and the ‘convulsive’ urge to write.
“Here is what I believe: it is the pressure between the lines of the text, and the pressure rising up from under the text, and the pressure that is running above the text, that gives the writing its meaning, it is the unwritten sitting right next to the written, which makes something go beyond the explanation of the team of experts. And this is what happens when you go outside the margins (if I understand you correctly) and it is this which is mysterious, that we aim for.”
“No matter how love for others and language as an act of love try continuously, insistently, desperately to get outside the margins of the suffocating first-person singular, we remain bodies organically enclosed in our isolation. Once I recognised this, I was convinced that the other can be truthfully described only through an “I” that is colliding and in the collision unravels.”
Elena Ferrante and Elizabeth Strout, “‘I felt different as a child. I was nearly mute’: Elena Ferrante in conversation with Elizabeth Strout,” The Guardian, March 5, 2022.One True Sentence from Hemingway
Looking through the many true sentences in Hemingway's work, one jumped out at me. A real pleasure speaking with Mark Cirino for One True Podcast!
Mark Cirino and Michael Von Cannon, “One True Sentence #8 with Elizabeth Strout,” One True Podcast, April 15, 2021.