Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout agreed to be interviewed via e-mail by Lisa Mahon.

LM: As a writer, it always interests me to read how long it has taken someone to write a really good book like Amy and Isabelle. I've seen time frames listed from a few weeks to fifteen years or more. How long did it take you to write Amy and Isabelle, and was it an ongoing project where you wrote continuously, or did it happen over time where you wrote as the story unfolded in your mind?

ES: It's always hard for me to say exactly how long it took me to write Amy and Isabelle, because it was such a long and bumpy process. I usually say five years; sometimes I say seven. Either way, it's a great approximation. For many years I wrote only short stories. This was partly because I simply loved short stories partly because I had the feeling they were more manageable than a novel (I'm not sure that's true, now), and partly because I lacked the confidence to think of myself as writing a novel. Short stories also gave me a chance to be in some kind of regular contact with editors, even if it was just their letter of rejection--they would usually say something extra and it was helpful to have that encouragement. Amy and Isabelle had its beginning in a short story way before I realized it was going to be a novel. The story got longer and longer, and it still just never seemed to quite "work" so for a while I put it away. Meanwhile I noticed my sentences were changing, my writing style was changing, it was getting very hard for me to write any stories. All this was frightening, and lasted almost three years. I now think of that as my "throat-clearing phase." It has to be included as a necessary part of the writing of Amy and Isabelle. Once I sat down and actually got the first chapter done, it was probably at least three years after that that the book was done. I re-write obsessively, all the time. I never really work straight from beginning to end. That's why it's a hard question to answer, you see.

LM: I loved the characters in Amy and Isabelle . . . Were they based on a composite of real people, or were they all from your imagination?

ES: The characters in Amy and Isabelle developed slowly, particularly the character of Isabelle who was a very tough little nut to crack, because she was so encased in herself. Different parts of "real life" were called upon for little descriptions here and there, but the work is all very much a piece of fiction, and not autobiographical. The characters are so much themselves; it's really a fascinating process of discovering who they are. It's like any other relationship--it takes time to get to know someone, although some people are easier to get to know than others. Fat Bev, for example, seemed to appear on the page fully formed. She was very easy to know, and always a delight to see, for me. It's a matter of looking deeper and deeper, always asking myself who is this person, and how will he/she respond here? In college I did a lot of theatre, and it's a similar process--really inhabiting a character, taking what we know honestly about ourselves and our responses to the world, paying close attention to other people, and then using all that to imagine what it feels like to be another person. That is at the heart of why I write--I have always longed to know what it feels like to be another person. And when you think about it, we never really do know. But books help us, for a few minutes, to almost know.

LM: Congratulations on having made the shortlist of the 2000 Orange Prize for Fiction with Amy and Isabelle! Do you find your life as a writer has since changed drastically?

ES: My life as a writer changed with the publication of the hardback here in the United States. The book got a great deal of attention over here, and it was startling to have the public attention. Here's the way I see it: My "outer" life changed, because I suddenly needed to travel, have interviews, go to different luncheons, and all that was different. But my "inner life" didn't change at all because I had always known I was a writer. It's other people who hadn't known that. Only my very closest friends really knew, because I talked very, very little about my work. So that was the interesting part--that other people now thought of me as a writer. If you say you're a writer to someone, the first question they will ask is "What have you published?" If you don't have a book in the bookstore, if you murmur something about a few stories here and there, you are not taken seriously. You are even looked upon with pity. That often happened to me, which is why I just usually said to people that I was a teacher. That was something they could understand. So to have the book get published made my life more convenient, in that way. And it has changed my life. But it hasn't fundamentally changed my life.

LM: Having succeeded in such a manner, do you feel pressured--by yourself or others--to repeat the success of Amy and Isabelle? And did you expect the novel to be received with such rave reviews?

ES: Now that the book has done well, I do sometimes think about the pressure with the next one. When I wrote the first one, I didn't know that it would be read by anyone. Now I know that my second book will be read, and that probably makes a little difference when I go to the page each morning, but I try very hard not to let it make a difference. The trick is to write honestly, and so I have to concentrate on that. I would be lying to say that the future reception of this next book does not go through my mind on occasion; it certainly does. But it's a matter of focusing on the characters. The truthfulness of the story is what matters, and I work to lose myself in that, and when I am lost in that I can put aside the other worries. Also, I do work slowly. I re-write and re-write and re-write. So it's not like the book will be done right away. Therefore, when I start worrying about its reception I can think, well, that won't happen for a while so I don't have to think about that now.

LM: In the process of writing, do you become attached to your characters? And if so, do you find they affect or change your life in any way?

ES: I do become terribly attached to my characters, I must say. I love them when I am writing about them. Even when I'm not sitting with the pen in my hand, my characters are with me all the time. I think: oh, this is how so-and-so would react to such-and-such. I'm always looking at "real life" situations through my characters ' eyes. It's like I carry around this whole little universe. Now that I'm through writing about Amy and Isabelle I don't think about them so much, because I have other ones in my life now. Finishing the book was kind of like sending your kid off to school for the first day. You watch them go down the sidewalk with their new little lunchbox and just hope, from the bottom of your heart, that they will find people to love and understand them in this world. The characters of Shirley Falls have been loved and understood by readers, and I am tremendously grateful for that.

LM: When you began writing, did you write merely for yourself? If so, has that ideal changed as you've become more successful?

ES: I don't believe I was ever writing for myself, even as a very young person when I wrote pages and pages of anything--just for the sake of writing--I think even then I was always writing with a deep desire to communicate to another person. I have never written something and thought, Well, I'll just put that in the drawer. Maybe I have thought: Well, I'll put that in the drawer for a while, until I know better what to do for it. But writing, for me, as always been about a relationship with the reader. As a very young girl, first starting to love books, I would often feel--when I found a book especially wonderful--that the writer was speaking right to me, that he or she understood me, and it is that kind of intimacy I hope my own readers to feel. Of course if you pay attention at a certain early point in writing to the thought: What will people say? then you might as well forget it. You cannot write to please people, because you cannot write honestly that way. So I always imagine the ideal reader, someone thoughtful, receptive, understanding--someone in need of a truthful sentence, and I write the book imagining what that person needs from me, the writer.

LM: I understand that you're a teacher of literature and writing at Manhattan Community College as well as the New School. In teaching, do you often come across truly gifted writers? If so, given the odds of becoming a successful writer, do you--as a published author yourself--find it difficult to get across to your students just how difficult a career in writing can be, or have they already come to realize that by the time they've reached you?

ES: I am hesitant to think of any young writer as "gifted," because good writing is mostly about hard work. The gift that is necessary is the one that allows the writer to see the falseness in what has been written and the courage to get rid of it and re-write. This is hard stuff. I think as a teacher the most I can do is to encourage the student, to alert them to writers they may not yet be familiar with, and try and point out things in their writing that might or might not work; to provide an atmosphere in which they can try out different things. Probably most students don't yet realize how difficult a career in writing can be, but I don't think that makes much difference. I often hear parents say they try and encourage their kids not to go into the "arts" because it will be a hard life. If someone wants to be an artist, their life will be much harder if they try and do something else. The job of any parent, or teacher, I think is to give the person the freedom to discover. If they are a writer, they'll write.

LM: In your career as a writer, how flexible have you had to be with regards to changes that an editor--or anyone else in a like position--has wanted to make? Was there ever a time when you felt it was necessary to stand your ground and refuse to make a change in order to stay true to your story? With the success of Amy and Isabelle, do you feel you have more power to stand behind your work with regards to changes, or--in your experience--is the process of editing something that is always a sort of give and take between a writer and editor?

ES: I'm going to combine these answers, as they all deal with editors. I have been extremely fortunate to have the editor I have. This is how it came to be: Years ago I read a story in some literary magazine, and it had a certain flavor that I liked; the byline of the author (Daniel Menaker) said that he was an editor at The New Yorker. So after that I began sending my stories to him at The New Yorker. He always wrote back personal rejections, and the letters got longer as my writing got better. This was a great help to me. Once or twice he even called me to encourage me, although the stories were still getting rejected. Then I stopped writing stories to work full time on Amy and Isabelle, and I heard that Dan had left The New Yorker and gone over to Random House. When I finally--years later--finished the book, I could not find an agent, and I had no contacts, really, in the publishing world at all. So I wrote Dan a letter at Random House asking if he'd look at the book. He said he remembered me, and yes, he'd take a look. I sat down and rewrote the entire thing, working round the clock for two weeks. I wanted to make sure every word was polished exactly the way I wanted it to be.

Anyway, Dan liked the book very much, helped me find an agent, and the rest is history. But as a result of my re-writing it so many times, and the fact that Dan had always seemed intuitively to understand my work, there were very, very few changes that were made. Just a few tiny ones. I was grateful for that. You really have to trust your editor. If you do, what they have to say can be considered with seriousness. It's quite painful to have to change something when you don't think it should be changed; this has happened on a small scale with some stories, and it always feels like a chunk of skin has been taken off me. But of course one can always refuse, and should, if they think the integrity of the story is at stake.

LM: Did you always want to be a writer, or did you come to it by way of another career?

ES: I have always wanted to be a writer, from my very earliest memory. My mother encouraged me, buying me notebooks and telling me at the end of the day, "Write it down." I'm talking about when I was no more than five or six. So I always thought in terms of sentences. Then as I got older I thought I might also go into the theatre, because I loved theatre very much. But by the end of college I realized that the solitariness of writing suited my nature better, and so the emphasis went back to that.

I confess, however, that a few years out of college I went to law school, and this was partly because I was very afraid of failing as a writer. Somehow I thought if I failed as a lawyer, it wouldn't mean as much to me, and besides, I was tired of cocktail waitressing. Well, I did fail as a lawyer, I was a terrible lawyer, and I hated it. What I learned was that it was far better to attempt to be a writer and fail at that, than to attempt to be something else. This was an important lesson to learn. (And expensive.)

LM: Totally whimsical question here, but I always find the answer interesting. Who are your favorite writers? Are there any particular ones that inspired you?

ES: I have so many writers I love . . . William Trevor and Alice Munro. Anita Brookner, Oscar Hijueslos, Michael Cunningham, Philip Roth, John Updike. Probably the single most important book for me has been The Journals of John Cheever. He is so very honest, and the writing is beautiful. I learned a lot about weather from that book, as well as many other things. I love Tolstoy and D.H. Lawrence and George Eliot, Hawthorne, Woolf . . . so many more. A good writer always inspires me.

LM: What advice would you give to struggling writers out there?

ES: The advice I would give to struggling writers: Read the Masters, and pray that life, even in all its gloriousness, will be unbearable if you don't write. That way you will keep writing, and if you keep writing you will get better at it. If life is bearable without writing, then chances are you won't keep writing. So really, it's a problem that will solve itself.

About the Author:

• Bio
• The Orange Prize for Fiction
• Order Amy and Isabelle from Amazon.com.
• Read Lisa Mahon's review of Amy and Isabelle

Add a Link
Disclaimer
Credits
Site founded 1996.
Copyright © 2001 C.T. Atherton.
All rights reserved.
Some images copyright © ArtToday.