--- title: Elizabeth Strout on Her New Book 'The Things We Never Say' description: In her 11th novel, author Elizabeth Strout explores the inner life of a man grappling with loneliness canonical: https://time.com/article/2026/04/28/elizabeth-strout-the-things-we-never-say-interview/ author: Belinda Luscombe article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-04-28T10:27:04.722Z article:modified_time: 2026-05-12T07:05:40.154Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: How Elizabeth Strout Gets Inside People's Minds og:description: In her 11th novel, the Pulitzer Prize winner explores the inner life of a man grappling with loneliness og:url: https://time.com/article/2026/04/28/elizabeth-strout-the-things-we-never-say-interview/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt766bdf7830e034e4/69eac53c50e0cc7096ceaeec/Elizabeth-Strout_.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9%2Coffset-x0.00%2Coffset-y7.39 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: Elizabeth-Strout .jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Elizabeth Strout Gets Inside People's Minds twitter:description: In her 11th novel, the Pulitzer Prize winner explores the inner life of a man grappling with loneliness twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt766bdf7830e034e4/69eac53c50e0cc7096ceaeec/Elizabeth-Strout_.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9%2Coffset-x0.00%2Coffset-y7.39 ---  # How Elizabeth Strout Gets Inside People's Minds > Sponsored content. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account.  by [Belinda Luscombe](https://time.com/author/belinda-luscombe/)  ## Belinda Luscombe Editor at Large Apr 28, 2026 10:27 AM UTC  Fjodor Buis  by [Belinda Luscombe](https://time.com/author/belinda-luscombe/)  ## Belinda Luscombe Editor at Large Apr 28, 2026 10:27 AM UTC Elizabeth Strout’s novels are just like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, except nothing happens and the multiverse is Maine. Her [past](https://time.com/6105980/elizabeth-strout-oh-william/) [books](https://time.com/4766617/elizabeth-strout-2/) have [explored](https://time.com/collections/must-read-books-2022/6228577/lucy-by-the-sea/) the [inner lives](https://time.com/collections/100-must-read-books-2021/6120595/oh-william/) of a [series](https://time.com/collections/top-10-list-2016/4571566/my-name-is-lucy-barton-elizabeth-strout/) of [interlocking](https://time.com/collections/must-read-books-2019/5724532/olive-again/) [characters](https://time.com/archive/6643349/unfortunate-son/) who are doing the best they can, given the specific set of events that made them who they are. Strout’s ability to breathe life into [these non-superheroes](https://time.com/collections/must-read-books-2024/7172887/tell-me-everything/), to create recognizable, flawed, sympathetic, interesting humans, has won her a huge following and many honors, including the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for _Olive Kitteridge._ Strout’s newest work, _The Things We Never Say,_ out May 5, departs from the Maineverse. But it doesn’t go far—just down the coast to Massachusetts. _Things_ chronicles a short but life-changing period in the life of 57-year-old high school history teacher Artie Dam, who has a big home near the water, a wife, a successful son, and students who love him, but can’t quite shake the feeling that he’d like to die soon. Externally, he has a [jolly Tim Walz–type energy](https://time.com/7009138/tim-walz-authenticity-charm-essay/)—he too is a coach—but he is grappling with a newfound loneliness that he doesn’t understand. It’s a book about secrets, and how revealing them can bring liberation, as well as a whole different set of limitations. Strout, 70, says Artie first came into view when a close friend, for reasons she can’t recall, sent her some old obituaries. “There was a man that had wire-rimmed glasses and the most pleasant, ordinary face I’d ever seen,” she says, by video call from Maine. “And I remember looking at that photo and thinking, ‘Now, who were you? Because you just look so pleasant and so ordinary.’” She decided to put the man, with a slightly altered name, in a school in 2016, just as the fissures in the U.S. were beginning to make “pleasant and ordinary” harder to find. “She’s doing a very decent man in times where decency is devalued, dangerous, and scorned,” says Anna Funder, a fellow author, most recently of _Wifedom,_ and a fan. How a character behaves in a particular location at a particular time is the organizing principle of Strout’s work. It’s the walled garden in which she can safely roam. “I have always understood with the literature that I’m trying to write that it’s about place and time,” she says, adjusting her heavy glasses for possibly the 15th time during our conversation. “When we’re born is so essential to what will happen to us. So if you take a time and a place and drop in a character, you’ll have a story.” While her most well-regarded books have women at their centers, Strout did not find it difficult to get inside the mind of a man. She is also not interested in picking a side in the current conflicts over what it means to be male. She can only speak about the guy in front of her. “My whole entire process is just concentrating on what it feels like to be that character,” she says. “I’m not thinking about presenting a masculine identity or anything like that. I’m just thinking, ‘What is it like to be Artie Dam at this moment?’” It’s lonely, Artie finds, and disorienting. Strout grew up in Maine (her family has lived in the state since 1603) and New Hampshire, went to college in Maine, and mostly lives there now, after a long stint splitting time between the Pine Tree State and New York City. Just as her characters tussle with the frailties installed during their upbringings, Strout, the daughter of a schoolteacher mother and parasitologist father who was also a congregationalist deacon, has reckoned with her roots. “I came from really, really, really Puritan stock,” she says. “And the whole point of coming from that background was, do not ever call attention to yourself.” She loves the work of John Cheever, who when asked by his mother why he hadn’t told her about his successes, said he didn’t want her to think he was bragging.  Elizabeth Strout, a best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and novelist, stands for a portrait along the Androscoggin River in Topsham, Maine on August 19, 2022. Tristan Spinski—The Washington Post/Getty Images Having been inoculated against seeking a spotlight, she became an avid observer of others. When she lived in New York, her favorite place to watch people was the subway. “Just watching their gestures, what their resting faces looked like, the whole thing,” she says. “If you had your sunglasses on, they didn’t even know.” She also enjoyed New Yorkers’ lack of reticence, especially among the students she taught at a local community college for 13 years. “It was so exciting, so refreshing, absolutely wonderful,” she says. But it wore her out. “I feel things so deeply, it’s always exhausting for me. I have to go back and sit down.” She published her first novel, _Amy and Isabelle,_ in 1998 when she was 42\. After its success, and after her daughter Zarina left for college, things changed. She moved out of the house she shared with her juvenile-rights-lawyer husband, though they remained friends. She published another novel eight years later, and her breakthrough best seller, _Olive Kitteridge,_ in 2008\. Then she upped the pace a bit; from 2013 to 2024, she delivered seven more books, many of them about characters who orbited Olive’s world, or that of another titular hero, Lucy Barton, whom she eventually connected back to Olive. She made Maine her primary home again, married former Maine attorney general Jim Tierney, and bought a place near where she grew up. Strout remains almost allergic to talking about herself outside the writing context. She says she has no family traditions. Despite writing about them all the time, she takes no view on the pros and cons of long marriages. She’s not sure if people recognize her on the street. “I have probably more of a blind spot than most people about who I am,” she says. “But as I look back over my work, I realize that I’ve been increasingly interested in the idea that not only do we not really understand other people, we probably don’t know who we are in reference to other people.” Sometimes in her books, it seems people don’t even know who they are, period. _The Things We Never Say_ features her second kleptomaniac character and some light shoplifting by Artie. Strout wants to make it clear that she has never stolen anything. Would never. But pointless thievery interests her. Years ago, having shared a story about a woman who started stealing right after her child was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, her mother told her, “When you lose something, you need to take something.” “I’ve never forgotten that,” she says. For Strout, fiction is the place where human mysteries can be safely explained. She harks back to the moment, about age 12, when she was reading a novel and discovered a person who thought like her. “I remember understanding at that point that through reading fiction, we could actually get inside the head of somebody else, and that was unbelievably exciting to me,” she says. “That’s really why I’m a writer, because I’m just so fascinated with what it might feel like to be another person.” All those years of quiet observation have paid off. Strout’s books are full of minutiae and small but telling gestures, from the way people nod to what they do and do not notice. Reading her novels is not unlike watching the sea; with sustained attention to the spare, unchanging landscape, you eventually ascertain there’s a lot going on beneath the surface. “She does big-ticket emotion without any sentimentality, in a way that will undo you as a reader,” says Funder. “She’s making the interior life visible in language that doesn’t erase itself, but is very understated.” While Strout’s self-abnegation is real, there are signs that she has some appreciation of the impact of her work. In her new book, Artie’s mind wanders back to a novel, “about a crotchety old woman from Maine and he had read the book reluctantly only because his wife had liked it. He’d forgotten about it until now.” If that sounds like a book Strout might write, it’s because it is—_Olive Kitteridge._ It felt true to her characters, Strout notes, that Artie’s wife, who becomes a family therapist after a traumatic experience, would read and enjoy Strout and that Artie would see himself in Olive—as countless of real readers have done. (And, yes, the scenario of wives making their spouses read her books is familiar to her.) Strout says she has no idea if there will be follow-up novels for Artie [as there were for Olive](https://time.com/5691639/elizabeth-strout-olive-again-review/). “I have no plans of that right now at all,” she says. “But I will tell you I had no plans of continuing to write about Olive or Lucy either.” Her urge to write _something_ is undimmed, more because she can’t help it than because she loves it. “I have these things bubbling up in me, and they’ve got to find their way out,” she says, even though it consumes her. “To pull everything out, the concentration is so intense—to pull it from my viscera, to give it to the reader on a page that they can receive it, to make sure that the sentences fall on their ears in a way that is receivable, it’s like being a sculptor but having to produce your own clay.” But if the writing part of being an author hasn’t gotten any easier, at least she’s not as nervous as she was 11 books ago about how the work will be received. “I don’t mourn those nerves at all,” she says. “They were quite extreme.” Besides, there’s so much she has to learn from making herself write. “Younger people think, ‘Oh, when you hit a certain age, you just stop growing,’” she says. “But you don’t.” □ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/04/28/elizabeth-strout-the-things-we-never-say-interview/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/04/28/elizabeth-strout-the-things-we-never-say-interview/"},"headline":"How Elizabeth Strout Gets Inside People's Minds","datePublished":"2026-04-28T10:27:04.722Z","dateModified":"2026-05-12T07:05:40.154Z","description":"In her 11th novel, Pulitzer Prize winner explores the inner life of a man grappling with loneliness","url":"https://time.com/article/2026/04/28/elizabeth-strout-the-things-we-never-say-interview/","keywords":["Books"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt766bdf7830e034e4/69eac53c50e0cc7096ceaeec/Elizabeth-Strout_.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675%2Coffset-x0.00%2Coffset-y7.39&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Belinda Luscombe","jobTitle":"Editor at Large","url":"https://time.com/author/belinda-luscombe/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt766bdf7830e034e4/69eac53c50e0cc7096ceaeec/Elizabeth-Strout_.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675%2Coffset-x0.00%2Coffset-y7.39&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"Elizabeth-Strout .jpg","caption":"","creditText":"Fjodor Buis","representativeOfPage":true}],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"/tag/books/","name":"Books"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/04/28/elizabeth-strout-the-things-we-never-say-interview/","name":"How Elizabeth Strout Gets Inside People's Minds"}}]}] ```