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Elizabeth Strout: Fiction is Not a Lie

Strout spoke to guests at a literary luncheon fundraiser at the Golf Club of Avon Friday, which the Friends of the Avon Library hosted.

Author Elizabeth Strout once was sitting at a table full of people she didn’t know at a wedding when a man her table expressed his view on his daughter’s fiction writing.

“My daughter devotes herself to telling lies,” he said, not necessarily to Strout, who is the Pullitzer prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge, a compilation of 13 short stories that together make a novel.

On the contrary, Strout claims that truth is an important vehicle in fiction. As a novelist, Strout said she has learned how to distinguish a true sentence in fiction from a false one.

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“I try not to lie to you,” Strout said of her writing at an author luncheon at the Friday. The Friends of the Avon Library organized the event as a fundraiser for the library. “I’m trying to find language to explain experiences to you. I shouldn’t be showing off.”

By reading perspectives of characters different than us, Strout said that we could learn more about life and ourselves. One of her friends, who does not read a lot, told her that she married and had a family like she wanted, but that she “never thought it would be so ickily human.” Strout told the luncheon audience that her internal reaction was, “Oh sweetheart, you should have read.”

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Fiction, Strout said, is the closest place to becoming someone else.

“We will never know what it feels like to be another person,” Strout said. “This is it, folks, we’re in our own little head here.”

As a child, after enjoying a neighbor’s exquisite French toast breakfast, with powdered sugar and all, Strout repeatedly described the meal to her mother, perhaps hinting that she should make the French toast. Her mother eventually said, “Just remember, Elizabeth, you never know.”

“We may think we know our neighbors,” Strout said. “… I don’t have a clue what went on inside her house.”

Strout’s mother often vocalized her theories on passersby during outings. For instance, she once pointed out a woman who “was not anxious to go home.” Strout began to watch people and create stories in her head about what that person’s life was like.

On another childhood occasion, after a congregational worship service in New Hampshire, her mother said she could not believe woman was wearing a big hat decorated with fake fruit and ribbons. Her father said to keep quiet if she didn’t have something nice to say. While Strout said that only writing positive words is “death to a writer,” such conversations taught her that a balance between her parents’ outlooks is important in fiction, which should portray both compassion and truth.

“The right sentences can calm us down,” Strout said.

Olive Kitteridge readers often assume Strout must be a mother-in-law with a son to be able to create such a strong title character who is some way present throughout the book, whether the story is told from her perspective or she is walking across the scene in someone else’s story. In reality, Strout has a daughter and is not a mother-in-law yet. How can she write a character that she is not? The constant focus on audience and language helps her write fiction that is believable.  

“It’s yours. A writer gives it to you freely without condition," Strout said of books. “I write for a reader. I never write for myself.”

When Strout, who did theater at Bates College, took a class in stand-up comedy at The New School in Manhattan, the awareness of audience could not be avoided because a comedian’s audience is right there. That frightened her. When her jokes about bad hair, her New York in-laws and being a New Englander at a final exam performance in an Upper East Side club made people laugh, Strout realized that people connect most to places and common experiences in both comedy and fiction. Everyone should recognize their place and subject when writing, she said, and fiction should be inclusive, not exclusive.

“We all have one song and we keep singing it in as many variations as we can,” Strout said.

She determined that because of growing up in Maine and New Hampshire, New England proved the strongest setting for her stories, many of which take place in Maine. And those hair jokes from her stand-up comedy routine became useful in her novel, Amy and Isabelle, about a mother and daughter’s strained relationship, as hair was a frequent theme.

While commonality might be something audiences search for, Strout said that people often struggle with being “stuck behind two eyes” and having a narrow vision. By opening the right book, different perspectives can teach you more about yourself and life. For instance, it wasn’t until her mother-in-law asked her how long she had been “compulsively early” to everything that Strout noticed her habit and realized, “I’m early because I expect disaster.” After reading a novel with characters that reacted negatively to someone with that attitude, she decided to keep those thoughts to herself.

Language also has its limitations, she said, and can distort memory and childhood understanding of the world. Strout overheard a neighbor respond to her child’s screams on separate occasions about hating his birthday and his brother that he loved rather than hated those things. When adults tell children they are not feeling something they are, it keeps them from experiencing honest feelings, Strout said.

“I believe that he really did hate his brother at that moment, and his birthday,” Strout said.

In the end, Strout refuted the view of the father at the wedding reception table that his novelist daughter was a liar.

Rather, “she was devoted to saving lives,” Strout said.   


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