A bit of Olive Kitteridge, a lot of Lucy Barton in Strout’s Oh William!

Elizabeth Strout says there nothing romantic about the ‘many, many, many’ rejections she received before finding huge success with a blunt female character.

Frances McDormand and Richard Jenkins in HBO’s miniseries Olive Kitteridge.

Elizabeth Strout was stacking the dishwasher when her best-loved character, Olive Kitteridge, just showed up like a bossy, uninvited guest.

“I felt her behind me. I could hear her saying ‘OK, it’s high time everyone went home.’ And I thought I have to pay attention to this because this is a force to be reckoned with.”

Once she had barged in, prickly, exasperating, blunt, Olive wasn’t going anywhere. A retired, middle school maths teacher in all her “Oliveness”, she could just be plain rude to people. Even the person who invented her could be mildly shocked by the things Olive would come out with.

Beneath Strout’s own warmly polite surface, “apparently there was a part of me” that was Olive. Although, “I try not to be’’.

“You know, when I was working on the first Olive Kitteridge book I remember thinking, ‘you’re going too far with her, she’s just too much.’ And then I told myself, ‘let Olive be Olive’.

“I realised my job was to report on her and therefore not try and control or constrain her. It was freeing and fun to see how outspoken and rude she could be. I suspended judgment. OK, she’s just going to be Olive, let her go.”

Olive Kitteridge, a series of connected stories set on the coast of Maine, would win the Pulitzer Prize in 2009 and become an HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand as Olive. The series won eight Emmy Awards. And Olive would go on to have a life of her own. Men come up to Strout “really quite cheerfully, and say ‘my wife is Olive’.” She has encountered young women “and they were affluent women” who meet at Starbucks to talk about their own “Olive moments”. Or women will simply say, “I’m Olive.”

Olive is a creature of Maine, a cold place of wild beauty, another insular country. It’s where Strout grew up, a “need” she has said, “and a loathing”. Now she says, “let’s just say it’s ambivalent, that’s a nicer word. I hadn’t felt comfortable here.” She was an irredeemably talkative child in a place of reserved, taciturn people who are suspicious of strangers. “If you’re really from Maine you are never, ever supposed to call attention to yourself, to be praised is awkward, embarrassing.” But during Covid, it is a place she has returned to permanently, after 38 years in Manhattan, to a house not far from where she grew up, with her second husband, former Maine district attorney James Tierney, who she met at a symphony concert. “It was just immediate, very immediately a sense of ‘Oh, right. This is who I should have been with.’ ”

Olive would make a comeback in 2019 with Olive, Again, where she ends the book as a grumpy 86-year-old with leaking bowels, still a staunch Democrat, still not being “very nice”, in a residential home with people she mostly can’t stand, looking back on her life: “But it was almost over, after all, her life. It swelled behind her like a sardine fishing net, all sorts of useless seaweed and broken bits of shells and the tiny, shining fish, all the hundreds of students she had taught.”

Meanwhile a very different character would arrive, Lucy Barton, whose life would be chronicled in My Name is Lucy Barton and now, again, in Strout’s latest book, Oh William! (Penguin Australia). Lucy is the closest character to Strout’s own life yet. She is a successful novelist in Manhattan, married twice, a calm presence who has reinvented herself but will always feel “invisible” after a background of ostracising, “terribly bleak” poverty in Illinois. Growing up in a garage with a violent mother and a war-damaged father, like Strout she has only seen two movies by the time she goes to college.

Elizabeth Strout.

 

Strout’s books do not shy away from issues like depression, mental illness, suicide, the pain of being alive. She knew desperately poor people growing up. “There was a young fellow who never said a word the entire time from elementary school through high school. And the teacher said to him one day in third grade: ‘You have dirt behind your ears, there’s nobody too poor to afford a bar of soap.’ And I saw his neck turn bright red. I’ll never forget it, it just seared itself into my brain.”

Strout was nervous about writing Lucy in the first person. “It’s technically more difficult because you can only see things through that person’s eyes. One has to work around the page in order to get other people’s thoughts and opinions. It’s funny because I have to separate myself from her but I also have to become her.”

William, 72, from the title, is Lucy’s first husband, a scientist and professor. He turns to Lucy after a series of crises, and the discovery of a half sister living in Maine. “When William met me at LaGuardia Airport I saw him from afar and I saw that his khakis were too short. A little bit this broke my heart … Oh William, I thought. Oh William!” she writes.

Strout says she always knew that she was a writer, even if no one else knew it. She went to law school because she had a social conscience and she didn’t want to be an unpublished writer working as a cocktail waitress at 58. “I was just an awful, awful lawyer for six months,” she has said.

Moving to Manhattan with her first husband Martin Feinman, her writing was a secret thing. “I learned not to tell people I was a writer because I didn’t have any books out and they would get all embarrassed for me.” She began to write in the series of scenes that characterise her work “years ago when I was raising my daughter and teaching part time at a college. I might only have two hours every other day to write so I would think, let’s just get a scene that has a heartbeat to it.”

Even so, apart from stories in obscure literary magazines, she was 40 before she got a novel published. “There’s nothing romantic about all the rejections I received and there were many, many, many for many, many years. Every single one of them was painful. What kept me going was that I understood that everything I wrote was slightly better than the last thing I wrote.”

She had to find the truth in her work. Once she did that everything changed. “I kept trying to imitate writers, whatever was latest in the New Yorker. That went on a bit too long for my training purposes, there was something I was missing. I had to recognise that I am a white woman from Maine, and it was kind of horrifying but that’s who I am.”

Strout was 54 when she won the Pulitzer Prize. “There was no downside to it. But it was a good thing that I got it later in life because I wasn’t like a young person who might have been rocked by it.”

She is always thinking of the reader when she is writing.

“I think of myself as being in a dance with the reader, so I have to take the lead. I’m always trying to get from one living mind into another.”