Elizabeth Strout at B&N

Last night Elizabeth Strout traced back the origins of her life as a novelist to a sleepover when she was twelve where the neighbor mom made French toast, cut it diagonally, and sprinkled it with confectioners sugar. Hearing her enraptured report, her own mother was not impressed. Not only did she ignore the hint that this was how every breakfast should be, she said, "Elizabeth, you don't know." It stunned her at twelve and took her years to understand she really didn't know why people do what they do, and has spent her adult life pondering such mysteries.
    She said she knew Olive Kitteridge, her blunt Maine heroine, was "a lot for the reader to deal with," and one of the reasons she told this novel in episodes, sometimes not directly about Olive, was to give the reader a break from her. Strout said as she's writing she thinks "a great deal" about the readers and what they need to make the story work. She also said ambivalence about her characters is "helpful" because it's "so freeing not to be responsible for their actions." Queried whether the difficult moms in all three of her books reflect issues with her own mother, she said, "Yes." I asked if her two minor gay characters came to her unbidden as she wrote or if she inserted them intentionally, to suggest a more universal aspect to the romantic troubles of her protagonists and she said they "just rose up," adding that she is in no way a political writer. She admitted she had not intended the ending to her previous novel, Abide with Me, but had planned for Tyler to "wander away and become a librarian in a seminary." The new novel continues to garner stellar reviews. Buy it.