Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout's latest novel is Anything Is Possible.

From her Q&A with Caroline Leavitt:

I absolutely loved Anything is Possible. Why did you bring back Lucy Barton?

You know, I really wasn’t sure about Lucy in this novel. I just wasn’t sure what to do with her. I wanted her there, but I didn’t want to tarnish her voice from My Name is Lucy Barton. So I played around with a few different things, and they didn’t work, and I almost gave up on her for this book. But then I thought: Oh, if I just show her, without getting into her head – and that story is all third person Pete’s point of view – then I thought, That may work. And so I decided to do it that way, to keep the camera sort of far away from her in a way. If you see what I mean.

I'm fascinated by how writers write. How do you?

I never map things out. My head just doesn’t work that way. In truth, I’m not sure how it works, but I do know that I never write anything from beginning to end, not a story, not a book, nothing do I do from start to finish. So I might be...[read on]

Visit Elizabeth Strout's website.

--Marshal Zeringue