Elizabeth Strout

We took a car trip down the coast of Massachusetts and we

spent a couple nights and we found, you know, the dirt road that Artie probably lived on.

It's a private road and we found Endicott Peabody standing at the end with his golf clubs and he waved at us and, you know, we waved.

It was like, okay, he's going to be in the book.

So, you know, we found, you know, the restaurant by the water, you know, we just found the different things.

We went to different high schools and looked and, you know, so I need visuals.

So we did that.

And then he's a history teacher.

He came to me as a history teacher.

I have no idea what the poor obituary man was.

I have no memory of... I read it, obviously, but it's... Anyway, but already arrived to me as a history teacher, a high school history teacher.

And so...

That was important as I was writing it because I thought, oh, right, okay, so history is going to affect him.

Precisely.

Exactly, precisely, precisely.

And as we know, he

teaches the Civil War every year, and he teaches it by assigning every student a Massachusetts soldier or a nurse.

And then when the principal calls him in and says, the school board wants you to use Confederate soldiers, that's the first ping that things are going to change.

And that's actually true.

They are, the high schools are changing.