Elizabeth Strout

Yes, and at the point that he's wondering that, he's feeling distressed himself, and everybody thinks of Artie as jovial, which was important for me to have the word jovial in the very first paragraph when his friend Flossie is saying, promise me you'll stay jovial, because that's how Artie appears to everybody.

Everybody thinks of Artie as, you know, jolly Artie or jovial Artie, and yet at the moment the book begins, he's not feeling that.

And then...

I began to realize as I was inside him having these feelings I all of a sudden began to realize right he's feeling that because his wife moves away intermittently because of what she's going through that he doesn't even know and that his son is moving away for reasons that he really doesn't know and then as I was writing I thought oh now I know why he's feeling so distressed

Precisely, precisely, which obviously can happen.

Oh, that's a really interesting question.

I think there's a difference between the loneliness of widowhood, because you're just alone.

I mean, you're literally alone, and there's probably a qualitative difference, and yet it's still a sense of being isolated.

Yeah.

Yes.

That's exactly it.

Right.

Yeah.

That came to me as I was slowly understanding.

I don't think I understood at that point that I wrote that line.

I don't think I understood the huge secret behind it at that point, because I found out about that secret about five minutes before Artie did.

I mean, you know, I realized, oh, now I get the whole... But anyway, but that idea of a child...

well, he's not a child, he's, you know, a young man, but of a child looking up to a parent in that way and thinking, no, you have to tell me what I can and cannot do in this world.

You know, you go first.

And if you do something, then that gives me permission to do it.