Elizabeth Strout

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.

People are getting, you know, the school boards are saying, we don't like this curriculum anymore.

You've got to change it.

And

And that's a signal to any reader that things are now going to be different for Artie.

Yeah.

You know, I don't know, but...

I don't know.

But as I was writing him and I was so inside him, I thought, okay, so, you know, he's 57.

He's not really ever actually thought about free will that much.