Elizabeth Strout

And I'm not sure...

how I came up with Artie.

I know I came up with Damn.

I had seen, somebody had sent me an obituary from the 1960s or 70s.

I mean, this friend of mine who does these, anyway, it doesn't matter.

But I do remember seeing a man called Damn with two Ms and he looked so pleasant and he had these big wire frame glasses and he just looked so ordinary and so pleasant.

And his last name was Damn, D-A-M-M.

And that just kept going round and round in my head.

And I don't even know, I don't even remember what his obituary said he did, but finally Artie Dan came to me as this character.

But I do think the first germ was, you know, the photo that I'd seen from the obituary.

Really, really lovely and so ordinary looking.

Yeah.

Well, I wanted, I think I had his name damn.

I just didn't want the two M's originally.

So I, and I come up with a little story of why he dropped one of the M's, you know, in the, in the book, he, his, he and his son explain it to the son's wife.

But

I just thought it would be, it was a better name already, D-A-M.

And then I began to think, wait, these students have had him for years.

He's been known as damn, damn, probably.

So, you know, going way back, not currently, not, it's not so much a contemporary student would have called him that, except they do because that's what he's known as.