Elizabeth Strout

I just didn't want to live.

At that moment, he hadn't wanted to live.

And then he's fully, fully back in life and life begins to hand him some real surprises.

Yeah.

I know.

It's funny.

I wrote this book.

I mean, this was a book that came out almost –

almost the way it was written.

I don't mean, I mean, I rewrote many scenes and stuff like that, but I actually began the first, that first paragraph when he's eating with Flossie, that was the first paragraph I began with because I wanted the reader to hear the word jovial.

Like she says to him, please stay jovial, always stay jovial.

And I think

Artie has always thought of himself as jovial.

Other people have thought of him as jovial.

And then we find out, oh my word, he's not jovial right now.

And then he has to, you know, build back his life somehow.

And so I was interested that I did that at the beginning.

I wrote about him so lonely.

But then when the writing goes really well for me, I realized, and it's always intriguing to me, that I've almost left little clues for myself in the text.

And it was sitting right there.