Elizabeth Strout

And yet he's going through certain things and he's about to think about that.

And I mean, it was a number of years ago that I was having a drink with a friend of mine and she said, you know, I just don't think there's any free will.

And I was amazed.

And ever since that moment, I've thought about it often.

I thought, well, how could she be so sure?

But anyway, so I've thought about it myself.

And I thought, I already was going to think about this.

And that's at the beginning of the book.

And then it's sort of like a little like, heads up, everybody, this is the point of the book.

Nobody would enjoy the cocktail party, right?

Yeah.

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.