"People are so interesting." Elizabeth Strout/ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

Monday evening I headed to the Free Library of Philadelphia to join friends for an evening celebrating Elizabeth Strout. I'd seen Miss Strout, years before, in a small classroom at Swarthmore College, but that was before her great fame, before the HBO adaptation of Olive Kitteridge, before last week's New Yorker profile. I'd just had a rather unfortunate encounter with another famous writer the week before, and I was hoping, how I was hoping, that great fame had not dented Strout's original charm.

That fame had not made her immune to the questions her readers wish to ask.

Good news for all of us: It has not. In conversation with the always-delightful Laura Kovacs, Strout was smart, precise, concise. "Right," she'd say, touching her glasses, and that would say it all. Then she'd say a little more, and we were with her. The entire, sold-out audience was.

More than once, Strout commented on how interesting people are, and I could imagine her on subways, in restaurants, over coffee, listening for the odd and beautiful articulations of nearby strangers falling in and out of love, hope, despair. What we love about Strout, and what is so gorgeously apparent in her newest linked fiction collection, Anything is Possible, is her ability to marinate even the crustiest characters with moments of moving reverie and meaningful hesitations. Maybe they aren't always the most pleasant, honest, well-meaning people, but they come from hard places and they still seek the dazzle of sun-struck snow or maternal affection or a place where they might confess.

They are still so very human, so very interesting, and when they hurt, when they act hurt, we cannot blame them. We're glad to find them again, set off in different light, at a different angle, a few stories later.

It is in the seemingly smallest of exchanges that so much devastating beauty happens. Here, in "Mississippi Mary," a mother and daughter reconnect in a small Italian town. They've not seen each other for four years. The daughter, trying to be hip, has arrived in a too-tight pair of jeans. They have been thinking toward each other, these characters, but also speaking past each other. They have spent time in the ocean, the mother in her yellow two-piece suit, the daughter in her conservative one-piece. Then there is this moment. They are discussing those jeans.

And then Angelina—oh bless her soul—began to really laugh. "Well, I don't like them. I feel like a jerk in them. But I bought them special, so you'd think I was, you know, sophisticated or something." Angelina added, "In my one-piece bathing suit!" Both of them laughed until they had tears in their eyes, and even then they kept on laughing. But Mary thought: Not one thing lasts forever; still may Angelina have this moment for the rest of her life.

To try to define, in academic fashion, just why this hits so hard would be impossible. But we don't need to dissect it. We just need to embrace, and I can't think of a reader out there who would not embrace this book.

During the open question period, a fan asked Strout something about the other writers to whom Strout had been compared. Strout wavered, then returned to the suggested notion of Alice Munro, a comparison she liked a lot.

I'd like to share two others: Louise Erdrich, in her early books. Kent Haruf in all of his.

Small moments. Big heart. Wise writing that gets out of its own way.

That's what Strout delivers.

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Write What You Want, Open Your Own Doors

Lovers of books, buy the July 13th issue of Newsweek (a magazine that has lately been looking so smart, so right in its new designer threads). The editors have called this issue "What to Read Now," and there's no mere lip service to books paid here. This is the real thing, with articles titled "What to Read Now. And Why." (which lists The Elegance of the Hedgehog and Brooklyn among the top 50!!!), "The Write Stuff," "Best Books Ever," "Now, Read it Again," The Reluctant Poet Laureate," "My Favorite Covers," and "Homer & Langley: An exclusive (E.L. Doctorow) excerpt."

Readers of this blog know that I'm a huge fan of Olive Kitteridge, and that I had the privilege of seeing Elizabeth Strout read from this Pulitzer winner not long ago, and of speaking with her for a spell. She's one of the interviewees in this Newsweek issue, and what she has to say—not just about how hard writing is, but how essential— is worth the price of the magazine.

But there are also these pristine words from Lawrence Block. What Block expresses here is a notion in which I, too, have put my faith. My first book was rejected by the house that had stated, unequivocably, that it had plans to buy it, because, the house marketing team reported, it would never sell (and then it did). FLOW, my autobiography of a river, was considered unsalable; a university press took it on, and that book changed my life in Philadelphia. I write literary novels for young adult readers that are devoid of vampires and salacious details; somehow or other (that somehow being the blog community), those books still find their readers.

It can, in other words, be done. Lawrence Block:

"...I think the less attention I pay to what people want and the more attention I pay to just writing the book I want to write, the better I do. The enormous mistake a lot of young writers make is that they want to know what people want."

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Brief Lessons from Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout in person is just as interesting, complex, and ultimately original as her own Olive Kitteridge. I liked her at once, and very much.

She read from "Security." She spoke of the ways that writing involves one's whole heart, also one's liver. She said that every sentence counts, and also: There is no room for sogginess. You put down your coffee cup when you write, she said. You step past and through.

Oh, Libby, I said to my friend afterward. She makes me want to write an entirely different kind of book. Makes me want to write. Again.

I should have had my fill of books by now. I should have. I have not.

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Readerly Pursuits, and on seeing Elizabeth Strout with Elizabeth Mosier

With Dangerous Neighbors, my novel about 1876 Philadelphia, now safely in my agent's hands and Small Damages, my novel set mostly on a cortijo in southern Spain, now fully formed, I can again turn my full writerly attention to the stories that others tell. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz, had me laughing (and marveling) this past weekend. The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol is (at long last) next on my list. After that I'll be reading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, just because many have and I haven't; subsequently I'll re-read Paul West's Master Class.

But what is in store for tonight is something truly special—a trip to Swarthmore College to see Elizabeth Strout, in the company of my writer/teacher friend, Elizabeth Mosier. Those of you who read my blog post on Strout's Olive Kitteridge know how deep my respect for this writer runs, particularly for this collection of linked short stories. You know how much I think this collection teaches.

A thank you, then, to Libby Mosier, for alerting me to Strout's appearance. The last time Libby and I ventured out into the world of literature together, it was dark and cold and we were sharing a meal with the spectacular Patricia Hampl, a writing heroine who lived up to every one of my expectations. I expect tonight to be just as glittered.

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Olive Kitteridge: Shadow and Light

I was not prepared for the power of Elizabeth Strout's extraordinary novel-in-stories, Olive Kitteridge. I'd read Abide with Me in total and Amy and Isabelle in pieces, and while both of those earlier Strout books are well-made, they aren't nearly as inhabited as Kitteridge, which brings to forceful life a retired schoolteacher who has not made it her business to please. Olive Kitteridge has been herself—her hands the size of a man's, her height unnatural for a woman, her bulk an unapologetic presence. She is frequently disappointed in others. She's not in the habit of honest self reflection. Her husband, Henry, was the good one, the kind soul. She was the undeterred realist.

Novels in stories often don't work—can feel like grab-bag constructions, a publisher's label applied to loosely related themes. This one does. In stories that don't seem to be much about Olive (they are about neighbors, rather, about a piano player or illicit lovers or a young anorexic), she is revealed, and in this lies suspense (one feels her on the horizon, one awaits her knock on the door). In stories in which Olive claims every page, she is transfixing, appalling, somehow sympathetic. She is the shadow and light, wholly given up and over.

Strout's writing here is superb, by which I mean not just her style, but what she has to say about the messy gist of things. I share with you this:

... She knows that loneliness can kill people—in different ways can actually make you die. Olive's private view is that life depends on what she thinks of as "big bursts" and "little bursts." Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen currents. Which is why you need the little bursts as well: a friendly clerk at Bradlee's, let's say, or the waitress at Dunkin' Donuts who knows how you like your coffee. Tricky business, really.

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