Elizabeth Strout, mystery writer

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout spent much of her time “alone in the woods” as a girl growing up in rural New England. But it wasn’t solitude that fired her imagination.

“Whenever we went to town, I loved seeing people,” Strout said Thursday, delivering this year’s Ingersoll Lecture at the Divinity School. “I wanted to know about their lives. And I realized, when I was young, that I was never going to know. So I had to make it up.”

Strout has written 11 novels, most set in Maine, where she was born. They include “Olive Kitteridge,” which received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; “The Burgess Boys”; “My Name Is Lucy Barton”; and “Lucy by the Sea.”

Strout’s works have been warmly received by both critics and readers. Her novels and stories, many of which are interconnected, explore themes of family and loneliness, and her characters are everyday people who are mostly decent but never without flaws.

In her Ingersoll conversation with Catherine Brekus, Charles Warren Professor of the History of Religion in America, Strout spoke about her fascination with ordinary people, her creative process, and the mystery of human nature.

Strout was first drawn to writing when she was 4 years old, encouraged by her mother, a schoolteacher. It was about that time when she also developed a habit of people-watching, and a love for reading. Without a television at home, she immersed herself in the works of Harper Lee, J.D. Salinger, and Ernest Hemingway.

“Writing has always been a vocation,” Strout said. “I have known that from a very young age.”

Success didn’t come easy. Throughout her 20s and 30s, Strout received “tons of rejections,” but kept at it by working odd jobs at night, including as a cocktail waitress and a piano player, and writing during the day. Worried that she was not going to make it as a novelist, she attended law school but quit after a six-month stint as a lawyer.

All the while, her writing remained a secret.

“Nobody wanted to know — and I didn’t want to tell them,” Strout said. “I was scared that I would fail. I remember thinking, ‘If I’m 58 years old and I’m still a cocktail waitress, that would be depressing.’ For many years, nobody was interested in my stories.”

Strout was 43 when she published her first book “Amy and Isabelle,” to critical acclaim and public attention. Her latest novel, “The Things We Never Say,” is on the shortlist for the 2026 Booker Prize, whose winner will be announced on Nov. 9. Strout was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2000 and 2009.

Strout said that her characters sometimes come to her fully formed, with their own personalities, quirks, and voices. The settings are fictional towns in Maine and coastal Massachusetts whose natural landscapes serve as backdrops to the stories. Strout’s connection to nature goes back to her childhood, she said. When she was alone in the woods, she would experience a “sense of transcendence.”

“The beauty of the physical world was my first friend,” she said.

Asked about one of her most enduring themes, the difficulty of truly knowing oneself and others, Strout said that she’s been surprised by its reappearance in novel after novel, but that she recognizes it as one of the most universal features of being human.

“We don’t really know who we are,” she said. “We think we know, but we don’t. And we don’t know each other as well as we think we do.”

For Brekus, part of the power of Strout’s stories comes from her complicated characters. For Strout, those complications are essential.

“We’re all flawed,” Strout said. “I’m not interested in writing about evil people … to feel remorse is so important. Part of what makes us human is to feel bad about something horrible we did.”

As the conversation wrapped up, Strout weighed the mystery of human life and the difficulties of self-knowledge. In her work she found an answer.

“One of my characters said in a novel, ‘I believe our duty is to bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can,’” Strout said. “That would be my philosophy of life.”

The Ingersoll Lectures were established at Harvard in 1896. Since 1979, they have been organized and hosted by the Divinity School.