She followed it last year with Anything Is Possible, which took up the stories of several characters that had appeared fleetingly in its predecessor. In 2016 she published My Name Is Lucy Barton, an exceptional novel narrated by the eponymous Lucy, a novelist who has been forced to spend several weeks in hospital where her estranged mother comes to visit. Her books - among them Olive Kitteridge, which has sold more than a million copies and won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction - are peopled with characters so fully realised you imagine she has known them her entire life. Now 62, Elizabeth Strout is one of America’s foremost novelists. And I didn’t realise it then but spending so much time alone at such a young age gave me the inner resources I needed to become a writer.” I would spend many hours alone in the woods. “I was a very solitary child my brother and I didn’t play together the way some siblings do. “I would stare at other people so hard, wondering what they were thinking, that in my head I almost became them,” she tells me over tea at the Bridge Theatre in London. When Elizabeth Strout was growing up among the cornfields of Maine, she would spend a lot of time imagining she was someone else.
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