Washington Post profiles acclaimed fiction writer Elizabeth Strout '77

An extensive profile of author Elizabeth Strout ’77 in The Washington Post focuses on Strout’s past as a way to explain the compelling lead character in her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Olive Kitteridge. Writer Bob Thompson begins this discussion by asking, “Who is this extraordinary creature? And what caused her to spring, full-grown, from the brow of the wholly un-Olive-like Elizabeth Strout?” Part of the answer, he writes, comes from friend Kathy Chamberlain; she notes that “powerful family feelings” often drive a fiction writer’s creative process. This is true for Strout, says Chamberlain, yet she cautions that writing “is like an alchemical process. That data passes through the writer’s mind and what comes out is fiction.” (View Text)