The Things We Never Say
The Things We Never Say
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Elizabeth Strout on The Things We Never Say
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A face in an obituary columnThe novel’s central character, Artie Dam, a Massachusetts high school history teacher, did not begin as an idea about loneliness or masculinity or secrets. He began as a photograph. A friend who sends Strout strange archival material forwarded a page of obituary photographs from upstate New York, dated somewhere in the 1960s or ‘70s, and one face stopped her. The man’s surname had two m’s; she reduced it to one and wrote the reason into the book.
A friend of mine sent me an obituary from Upstate New York — because that’s the kind of man he is — and there was one of a man named Damm. And this man’s face was very, very, very ordinary. And so pleasant. He had big gold-rimmed glasses on. And his face was the germ, I think Henry James calls it ‘the germ’ [of Artie]. And then, I’m not sure what happened. But Artie, my Artie, had arrived.
The political content of the book arrived late, and against her instincts. Artie teaches the Civil War each year, and the first sign that the outside world is shifting comes when a school board orders him to give Confederate soldiers more favorable treatment in his curriculum. A history teacher, she concluded, could not be sealed off from history, even if she had wanted to keep the story contained.
The truth is, I didn’t want to make it a political book. I was frightened to make it a political book. But because I was writing about Artie’s time in history, I had to. All of this was happening and it affected him, so it had to be there.
That fear of the political, openly admitted, is part of what makes the book’s engagement with it feel earned rather than prescribed. She was inside Artie when the world pressed in on him, and she couldn’t pretend otherwise.
How she wrote it
Five minutes ahead of her characterThe major revelation at the center of the novel, the secret involving Artie’s wife and son that reorganizes everything the reader thought they understood, was not plotted in advance. Strout’s method across all her work is to accumulate scenes, trust the living ones, and follow where they lead. This book was no exception, and the destination arrived without warning.
I found out about that secret about five minutes before Artie did. [paraphrased from audio]
Critics and readers identified male loneliness as one of the novel’s governing concerns. Strout was the last to know. Her process begins with a character and proceeds from inside that character’s experience, which means the themes are always a consequence of the living rather than a design imposed on it.
It was not intentional. I don’t do anything intentionally. All I can do is start with a character and once I have that character and I’m inside that character, I just go through whatever they are going through. And later somebody will say, ‘You wrote about male loneliness’, and I will go, ‘Oh! Yes, I did.’ But I wasn’t intending to do that.
One structural choice was both deliberate and nervous. The novel scatters brief flash-forwards through the text, passages that tell the reader what eventually becomes of even peripheral characters, sometimes abruptly. This direct address to the reader was new territory for Strout, and she knew it when she was doing it.
It was narratively very different for me to do that, to address the reader directly. And then it pulls back and you go back into the story. It seemed kind of risky, but I kept it in. It seems like it made the book its particular book. That the book needed to be told that way.
Names are load-bearing for Strout, and she connected that principle directly to this book. “Artie Dam,” slightly comic, easily twisted into “Damn Dam” by students, carrying a small mystery in its single-m spelling, had the quality of fit she needs before she can write a character at all. She traced the lesson back to a struggle she had twenty years earlier on her debut novel.
Once I have the right name, I can write the character. And the right name is essential. I learned that with Amy & Isabelle. I knew that Isabelle’s name was Isabelle, but I could not figure out the daughter’s name for so long and it just didn’t work until I did.
What she wants us to sit with
The private fact of being aliveStrout has spent her career circling a single problem, and in 2026 she named it more precisely than she had before. Artie is loved by students, colleagues, and neighbors, and still essentially unknown to them. He doesn’t fully know himself either. That double opacity is what the novel is working on.
As I look back at my work, I realize that I’ve been increasingly interested in the idea that not only do we not understand other people, we probably don’t know who we are in reference to other people.
The obsession traces back to childhood. Growing up with almost no peers nearby, she sat in a parked car while her mother watched strangers pass on the street and made quick, confident observations about them from the outside. Strout was never satisfied with the outside.
I’ve always wanted to know what it felt like to be another person. And I was probably about 10 or 11 or 12 or something when I realized, ‘Oh, I’m never going to know what it feels like to be another person.’ And I’ve never gotten over that. I’ve never gotten over it. It was very distressing to me. [paraphrased from audio]
The title of the novel comes from a moment when Artie grasps something about his own life that he has no adequate language for. Strout was particularly pleased with one word in that passage, and at the Waterstones event she explained why it mattered to her that the word carried no moral weight.
Private is not a judgmental word. It’s just a word describing what it’s like to be alive. And that Artie understood it was a private thing to be alive. And that seemed a very Artie way of putting it. No judgment, just a fact. [paraphrased from audio]
The political events in the novel, the election, the school board pressure, the shifting climate in Artie’s classroom, are real in the story, but Strout resists reading the book as a political document. What drove the writing was always the friction between what a person carries inside and what the world demands of them on the outside.
I didn’t want it to be a political story. It’s a personal story about the interior life of this man, because I’m always interested in people’s interior lives and how they come banging up against the exterior world. And that’s what interests me is that sort of interface. [paraphrased from audio]
That interface, the collision between a private self and a public world that doesn’t pause to ask permission, is the territory Strout has been mapping since her first novel. In Artie Dam, she has found a new figure to walk it with.